Domain: shu.edu
Stories and comments across the archive that link to shu.edu.
Comments · 31
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Re:Fundamentals
1) Have a look at http://law.shu.edu/publication...
Key points for me:
a) Only 5% of gitmo detainees were actually captured by the US. 86% were handed in by' bounty hunters' during a dubious bounty program that offered the public a nice way to get rich while getting rid of anyone you really didn't like :Get wealth and power beyond your dreams....You can receive millions of
dollars helping the anti-Taliban forces catch al-Qaida and Taliban murders.
This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for
the rest of your life. Pay for livestock and doctors and school books and
housing for all your people.b) Fifty-five percent (55%) of the detainees are not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or its coalition allies.
2) Terror laws are being used against US citizens...on US soil.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..."Since then[9/11], the Justice Department's Inspector General found that the FBI has issued hundreds of thousands of national security letters, a majority against U.S. persons, and many without any connection to terrorism at all."
https://www.aclu.org/top-ten-a...Americans can be accused of terrorism, with no basis, and be thrown in a hole indefinitely with no right to legal defense or trail.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...So, for me...I'd rather say "Stop" to the government who I feel is out of control. You fight a war, you fight a war - you don't use it as a justification to take away constitutional protections of the citizens who put you in power.
As far as actual fear of terror...I am more afraid or (and statistically much more likely to actually die from) getting hit by a car crossing the street.
So yes, I want the government to obey the law and the constitution. I do not want the government to have more and more power over me because of media inspired fear of something that is not actually a real threat.
I don't have numbers to back it up but I suspect that I am more likely to be hurt by the government, in some way, than I am to be hurt by a terrorist.
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Re:So ... change ...
And you do realize these folks weren't exactly picked up off the street for jaywalking, right? Most, if not all, were caught on the battlefield, and those who weren't, like Khalid Sheik Mohammad (considered the Forrest Gump of terrorism) were put there for their positions in terror groups such as al-Qaeda. For the most part, the folks in this prison don't have "sob stories".
Ahem. I'm not saying that everybody there is innocent. I will suggest that this is one of those times in our history that we're going to be embarassed about once enough years have passed. There are enough well publicised stories of the insane screw ups associated with Guantanamo that it's time to stop drinking the official Kool Aid about "Most, if not all were caught on the battlefield..." and other such nonsense.
I highly recommend this epsiode of This American Life to anybody who isn't familiar with the other side of the story. -
Re:Sudden?That report is very interesting. Thanks for the reference. This part caught my eye:
Examples of evidence
that the Government cited as proof that the detainees were enemy combatants includes the
following:- Associations with unnamed and unidentified individuals and/or organizations;
- Associations with organizations, the members of which would be allowed into the
United States by the Department of Homeland Security; - Possession of rifles;
- Use of a guest house;
- Possession of Casio watches; and
- Wearing of olive drab clothing.
Possession of Casio watches? Wearing ugly clothes? I wonder if they could have picked people up for listening to Milli Vanilli.
Right below that paragraph (on page 17) it says a guy was arrested for being a cook's assistant for the Taliban.
Every day, I feel a little more seditious. - Associations with unnamed and unidentified individuals and/or organizations;
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Re:Sudden?You can try this.
NON BIASED Source?
Who would you consider non-biased? The sources for this paper are available. The person who wrote it could be considered biased, but the numbers are taken straight from the detainee files. The people are, by and large, not people who were picked up by US troops on the battlefield.
If you're interested in a broader examination, I recommend the This American Life program on the topic. Transcript and audio can be found here. It has become clear to me that although the people running these things have good intentions, the result is that we're casting a wide net and sweeping up a lot of people without appropriate protections. Kangaroo courts don't count, and I think that the Supreme Court was right to come in and attempt to bring sanity to the process. Well, the first source looked OK, until I read this on the bottom the page. The authors are counsel for two detainees in Guantanamo. A Lawyer? You're kidding right?
