* Posts by Wzrd1

2260 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Dec 2012

Sceptic-bait E-Cat COLD FUSION generator goes on sale for $US1.5m

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"...but the presence of an article that's this subtle raises the distinct possibility of a bunch of copypasta news sites rewriting it without the invisible bits - for audiences that don't know enough to realize how bad these people are."

Frankly, anyone that is a big enough asshole to believe any such story as factual and pay for the thing deserves to lose their money to the fraudster.

But, at least then, the fraud would result in criminal charges.

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Re: Prove him wrong once and for all.

I know of no nation where an NDA can protect someone from charges of fraud.

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"As Jim Alkalili said on TV the other night "If someone says 'It's fusion' and there isn't a big bloody hole in the ground, it isn't.""

Except when there is fusion, but one used a hell of a lot more energy generating a tiny reaction to achieve it.

Which is what our current state of the art is.

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Re: Don't stand too close

"The usual way to do this in bulk is that the radiation heats a liquid that drives a turbine that spins a generator."

It'd long been a standing joke, we're still in the steam era.

For, regardless of *how* we do it, we still boil water to make electricity.

Be it by old fashioned fire or new fangled nuclear "fire".

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Re: I can see how this works...

"OK, that was funny as hell Bren, but seriously, bets on one of these units ever being sold?"

I'd bet real money that if there were any orders, the prospective purchaser would be informed of a massive backlog due to the mythical units popularity. All while not a single unit actually is sold and installed.

RIP Comet ISON: ???-2013. We hardly knew ye

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Re: A CME on the opposite side of the sun

"This has been seen before in comets crashing into the sun and ruled a coincidence. Maybe now it will get another look."

Keep on looking, it missed the sun. It was even visible at the very end of the video in the article. Looked to be dispersed a bit and quite dim.

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Re: So what you're saying...

"...is that ISON is off?"

It's now ICEOFF.

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Right at the end of the video it's visible.

But, it's now extra crispy. Looked rather dispersed and the volatiles are gone.

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"Especially when viewed in perspective with a small piece of fairy cake..."

True, I found out that I was the most important thing in the entire universe!

Zaphod turns out to be in second place.

Google: YouTube fights off HUGE ASCII PHALLUS MENACE

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Re: I stopped reading ..

"Yes, who could use such as mis-begotten Americanism..."

I honestly believe that we mangled the language so entirely to infuriate the UK. ;)

On a more serious note, I'm a fluent native speaker of American English and I'm also fluent in *real* English. :)

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Re: If you want to clean up YouTube...

Ever since Google linked YouTube to G+, G+ has turned to shit.

Now, it's like the flamewars on Facebook.

Google: "Hey, we have something here that's pretty cool and really good. Let's fuck it up."

Weird PHP-poking Linux worm slithers into home routers, Internet of Things

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Re: @ alleged legion of AC trollops (eg: 11:51)

"Fact is, thinking you're any better off with ANY product is really blind faith."

True enough. One is taking it on blind faith that the vendor will patch their hardware and not claim that there isn't enough memory, it's too slow, etc.

I'll not even to into the cheap, fly by night Chinese hardware vendors. Here today, gone next year after pissing off tens of thousands of customers with shitty software, vulnerability laden firmware or in one instance, infected at the factory hardware (USB drive that was a promotional give-away for one US state's National Guard, it had a CD image built in that contained windrives.b worm on it. One soldier was married to a recruiter from that state, he gave one to her, she plugged it into one of our installation's computers and I received an antivirus alert. We'll suffice it to say that the CIO of the National Guard Bureau was quite upset over the unauthorized hardware vendor, unauthorized hardware giveaway and the presence of that worm after I alerted him to the issue).

I still have that drive around here somewhere, as the soldier did not want the infected, unauthorized device and she gave it to me to add to my collection. Great educational tool!

COMET ISON's sun dive climax: RENDEZVOUS with DESTINY

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Re: Did anyone see

Sorry, not an alien ship. That was me.

Not rocket exhaust either, waste dump.

Bonobos 'face extinction from interacting with humans'

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Re: Sounds like they BONE-OBO species needs to

"Maybe the US government has some cash on hand (despite the sequester) to fund a study "

Erm, you really should climb out from under that rock more often. The sequester is long over and Congress is back to whoring around as usual.

Still, we in the US won't want to fund that. The religious types would get all up in arms about studying fornicating apes, undermining social and family values and all sorts of other bullshit.

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Re: Least understood?

There is quite a bit of research, most of it on captive populations.

Researchers in the Bonobo's natural habitat are in about as much danger as the Bonobo is.

Boffins: Bonkless Brits fondling slabs, not each other

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Re: Treat them alike.

"Just give your partner the exact same attention as the fondle slab & everything will be good."

