If I had the full reliability data then I could be as clear as you liked, but from patchy information, all I can get is:
oldspewey quoted taxi miles, which are irrelevant
300,000 miles can be achieved, but there's no reason to think this is typical.
Even in a set of data chosen to emphasise long battery life, there is mention of two failures -- one covered by warranty, and one not.
I think the manufacturer's warranty periods are the best available indication of what to expect in practice, rather than looking at exceptional cases
Don't get me wrong -- 150,000 miles would be over 10 year's driving for me, and I don't expect many parts of my car to last that long without replacement. It's a good lifetime. But it's that warranty that challenges the myth of poor battery life, not finding what might be an occasional statistical outlier.
The number of taxi-miles is an irrelevant metric. 300,000 taxis each driving for one mile wouldn't tell you anything useful about the service life of the batteries. The question is about the wear-out phase of the battery lifecycle, not the constant failure rate phase.
How is open source a better solution when your only source of troubleshooting is Google?
Google is all the support I have ever had for Microsoft products, too. Sure, I could have paid to speak to somebody reading off a script somewhere that labour is cheap if I'd got into real trouble with a Microsoft product. As opposed to open source, where for a lot of products you can get straight through to the development team.
I can see how using OpenOffice is beneficial for me, since I rarely do any work on my home PC and a $free word processor is better than $200 for MS Office, but how would OpenOffice be a better solution for a business customer if it doesn't come with any support for the employees?
It comes with as much support as MS Office does. None. Further support can be purchased, for either product. And unless the employees are already using Office 2007, the OpenOffice.org solution is likely to look more familiar and need less support. I really don't see what issue you're trying to raise.
And "A" for Allah.
And "B" for Baal.
And "C" for Ceridwen.
And "D" for Demeter.
And "E" for Ereskigal.
And "F" for Frigg.
And "G" for Ganesha.
And "H" for Horus.
And "I" for Ishtar.
And "J" for Juno.
And "K" for Krishna.
And "L" for Loki.
And "M" for Mithras.
And "N" for Neptune.
And "O" for Osiris.
And "P" for Pan.
And "Q" for Quetzalcoatl.
And "R" for Rama.
And "S" for Shen-Yi.
And "T" for Tiamat.
And "U" for Uzume.
And "V" for Vulcan.
And "W" for Xi Wang-mu.
And "X" for the other bit of Xi Wang-mu.
"Y" for Yhwh, as you say, and the other bit of Shen-Yi
and "Z" for "Zeus".
Talk about a loose specification? "The Deity"?
The real problem with filters is that they don't work. There will still be some innocent looking link to a page thats far from innocent.
Oh, agreed completely. And there will be suspicious looking pages that contain important and relevant information. I understand there is something called "good parenting" which is claimed to be more effective than filtering. Unfortunately, it seems nobody makes a profit from it, which is probably why other techniques get more attention.
I don't see a problem with kids knowing about sex (although I did hear a comedy skit recently that the amount of porn kids see nowadays is likely to lead to give them problems having kids of their own, because the boys will prod around for a while then pull out and ejaculate on the girl's face), but straightforward porn is far from the worst thing on the web.
Who cares? If the laptop is doing its job I don't plan to upgrade. I don't need state-of-the-art to do any of my work, and I don't needs state-of-the-art for my personal laptop. Word processing, presentations and Eclipse work fine on an old laptop -- as long as it isn't falling apart. (Anything that needs high spec -- which to be honest is just games for me -- I run on a desktop computer).
Yes, but after about 18 months the case on my Dell was falling apart, similarly a Sony Vaio, and after a similar period keys were falling off my son's IBM Thinkpad. Will the same happen to my son's Macbook? Well, I don't know, but it doesn't look as if it will.
I don't like Apple's hardware lock-in, but my son just got a macbook and I have to admit that although the technical spec seems low for the price the build standard is incredibly good; it looks and feels as if it's actually going to last the course, whereas most of the notebooks I've ever had have failed because of the casing or connectors. So there's clearly something missing from Microsoft's analysis (surprise!), although they're right that that pitches it at the high-end market. Does anybody have hardware reliability comparisons for Macbooks and comparably priced Windows laptops?