As for source two, This American Life (with Ira Glass, right?) NPR?!!??! Sorry, I need an unbiased source.
Listen, I don't know where these guys came from. I just keep hearing people say that a rival clan turned them in for bounty. It's as if they were just working in their fields, trying to grow flowers for Grandma in the desert sand when suddenly, their evil neighbor shows up with American forces pointing at the guy saying, "That's him!". However, from your first source, Only 5% of the detainees were captured by United States forces. 86% of the detainees were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to United States custody. I don't think that the Norther Alliance gets a bounty for prisoners they turn over. They turn over prisoners who they think we may get information from, or WE think they have information we need.
Either way, it's not like we WANT to keep people at Gitmo or anywhere else. I was a soldier, and trust me, soldiers are lazy! If I learned on thing from basic training, it was that a good night's sleep is good, naps are better. Oh, and that volunteering for the service is the last time you volunteer to do anything. No one wants these guys there, but someone deemed it necessary. I'm not going to assume that Bush likes torturing people, just like I'm not going to assume that Obama hates white people or that Clinton trolls the malls for teenage girls. Gitmo is run by American men and women, just like you and me. -
Re:About time...
How do we expect our soldiers to gather evidence for the prosecution while they're being shot at? How do you expect our soldiers to gather evidence at all when they're generally not the ones picking these people up?
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Re:Sudden?
Here.
Salient extract from the summary:
1. Fifty-five percent (55%) of the detainees are not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or its coalition allies.
2. Only 8% of the detainees were characterized as al Qaeda fighters. Of the remaining detainees, 40% have no definitive connection with al Qaeda at all and 18% are have no definitive affiliation with either al Qaeda or the Taliban.
3. The Government has detained numerous persons based on mere affiliations with a large number of groups that in fact, are not on the Department of Homeland Security terrorist watchlist. Moreover, the nexus between such a detainee and such organizations varies considerably. Eight percent are detained because they are deemed âoefighters for;â 30% considered âoemembers of;â a large majority â" 60% -- are detained merely because they are âoeassociated withâ a group or groups the Government asserts are terrorist organizations. For 2% of the prisoners their nexus to any terrorist group is unidentified.
4. Only 5% of the detainees were captured by United States forces. 86% of the detainees were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to United States custody.
Also from the report:
The United States promised (and apparently paid) large sums of money for the capture of persons identified as enemy combatants in Afghanistan and Pakistan. One representative flyer, distributed in Afghanistan, states:
Get wealth and power beyond your dreams....You can receive millions of dollars helping the anti-Taliban forces catch al-Qaida and Taliban murders. This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life. Pay for livestock and doctors and school books and housing for all your people.
Bounty hunters or reward-seekers handed people over to American or Northern Alliance soldiers in the field, often soon after disappearing; as a result, there was little opportunity on the field to verify the story of an individual who presented the detainee in response to the bounty award.
I think the report is fairly damning. -
Re:Sudden?You can try this.
NON BIASED Source?
Who would you consider non-biased? The sources for this paper are available. The person who wrote it could be considered biased, but the numbers are taken straight from the detainee files. The people are, by and large, not people who were picked up by US troops on the battlefield.
If you're interested in a broader examination, I recommend the This American Life program on the topic. Transcript and audio can be found here. It has become clear to me that although the people running these things have good intentions, the result is that we're casting a wide net and sweeping up a lot of people without appropriate protections. Kangaroo courts don't count, and I think that the Supreme Court was right to come in and attempt to bring sanity to the process. -
Re:Down here...
You are correct. We've been lied to about these guys. Mostly, they were turned in for money -- a king's ransom really if you compared the amount paid to per capita income. Seriously, if you started offering American's $150,000 to turn in terrorists, and required little evidence beyond someone's word, every neighborhood grudge would devolve into one person disappearing, and another installing a new swimming pool. We've been totally duped: Seton Hall Report.