Won't work. You also have to TALK to the woman and listen to her as well.

Worked well for us, 32 years of marriage, next month.

The honeymoon resumed when the kids moved out of the house. :)

ROBOT SWARM positions itself over EARTH ... to probe our magnetic field

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Re: "the satellites are performing beyond expectation"

"What? They had low expectations?"

Well, there were those launches that blew up...

Still, the Russians were shooting rockets into space while the Americans were using rockets with a reverse gear for quite a bit. ;)

Our Sun menaces comet 'of the century' ISON with FIERY DESTRUCTION

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Re: I have scientific proof

Sol is holding its breath in order to be ready to blow out the candle that is that oddly named comet.

That's why the polar shift hasn't finished. ;)

SILENCE of the OWLS may mean real-life 'Whisper Mode' for Black Helicopters

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Re: The biggest problem with flying cars

Stupidity doesn't follow the square-cube law. It's logarithmic in nature.

If we end up with flying cars, I'll need an armoured roof and a rolled homogenous steel umbrella (from Acme).

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Re: In the States the human genome was patented, so we better watch out otherwise ...

Actually, it was specific genes that were patented.

The court found that such genes were a part of nature, hence cannot be patented.

They weren't designed genes, they were defective genes, such as with certain cancer cells and some genetic diseases.

Besides, everybody knows that scientists can't patent nature. Bill Gates beat them to it. :P

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Re: A quieter helicopter?

I'm in the US and get much of that on a regular basis.

One good crash on the local superhighway, there are helicopters orbiting about filming the traffic snarl.

Then, to add insult to injury, there is a Boeing VERTOL plant about a mile away.

Of course, an upside to that is seeing the latest and greatest before anyone else does.

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Re: What comes after the owl-winged stealthicopter?

They already have them.

One is tempted to say something about Pakistan, but shall remain polite.

<OUCH!>

Who threw that?!

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Re: Cavitation.

Extended pump jets.

The bubbles collapse inside of the jet body, the body permits destructive interference with the blade noise.

Then, from something that more beams noise in a restricted cone, one now has far, far, far less noise along that rearward facing cone.

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Re: I like the sound of this

I don't.

Shit, they can't bloody well drive on the ground without smashing into each other.

Now, you want to see people in flying cars?!

I'm going to need an armoured rooftop!

Boffins baffled after Sun fails to fry satellites

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Re: RE: One word: fuck off

Or even mount a decent response fit for mixed company.

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Re: Now we know.....

Really?

I thought it was up Baker's nose.

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Re: Lots of suns have a North...

"You sound as if you are from the north."

"Which north?"

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"Did you also check neutrinos for possible mutations?"

I *hate* when the little bastards mutate off schedule!

Just remember, never get them wet and never feed them after midnight.

Yeah, I know. Different thing.

But, neutrinos are a special kind of gremlin. Always making us rethink our subatomic physics when we least expect them to.

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Re: So it's time to

"gather all the plutonium together into a block the size of manhatten"

As I recall, it was uranium. One of us recalls incorrectly.

Oh well, time to dig that DVD out and try not to vomit watching it.

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Re: The sun growing up ?

"Maybe the sun has finally stopped being a teenager and all these disfiguring spots will be a thing of the past."

Wait until it gets its middle age bulge.

Nevermind, everything will be incinerated long before the bulge happens.

As in about a billion years from now, solar output will be high enough to kill off everything on the planet.

I'll be at my vacation home on Europa.

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Re: Scientists! Repeat after me: We don't know

"That's the problem. The news media knows exactly what people are saying, they just choose to ignore those bits and instead focus on what will sell papers. Hint: Half true polarizing statements sell more papers than completely true innocuous ones."

Erm, I rather doubt that. I remember the Fukushima tsunami story and later, the explosions and pouring boric acid into the reactors and cooling pools.

Consultants and reporters got cesium-137 and boric acid 180 degrees out, getting the entire story as wrong as is humanly possible.

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Re: Supplies Gathered......

"BRING ON THE SIXTH WINTER, my skis are waxed and ready to go!!!"

Bleh, Yellowstone is charged up and ready. Pop that cork and let the ice melt away from all of that ash absorbing sunlight.

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Re: JFK

Erm, well...

I was trained by those who trained the crowd in Afghanistan during the Afghan-Soviet war.

One thing that I recall clearly was the statement that those people, while fanatics, are far from stupid. Indeed, they're quite bright.

The idiots got killed off quickly.

Of course, I also remember another thing one of those agents told us.

That they told Washington that, "They hate us and they hate the Russians. They currently only hate the Russians a little bit more now. When this is over, they should be eliminated. The Carter administration said, "We do not do business that way."

The rest is history.

As well as two towers, a few online friends and one cousin.

