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Comment: Re:Please.... (Score 1) 303

by Baloroth (#46473075) Attached to: Google Sued Over Children's In-App Android Purchases

The tablets aren't $300 and the children aren't toddlers. Next time you're baffled as to why a lawsuit exists, ask yourself if you have a problem with the actual lawsuit, or the one in your imagination.

Well, considering at least one Slashdot poster commented about his 3-year-old wracking up charges, I would say at least some of of the children are toddlers and they probably are using $300 dollar devices.

Comment: Re:Better be for Windows 7 (Score 4, Informative) 127

by Baloroth (#46423657) Attached to: Microsoft Confirms DirectX 12 Is Alive and Well, Demo Coming At GDC

XP = DX9c. Vista = DX10. Vista SP1 = DX10.1. Vista SP2 = DX10.2. Win7 = DX11. WIn 7 SP1 = DX11.1. Win 8 = DX11.1. Win 8.1 = DX11.2. And now it looks like Win 8.1 SP1 = DX12. It really shouldn't be that difficult to grasp.

Perhaps it shouldn't, but considering that you got it wrong, as Microsoft added DX11 support to Vista, obviously it's slightly more difficult to grasp than you seem to think it is.

Comment: Re:We know it works - Teller showed us (Score 1) 196

by Baloroth (#46408273) Attached to: Computing a Winner, Fusion a Loser In US Science Budget

We know it works - the tricky bits are scaling it down and keeping it under control.

We know it works at large scales. We don't know if it works at small scales. Since the entire goal is small-scale fusion (i.e. something that doesn't require an entire solar mass of hydrogen to maintain), we really don't yet know if it works as a viable contained power source.

Comment: Re:Why so expensive? (Score 3, Interesting) 166

by Baloroth (#46396891) Attached to: NASA Forgets How To Talk To ICE/ISEE-3 Spacecraft




Comment: Re:Cambridge Dogma (Score 3, Insightful) 106

by Baloroth (#46387543) Attached to: Physicists Test Symmetry Principle With an Antimatter Beam


Comment: Re:That's one heck of a very **BROAD** Patent ! (Score 3, Informative) 258

by Baloroth (#46384867) Attached to: Inventor Has Waited 43 Years For Patent Approval

"if TFA's description is to be believable" Why should this be a matter of speculation? You can look at the claims yourself.

Unfortunately, we can't. From TFA:

Because the filings are so old, they fall under a law that keeps them confidential, said Patrick Ross, a PTO spokesman. That means the office can't discuss them or even say how many pending patent applications predate a 1995 change in the law, Ross said.

Comment: Re: Interesting Stuff (Score 4, Interesting) 91

by Baloroth (#46379347) Attached to: X-rays From Other Galaxies Could Emanate From Particles of Dark Matter

Most science fiction sounds plausible, that is why we enjoy it. We have no proof dark matter or dark energy exists, so claiming side effects is pretty stupid. Sure, it is possible but it is equally not possie. A whole segment of theoretical physicists has been working on equations that don't require dark matter or energy with promising results so far.

And just as fast as those physicists have come up with those equations, they have been ruled out. Currently, none of the equations explain the phenomenon better than dark matter (and they're often much much worse). It's not equally as possible that dark matter exists as that it doesn't: the current evidence points to dark matter being more likely to exist than not. Tweaking equations and throwing in correction terms to force the model to fit the observations is usually a bad approach in physics (or science in general).

BTW, looking for side-effects that would result if dark matter does exist is, far from being stupid, a decent method of indirectly confirming the existence of dark matter in the first place (since observing dark matter directly is really, really hard, perhaps even impossible).

Comment: Re:How much you wanna bet (Score 4, Informative) 70

by Baloroth (#46353863) Attached to: Project Ara: Inside Google's Modular Smartphones

How much do you want to bet they end up like most "upgradeable" PCs -- never touched from day of purchase until they hit the landfill or the recycling company.

Most of them will. However, my current desktop has gone through a motherboard swap, CPU upgrade, 2 graphics cards swaps, several HDD upgrades, added RAM, PSU swap, and a new case (technically, the only original component is 2 of the current 4 sticks of RAM, the Wifi card, and one of the HDDs).

Most people probably won't use the modularity much, if at all. But some people will, and those people who do can benefit from it tremendously.

Comment: Re:Drake (Score 2) 77

by Baloroth (#46351699) Attached to: Kepler's Alien World Count Skyrockets

It love your extreme specificity. "Up", "plentiful", "an amazing rate", "almost certain".

My trip home from work will take "a few" minutes.

His precision is orders of magnitude greater than that of the Drake equation itself, so by comparison he was incredibly specific.

Not that that actually helps at all: the Drake "equation" is only useful as a thought exercise and is completely and utterly useless for any* kind of quantitative usage whatsoever (since several terms in it are completely and wholly unknown).

*Well, you can use it to find weak upper-bounds, but that's about it, and not much help, and you don't need the full equation for that.

Comment: Re:Hate speech, and Libel/Slander (Score 3, Insightful) 221

by Baloroth (#46336967) Attached to: South Park Game Censored On Consoles Outside North America

Inciting a riot, ill give you that one.

Wouldn't it be better to make rioting illegal, rather than speaking?

Encouraging people to commit a crime is also, generally, a crime. Speaking with the intent to cause a riot? Criminal. Speech that happens incidentally to cause a riot? Not criminal.

Comment: Re:Bad news for Wolfram alpha (Score 1) 54

Where do they claim that, exactly? As far as I can tell reading Wolfram's licensing page, your claim is 100% completely and utterly false. What they do claim is copyright on their presentation and assemblage of the facts (such as plots, graphs, tables, et alia), but not at all on the facts themselves.

Comment: Re:I find myself wondering... (Score 5, Insightful) 59

by Baloroth (#46292229) Attached to: Scientists Calculate Most Precise Measurement of Electron's Mass


Comment: Re:Manufactured Crisis (Score 1) 362