Sadly -- the GP is part of the end of America as we know it (whether by intention, apathy or simple lack of knowledge doesn't really matter). I don't know what we will be in the future, but it won't have anything to do with freedom, justice, fairness, or equity. -
Re:Hyperbolye
...the overwhelming majority of people in Guantanamo were rounded up from the battlefield...
I don't see much evidence to suggest that this is true. According to this breakdown 11% were picked up by the US or coalition forces and 20% were picked up by Northern Alliance and Afghan authorities (bounties were involved, but very little documentation of actual offenses and captors appears to be available). Let's assume for the sake of argument that all those people were on the battlefield. Sixty six percent were picked up by Pakistani authorities. If even half of them were picked up on the battlefield, that leaves over a third of the prisoners being of questionable origin. I strongly suspect that given the sums of money involved and the lack of oversight, we're dealing with a large number of people who were definitely not rounded up from the battlefield.
Of course, your original point holds--they aren't being rounded up "concentration camp" style, but "witch hunt" style might not be much of a stretch. I certainly agree that using the word "detainee" for somebody being held for years without a trial is whitewashing a situation that our leaders might call "disappearing" if it were Hugo Chavez doing it. -
Re:Damning changes?
Pardon me. The proper study link is here.
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Re:Damning changes?
I know this because I was a soldier myself. Regardless of what you hear in the media, the military does not like to waste resources. Wasting money is bad. It will get you in trouble. Wasting some other's soldier's time is a HUGE No-No!
Having spent plenty of time trying to get things done with the military, I have to disagree with your assessment. The military differs from other branches of the government mainly in that the people on the ground take their jobs more seriously. Beyond that, it's not exactly what I'd call a bastion of efficiency. Add to that the fact that they've got a hard job and not a lot of time to do it, and you have a recipe for problems.
Wasting someone's time who is not really military that belongs to some organization with three initials like CIA or NSA.... well, you just don't do that.
No, they do a pretty good job of wasting their own time as it is. Again, a huge organization doing a hard job doesn't necessarily produce great results. If you haven't done so already, I highly recommend listening to This American Life's program on the topic. The part that mentions the head of interrogations at Guantanamo complaining about getting too many "Mickey Mouse" prisoners is especially interesting. Also recommended is the Seton Hall study it references. We're scooping up a lot of people and disappearing them on what appear to be fairly thin pretenses, and we're not doing a particularly good job of correcting our mistakes or being answerable to the public about it. This isn't a matter of malice or abuse of power or even competence. It's the natural result of a system with high stakes and insufficient safeguards.
I have no doubt that a lot of people at Guantanamo are the types of people who should be locked up for good. What I doubt is that a system that encourages turning people in for sizable rewards, when combined with what appear to be kangaroo courts, is one in which we should entrust the power to lock people up indefinitely. I strongly suspect that this is going to be one of those episodes in our history that we will have a hard time defending in hindsight. -
Re:We're all boiling frogs
he won't bother so here's a link
http://law.shu.edu/aaafinal.pdf -
Re:Combined, yes. But not new.
then you stick them in a monkey and his testicles melt or his hair falls out
Military members are statutorily barred from suing the government for injuries arising in the line of duty. See here.
Government contractors are also immune from products liability suits, so long as the product in question was designed according to military specifications. See here.
Things the recruiter doesn't tell you... Hopefully the government tests carefully before using! -
Re:Some painful truth....
Terrorists hiding in civilian populations and as often as not attacking those same civilians deserve no protection. Catch em, give some minimal justice where needed to try to make sure the Mohammad you caught really is the same Mohammad that blew up a marketplace last week and then shoot the bastard.
Rather than fly further off topic and quibble on points where I have minor disagreements, I'm going to key in on this. I honestly have no qualms about summary execution or even brutal interrogation of terrorists--provided that they're actually terrorists and there's reason to believe that those tactics are effective. In fact, I have a hard time dealing with the fact that war has "rules" at all. War is what you do when the rules no longer work.