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Re: so the Russian skeptics seem to be right ?

As you said, the field is a consensus of tangles.

So, when the other pole finally reverses, it can be slow and quiet or quick and noisy.

I'd try the calculations to figure out which is more likely, but somebody has my coin. :/

Mystery traffic redirection attack pulls net traffic through Belarus, Iceland

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Re: Successful packet bidding strategies?

BGP is supposed to be protected by accepting routing updates/changes from particular AS numbers.

It's really not all that complicated and I'm really rusty with configuring Cisco routers, not to mention the various other vendors.

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Re: Protecting Border Gateway Protocol ..

When I saw this article, that is exactly what article I was thinking of.

WTF are the various service providers doing, hiring from the pool of CCNA school dropouts?

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Re: Surprise! (not Really it's Eadon by another name)

It's that bloody damned volcano acting out again.

First, it fucks up all of European air traffic, now it's mucking about with the network traffic!

Astronomers spot 13-BEEELLION-year-old hot galactic threesome

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Re: Errmmm....what?

"As far as that distant galaxy is concerned, we in our current state (as we regard it) happened billions of years ago in their past."

True enough. I remember that merger. The nice, quiet neighborhood got all noisy and boisterous, so we moved out this way.

Well, it feels like I'm that old in the morning.

We'll eventually have a few mergers in the Milky Way as well.

Though, as I recall, the Earth will long be no longer inhabitable when it happens.

Vintage wine laid down in 1600 BC was 'psychotropic'

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For the religions at the time that that wine was still fresh and fermenting, it was:

2) they naturally occur through superstition and grow from there, or

3) someone with influence (read money/power) was on drugs and persuaded people in their power that sky fairies exist with the threat of stabbing to death.

In that order, over many generations. Once some bright folks figured out how to make a racket out of #2, it quickly turned into #3.

Though, Europe turned that into a hard science, with fire, impalement, etc.

Though, other regions had other religions that did much the same thing.

What can I say, greedy assholes are very, very creative.

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".. and believing in fairies that live in the sky."

Naw, they *started* from that, went all psychodelic and moved into warp speed.

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Re: @ Efros

"Yes. He was certainly a dick."

True enough, he *was* a showman. He brought interest into something that was, at the time, utterly unknown to the masses.

But then, I grew up while he was doing his schtick, watching each installment.

Before him, only industrial divers and the military really had any clue what was below the surface of the waves, let alone down deep.

I'll not even begin to go into what was on the Loony Tunes back then...

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Re: "The 200 year old booze, which was the oldest ever found"

"And Hitler made the trains run on time."

I guess Germany has to pull up all train tracks, roads and bulldoze their Volkswagen plant in your strange little world.

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Re: I want a Technicolor dreamcoat for X-mas !

"I think the Iranian solution is the only permanent one - The world's Glow-in-the-Dark glass car park..."

Two problems there.

First, Iran is a bit of a haul from Israel, let alone where the wine residue was found.

Second, civilized people do not advocate for genocide.

Lead ONTO your pencil: Bill Gates pours cash into graphene condoms

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Re: "Is there anything the wonder material can't do?"

Next, to make non-latex versions.

There are a hell of a lot of folks out there who are allergic to latex.

Tiny, invisible EXTRATERRESTRIAL INVADERS appear at South Pole

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Re: Re. neutrinos

"Where the proton/antiproton streams from adjacent black holes collide you get intermittent bursts of neutrinos at the energy levels seen."

Yep, sounds like a lousy neighborhood to be in.

But, a totally cool one to observe from a great distance. ;)

MY EYES! Earth engulfed by BRIGHTEST EVER killer gamma-ray burst

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Re: Black magic

Any relativistic jet embarrasses puny lightning.

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Re: Black magic

"Electric and magnetic fields are much better at producing gamma rays, as is demonstrated by lightning bolts, from which gamma rays have been detected."

OK, why don't you hang out over the rotational pole of Sag A* and tell us all about it when that gas cloud hits in a few years.

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For Betelgeuse, very little. It's rotational axis is away from Earth, so a GRB won't hit us.

It *would* be brighter than the full moon and visible during daylight.

However, its shell would eventually reach our solar system, collapsing the solar magnetopause, possibly to Earth.

That would render space travel pretty much impossible.

That said, the shell of protons and assorted other particles wouldn't reach the solar system until around 100000 years after the supernova.

As for VY Canis Majoris, too far away to do anything to us beyond giving a nice show.

And perhaps, fracture some more theories. ;)

BAFFLING power cockup halts NASA's nuclear Mars tank Curiosity

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Re: A selfie???

NASA described long ago how the selfie is taken. It's a collection of shots stitched together.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/multimedia/pia16764.html

Pretty cool!

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Martian kid used it to launch their model rocket.