Some of the stuff in the report is more blatant nonsense, of course: "A re-buy of Office for Mac starts at $150" (whose fault is that?) -- so Office for the PC is free, is it? Or do they think that all Mac users will buy Office for Windows too, just to keep Microsoft happy?
I don't know the politics behind this -- am I correct in reading it as Waddoup being fine with everybody else being spammed, and only objecting when he discovered that he could get spammed too?
It seems that Chris is the only one who is making a public fuss about what Sam said and then being quoted, mostly blindly.
Well, I suppose this is public too. I'd never heard of Chris, so I'm certainly not quoting him blindly -- I'm not quoting him at all.
Being the cynic I am I have to doubt if Chris's selective quoting of Sam is for anything but profit.
I think his -- and my -- reading remains valid in the light of the complete passage. After all, the complete passage is how I came to my understanding of what he was saying.
He does of course have a book to sell called "I Don't Believe in Atheists". He is also religious so this probably colours his interpretation of the book a little.
I don't have a book to sell, and am agnostic, albeit a religious agnostic (ie, my religion is more hope than belief). I've read a lot on both sides of the "is religion evil" debate, and am concerned that both sides are ramping up hostility. I don't believe that either side has as certain a case as it thinks it has, and I think that the escalation on both sides is what is most likely to lead to violence that gets out of control.
The passage involving a nuclear first strike against an Islamic regime that has nuclear weapons is a hypothetical. It explores the possibility and as Sam says himself the whole situation is "perfectly insane".
Yes, perfectly insane, but "we may have no choice" but be "perfectly insane"? No, actually, we would always have a choice (unless he's digressed into the free will debate). All "we have no choice" ever means is "I prefer this to the alternative".
I think the most important part of the passage is this:
"I have just described a plausible scenario in which much of the world's population could be annihilated on account of religious ideas that belong on the same shelf with Batman, the philosopher's stone, and unicorns. That it would be a horrible absurdity for so many of us to die for the sake of myth does not mean, however, that it could not happen.
I agree that it's the most important passage, but apparently for a different reason to you. You see, Islamic states getting long-range nuclear capability doesn't make us nuke them, any more than North Korea getting long-range nuclear capability nuclear capability makes us nuke them. Launching a first strike and saying "It's therir fault for developing the same sort of capabilities as we have and for having different beliefs" is moral nonsense. It wouldn't be their fault at all, it would be the fault of the aggressor who launched the first strike. And incidentally, if policy makers started talking seriously about a first strike on any Islamic nation with long-range nuclear capability, what would the likely response of a state with such a capability be? "Better launch our attack before they find out". Nothing religious about that, just the standard cold-war thinking that Harris denies is possible.
The whole point he is making is that if it comes to this absurd situation it will be caused by the fact that a group of supposedly mature adults insist upon holding on to a belief in an imaginary friend. Human civilisation could be brought, close if not fully, to an end because of fantasy and fairytale.
Like a mugger who says that he had to kill his victim because the victim might have had a gun, so it's the victim's fault. Sure.
Sam does not in any way endorse or call for a first strike against Islam
He says we "may have no choice", which means that he says it may be preferable to the alternative. That's endorsement.
He's done it to prove his point that religious faith is dangerous.
Or his response to religious faith is dangerous. Do you not see that there are two sides to this?
Sam is correct when he says that faith is the cause of
Thanks for the link. As I said, I was basing my interpretation on the book alone. Having now read that link -- well, I'm not sure anything has changed. It confirms that others have independently read the same passage and come to the same interpretation as me. Harris doesn't deny the accusation but "leaves the reader to judge" -- well, I'd already done that; he's added nothing new. The passages he highlights show that he considers it as a last resort, the passages I highlighted show that he considers it to be better than the alternative. That's all consistent. If he doesn't hold the view that he's publically responding to, why the hell doesn't he just say that he doesn't hold that view?