My major problem is the question you didn't answer: What's the appropriate burden of proof for executing an unarmed person in the field or disappearing him to a prison site for the rest of his natural life? I'll accept for the sake of argument that these things are effective ways of dealing with the problem, but I'd like to see some serious rules applied before I give the nod to classifying somebody as a person with no rights, locking him up, and throwing away the key. So far, I haven't seen a lot of evidence that we're doing a good job of figuring out who we should be disappearing, and I've seen enough evidence that we aren't to be hesitant to give the government an "arbitrarily disappear, torture, and execute whoever you want as long as it's not me" card. When you combine death / permanent imprisonment with accusations and evidence that look like a scene out of The Crucible, I get nervous.
Why? Our government derives it's powers FROM US. By definition we hold a claim for our government to respect (and defend) our rights. Think of government as a mutual defense pact.
Hmmm... I think that we look at the world in a fundamentally different way, then. I tend to think that in all but the most extreme circumstances, it is universally wrong to deprive somebody of life or liberty without a way of meaningfully defending himself. To me, that principle isn't just a convenient legal fiction that happens to work out well for me. It's a fundamental concern about the unfairness of being kidnapped in the middle of the night and shipped off to be held incognito in the middle of nowhere until you die. Add to that the fact that it's bad PR at a time when we're losing a PR war to the types of people who blow up hospitals, and I think that you have the makings for a policy we'll be embarrassed about in the hindsight of history. -
Re:Habeas Corpus not "revoked"
I see this claimed all over the place by people who have some problem with Guantanamo, but I haven't seen where the evidence for this comes from. These people are given hearings to determine their status, and tribunals to determine their guilt or innocence, and without evidence, they are not found guilty. The charges against them are specific, and I read many of them online a while back. None of the charges read "some guy said he belonged to Al Qaeda." Yes, some were brought there without sufficient evidence... and were subsequently released. Doesn't that mean that the tribunals are working properly?
You might want to try the studies published by Steton Hall's law school. Specifically, here and, more generally, here. Many of the charges are very much just "some guy said he belonged to al Qaeda." Among the results of these studies: Only 5% were actually scooped up off of a battlefield. 86% were turned in by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance when we were offering rewards for tips. The bottom line is that regardless of the merits of the detainment (which appear very weak in many cases), we are being lied to by our leaders when they claim that the detainees are uniformly high value targets or that they were picked up off of a battlefield. We basically bought a bunch of them with little or no evidence beyond hearsay. I strongly recommend that anybody with an interest in these cases listen to (or read the transcript of) the This American Life program on the topic and then chase down references as they see fit. It's stunning how close we're coming to simply disappearing people on little or no evidence the way a tin pot dictatorship would. Regardless of whether it's constitutional, it looks to me like we're we're going to be answerable for some very serious mistakes.
And no, if you're stuck in an isolated prison for years with minimal contact with the outside world before the people holding you admit that they have no reason to hold you beyond fear of embarrassment, the system is not working properly. I don't know about you, but I have a limited lifespan, and I would consider years of my life disappearing into a hole more than a minor bump in the road. There's a good reason why habeas corpus is recognized as a fundamental right by modern democracies. Without it, people disappear. The only distinction I see between myself and a farmer from Afghanistan on that issue is a legal one, not an ethical one. -
Re:Habeas Corpus not "revoked"
I see this claimed all over the place by people who have some problem with Guantanamo, but I haven't seen where the evidence for this comes from. These people are given hearings to determine their status, and tribunals to determine their guilt or innocence, and without evidence, they are not found guilty. The charges against them are specific, and I read many of them online a while back. None of the charges read "some guy said he belonged to Al Qaeda." Yes, some were brought there without sufficient evidence... and were subsequently released. Doesn't that mean that the tribunals are working properly?
