I've studied special relativity through graduate school at UCSC.

While I haven't exactly studied general relativity in a formal way I've attended quite a few talks on it by cosmologists and the like.

I was an astronomy major at Caltech, but switched to Physics when I realized I prefer to build telescopes rather than look through them. Astronomers don't build telescopes; Opticians do that. However Physicists commonly build their own experimental apparatus.

So you still didn't open the article? :/

Most web pages work really poorly through my Mom's earthlink dialup. In part that's due to metric fucktons of javascript, in part it's due to some problem with routing.

I've spent years trying to diagnose it. I've got some theories but nothing conclusive. It seems to help if I do something like:

   $ sudo ping -f -c 1000 www.nytimes.com

... then repeat that for several other hosts.

I am sure that in the 21 minutes that elapsed between this comment and the one left by you above it, you could have just hit the page with curl.

Stop making embarrassing excuses and just read the article.

While I haven't tried curl, it is common for regular web pages - blogs, articles and the like - to take quite a lot longer to download with Safari or Firefox.

I can see the problem when I do a traceroute.

I'm having too much fun duking it out with whoever keeps modbombing me.

"Modbombing"? Your comments have been voted down by regular users of HN. You've been here long enough to know how this works.

In a different article, someone downvoted a comment in which I requested a reply, rather than a downvote of the parent.

Tonight's activity leads me to believe my cyberstalking friend from Kuro5hin has finally turned up.

It's hard to say, he's generally anonymous.

Don't be paranoid. Most guys here aren't evil, they just appreciate humbleness, politeness, honesty and facts.

Regular users voted you down because you backed controversial claims by appeal to authority or your education.

Also, you wrote comments without reading the article, which is usually considered bad here.

Works fine in lynx.

Over my Mom's dialup?

It's 2015. Your mom could probably get DSL for the same price that she's paying for Earthlink.

She's too far from the phone office for DSL, and she is completely convinced that were she to get comcast cable, no one would ever be able to email her, ever again.

Oddly she is completely cool with using webmail from cybercafes - she travels quite a lot.

Mom isn't stupid, she only acts that way.

You are making up fake excuses now. You've downloaded about as much text from HN just to reply to the threads here than it would have taken to read the original article.

The original document is 185512 bytes. The download can be read locally in 'links' with no additional network connections. At 28.8Kpbs that's a bit over a minute. Even with a noisy connection, that's well under the 21 minute gap pointed out elsewhere between your posts.

There is no reason to drag your mother's beliefs into this. Simply stop at "I don't have good internet access." All else is needlessly placing the blame or shifting the focus elsewhere ... that being your willingness to completely ignore the topic and instead name-drop your own history, connections to authority, and personal beliefs - even when they have no basis in fact.

Not sure how I'd feel if my optician prescribed me a telescope.

opticians make telescopes. Optometrists write prescriptions for eyeglasses. Optometric opticians make eyeglass lenses.

Opthalmologists diagnose and treat disease of the eyes. An optometrist can perform an opthalmological exam but cannot prescribe medicine nor practice eyeball surgery.

Google Define:

optician ɒpˈtɪʃ(ə)n/Submit nounBRITISH a person qualified to prescribe and dispense glasses and contact lenses, and to detect eye diseases ( ophthalmic optician ) or to make and supply glasses and contact lenses ( dispensing optician ). US a dispensing optician.

In my understanding, a dispensing optician is a different thing than either an optometrist or an opthalmologist.

There are some good reasons one requires a professional prescription from eyeglasses; if you wear the wrong lenses for any length of time, it can screw up your eyesight. Although the effect is commonly temporary it _can_ be debilitating.

So a dispensing optician would be someone who sells eyeglasses, given a prescription from an optometrist or an opthalmologist.

It is quite definitely the case that opticians make telescopes. From time to time I call myself an astronomical optician. I don't grind glass much anymore but I am quite good at making astronomical telescope optics.

I'd better tell my optician to change the sign outside the shop then...

Pardon me while I drop by the chemist's shop to pick up some fuming nitric acid, sulfuric acid and glycerin.