You might want to try the studies published by Steton Hall's law school. Specifically, here and, more generally, here. Many of the charges are very much just "some guy said he belonged to al Qaeda." Among the results of these studies: Only 5% were actually scooped up off of a battlefield. 86% were turned in by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance when we were offering rewards for tips. The bottom line is that regardless of the merits of the detainment (which appear very weak in many cases), we are being lied to by our leaders when they claim that the detainees are uniformly high value targets or that they were picked up off of a battlefield. We basically bought a bunch of them with little or no evidence beyond hearsay. I strongly recommend that anybody with an interest in these cases listen to (or read the transcript of) the This American Life program on the topic and then chase down references as they see fit. It's stunning how close we're coming to simply disappearing people on little or no evidence the way a tin pot dictatorship would. Regardless of whether it's constitutional, it looks to me like we're we're going to be answerable for some very serious mistakes.
And no, if you're stuck in an isolated prison for years with minimal contact with the outside world before the people holding you admit that they have no reason to hold you beyond fear of embarrassment, the system is not working properly. I don't know about you, but I have a limited lifespan, and I would consider years of my life disappearing into a hole more than a minor bump in the road. There's a good reason why habeas corpus is recognized as a fundamental right by modern democracies. Without it, people disappear. The only distinction I see between myself and a farmer from Afghanistan on that issue is a legal one, not an ethical one. -
Re:This puts a grin on my face.
Don't bother. GP is a brainwashed idiot.
Even the Pentagon says only about 10% will face trial because of a lack of evidence: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15361740/
And of course there's Seton Hall Law School's report: http://law.shu.edu/news/guantanamo_report_final_2_ 08_06.pdf (pdf)
Two notable factoids: only 5% were captured by US forces. Secondly, we were paying a $4285 reward per head. Pakistan delivered quite a few and with a per capita income = $720 (that's almost 6 years of pay as a reward for captured prisoners), how likely is it that there was no fraud? Can we talk negative probabilities here? Any realistic person would know there's a 100% chance innocents got nabbed for cash. -
Duquesne University sanction will backfire.From one of the articles quoted:
After an investigation, the Judicial Affairs office decided to take action against Miner and, in an Oct. 13 hearing, found him guilty of violating university policy prohibiting discrimination on the basis of "sexual orientation." As "punishment" - a term university officials say they don't like to use - Miner must write a 10-page essay in which he is required to research and explain the Roman Catholic church's position on gays and lesbians.
Now that's going to backfire, big-time. Because official Vatican doctrinal documents are much closer to the student's position than what Duquesne University is putting out.
The Catholic Church is having a doctrinal crackdown on this. No more "diversity". The Apostolic Visitation (what used to called the Grand Inquisition) of US seminaries by Vatican personnel is underway right now. Some faculty members have already been canned for deviations from church doctrine.
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Re:Proof?A point that seems to be overlooked is that in a civil case you pretty much have to testify if you want any chance of winning. You have the legal right to stay silent, but in a civil case silence can be taken as evidence of guilt. ("...the Supreme Court held in Baxter v. Palmigiano, 425 U.S. 308 (1976), that it is constitutionally permissible to draw an adverse inference from a party's invocation of the Fifth Amendment in non-criminal proceedings.")
If you testify then you have to answer their questions under oath. The top question on the RIAA list would be: where you using p2p to share RIAA member owned songs? If you were sharing and deny it, that is a felony.
This differs from a criminal case, where the jury is instructed to not hold silence against the accused. Also as pointed out by others, the standard of proof is lower in a civil case. Together these points make the common criminal defense strategy of staying silent and letting your lawyer raise doubts a much less effective tactic in civil cases.
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Re:I can see it now...
Says the courts. Congress hasn't bothered to actually codify the doctrines, but they do appear to have endorsed them in various legislation.
FYI, this isn't unusual: The fair use doctrine was created by the courts back in 1841 and wasn't codified until the 1976 Act. The first sale doctrine was created in what, 1908, and was codified in the 1909 Act the next year. The work for hire doctrine appeared in US courts in the 19th century and also wasn't codified until 1909.
Anyway, read the decision here, where the relevant bit begins "Accordingly, we next address whether Napster is secondarily liable for the direct infringement under two doctrines of copyright law: contributory copyright infringement and vicarious copyright infringement."
It seemed a bit long to quote.
Of course, you could've just googled for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement and found plenty about this.
These are rather old doctrines and AFAIK no one has really challenged the basic idea, and certainly not successfully. The only fights tend to be whether there was a necessary direct infringement (for neither contributory nor vicarious infringement can exist where there is no underlying direct infringement) and whether the requirements for these indirect forms of infringement have been met.
For example, Sony won the famous Betamax case both by arguing that there were fewer direct infringements than had been claimed, and that they didn't have the level of knowledge required by the contributory infringement doctrine. OTOH they didn't say that the very idea of contributory infringement was a lot of crap, probably because that would not be a successful argument. -
Re:real analysis
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Re:And what happens if it is positive?
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zeno paradox solutionIf you're unfamiliar with the zeno paradox here's the traditional solution.
It seems pretty clear to me that the zeno paradox is not a paradox at all but just our inability to intuitively solve maths with infinite terms. It reminds me of those visual illusion drawings that cause our brains to make sense of things in a missleading way. Check it out.
At the same time, this does not disprove his paper since the article, is not well writen enough to be useful in determining the validity of this work.
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Maybe both views are correct...
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that a mathematical physics model can accurately explain Zeno's paradox as well as a philosophical explanation can.
This is going to be a bit long, so bear with me.
First of all, as others have said here, the solution to Zeno's paradox has been discussed at length and largely agreed to be this.
The idea here is that you can have a functon that describes distance covered over some arbitrary time interval. The point is that you must be able to describe a time interval.
Our amateur physicist is claiming that in fact you can't describe an arbitrary time interval because there is no such thing-- there is only an infinite set of time and that once you pick an arbitrary interval out of that set, you're not talking about a moving object but rather an arbitrary point in space as well. That is, you can't pick out an arbitrary point or interval in time and still be talking about motion or distance outside of that interval, and, in the case of Zeno's paradox, you have to 'unfreeze' time to watch the race continue, in which case your runner is back to having to cover an infinite distance.
What I'm saying is that physics has described a mathematical, theoretical solution to the paradox. What it has not done is provide a solution which is intuitive to the spirit of the paradox.
Now, you might be thinking to yourself that the mathematical solution is a very intuitive solution-- after all, if I go to watch a race between a tortoise and Achilles, I'm sure to see Achilles leave that turtle in the dust, and now it's nice that I have a physics solution that explains what I see. You'd be correct! But here's where I make my claim, and I know it's very strange.
A sentence in the article that caught my eye the most is this one:
"There's no such thing as an instant in time or present moment in nature. It's something entirely subjective that we project onto the world around us. That is, it's the outcome of brain function and consciousness."
We're taught from all directions in Western society that math and physics and the sciences are objective, and things in the humanities are subjective. I suggest that the opposite is true, for certain technical definitions of subjective and objective.
My claim is that it is the sciences which are subjective descriptions of the world, and that subject-less, non-located descriptions are objective. Science relies on measurement and mathematics to get anywhere, but measurement and math are subject dependent. You cannot measure what you cannot experience. Yes, that includes your instruments.
In the case of this amateur phyisicst's work, he is making a claim about the world that attempts to describe things from a non-subjective perspective. His claim is essentially, I think, rather intuitive and obvious. His claim is just that it is us, as subjects, we project time intervals on a universe in which they may not really exist-- that is, time is not objectively quantifiable because objective quantification implies no people around to do the quantification, which means that there aren't any physicists to use mathematics to describe their reality.
While to most philosophers this sort of claim is routine, most physicists and mathematicians are aghast at the suggestion that their science is essentially dependent on the experience they have as subjects. I think that even though some physicists are starting to take note of this, it won't do much to hurt physics (nor should it), nor will it invalidate arguments and proofs which already deal with Zeno's paradox (nor should it). What I hope that it will do, however, is make some of the more arrogant physicists who have a large chip on their shoulder (Hi, Alan Sokal!) understand that they are not the keepers of objective world views, and that the work they do is just as subjective as any other human endeavour.
Regards,
Edward -
Re:It doesn't take a genius to solve this "paradoxIt may seem ridiculous, but it wasn't until Georg Cantors work on infinite series in the 19th century mathematicians had a way of providing a proof to solve Zeno's paradox.
The thing is, you might "solve" Zeno's paradox as much as you want by referring to examples, but most attempts at attacking Zeno's paradox via "logical" examples doesn't do anything to explain it, but merely points at motions and declares the matter solved.
Look at your answer again - you just restated the paradox
If you keep taking increasingly smaller steps, you will never reach your goal.
That is the core of the paradox: During the race, you will always have an infinite number of "half-distances" left.
Yet, the paradox as stated is correct in stating that to move from point A to B (provided they are not the same
:), you have to cover every "half-distance" in between - an infinite number of them.So how do you prove that covering an infinite number of half distance is possible to do in finite time?
That's where the aforementioned limits of infinite series comes in.
Today, this is pretty basic maths, but it had people stumped for a proof for more than two thousand years.
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DoD making a big push for IPv6
As reported before, the US Department of Defense is going to become fully IPv6 compliant by 2008 and purchasing only IPv6 compliant devices starting in October (see this press release).
Will they make full compliance by 2008? Probably not, knowing how government institutions work. However, DoD purchases a lot of computers, a lot of networked devices, etc. I remember hearing about 70% of their traffic goes accross the Internet (years ago, and they create a lot of traffic.) They have been a big influence on the 'net in the past, and I think this will be a big catalyst to IPv6 in the future. -
Re:One simple question
They don't need to do so, as one can prove that Pi is irrational in advance.
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Re:"angry ex-customers"Instead of completely blocking access, the best compromise seems to be using Quality of Service software on the server end. I know of several universities that are starting to do this, and it seems to keep everyone happy. Leave all the P2P programs working, but just throttle them back when they interfere with higher priority services.
On another note, P2P programs are simply another aplication of the 20-80 Rule, aka Pareto's Principle where 20% of your users account for 80% of your bandwidth.
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Re:G�del
I am sorry to downplay you but apparently you do not have a strong background in math and maybe some knowledge in algorithm theory? In short: Gödel's theorem applies to all axiomatic systems containing Peano axioms. The system that number theoreticians study contains the Peano axioms (obviously as it is a theory of numbers). Therefore the Gödel theorem applies as considering the Riemann hypothesis.
You'll find the Peano axioms here. The most important thing about the Peano axioms is that they state the existence of natural numbers {1,2,3,...} (note the axioms give out an infinite number of such objects). So no Peano axioms => no theory of numbers...
See also Some Theorems Derivable from Peano's Axioms. It should help to understand what signigicance these axioms have. Also, all mathematics is axiomatic. For mathematicians if a claim is not based a axiomatic system then it is just speculation... -
Pareto's Principle: The 80-20 Rule
Pareto's Principle: The 80-20 Rule
"Pareto's rule states that a small number of causes is responsible for a large percentage of the effect, in a ratio of about 20:80. Expressed in a management context, 20% of a person's effort generates 80% of the person's results. The corollary to this is that 20% of one's results absorb 80% of one's resources or efforts." -
And lest anyone ask
Should anybody ask "How is this a bad thing?", send them to read Privacy and Power: Computer Databases and Metaphors for Information Privacy (linked to here) by Daniel Solove. I personally think it is worth reading the whole thing, but it's kinda long, so maybe this NY Times article is a better suggestion.
It basically says, "You may think Big Brother isn't interested in you, and you may be right, but there is a Big Unknown gathering so much information about you, she could come after you once you become a nuisance to her!", only in a less conspiracy-theoretical way...