So, are you a troll or are you just reading the book through fundamentalist coloured glasses?
No and no. I'm fiercly anti-idealogue (and that includes anti-fundamentalist) and I -- in common with others, it seems -- read his words at face value as meaning what I interpret them to mean. By showing me that others read the passage in the same way as I do you have confirmed that my reading is not a completely eccentric one, and by pointing to his refusal to deny it you have deepened my concerns.
Rather than "wants" it's perhaps fairer to say that he reluctantly considers that we will have to risk it because that's better than allowing religion (Islam specifically) to continue to exist. It's not that he wants most of humanity to be wiped out, it's just that he wants it more than the continued existence of Islam. I've quoted the actual words and page number elsewhere in the thread.
There's a lot of room for religion to cause harm without actually causing death. Ask anyone tortured but not killed by the inquisition, or for that matter any of these kids taught only about abstinence.
Or, indeed, ask my wife about her schooldays, when friendship was forbidden (and team sports banned because they fostered friendship) because friendship meant treating some citizens more favourably than others. That was an attempt to seriously screw up social relationships (it failed dismally, fortunately) but of course was done in the name of an atheistic ideology (Maoism) rather than religion. As you say, "these kinds of badness are not reserved for the religious."
To my mind there are two bad kinds of religious people: Those who are fucking up the world by expecting everyone to be like them, and those who are letting the world go to hell while assuming that they aren't. There are certainly people whose religion suggests that they go out and do good works but don't try to shit on people, and those people are not bad people. The rest of them are, and I'm not going to apologize for that.
I want to say also that these kinds of badness are not reserved for the religious
Yes, that's why I've been careful not to talk about "tolerance" -- there are things we should not be tolerant of, and things we should. We can fall off the horse on either side, but it's infamously difficult to find a satisfactory point of balance.
With all this said, I do not believe you can stamp out religion by eliminating religious freedom
Albania probably tried the hardest of any of the communist states, ruthlessly killing anybody who was suspected of religious belief. Since the collapse of communism there it became very religious again very quickly.
so I'm not advocating the forcible elimination of the stuff. However, I think that an educated populace (and by educated I mean taught how to use their brain, not what to think with it) will eventually reject religion. So far, statistics have borne this out, as well as the converse; religion impedes education.
Agree completely, but be careful: in a lot of the anti-religious talk I hear -- here on/. and elsewhere -- I hear echoes that are so similar to the communist persecution of the religious that it's creepy, and one aspect of that was seeing any dissent as either a sign of lack of education or of mental illness, leading to the religious (along with anybody else who dissented from state dogma) at risk of being sent for "re-education" or of being committed to a mental hospital. So a wholehearted "yes" to an education that teaches "how to use their brain, not what to think with it" provided the educators accept that if a product of that system doesn't think what they're "supposed" to then the education has failed in some way and needs to be continued more forcefully.
Elsewhere in the thread I have backed this up with direct quotes (page 129 of the edition that I have). Sorry, but it's not a lie; you weren't reading carefully enough.
DIGITIG, YOU HAVE DELIBERATELY LIED TO THE READERS.
Nope, I just read the book more carefully than you did.
I disagree. An argument based on hard numbers and evidence of present actions is much more sound than a nebulous hand-waving about potential threats that don't yet exist (as you admit here) and one which you haven't even accounted for external factors (as you admit in the next point).
It's not so long ago the threat was from the communists, the slogan was "better dead than red" and the real perceived problem with the communists was that they were "godless". A lot of my inlaws were killed by the Chinese during the cultural revolution. This isn't a "potential threat" that doesn't yet exist, this is something real that people of my generation lived through and that hasn't gone away yet. The most cursory examination of 20th century history would tell you that the problem isn't religion, the problem is blind ideology whatever flavour it comes in, and I'm no happier to be killed by a right- or left-wing extremist atheist than I am being killed by a religious fundamentalist.
To be honest, I don't care whether people live in their own fantasy worlds or not, as long as they leave me alone and in particular don't try to kill me.
That's a complete fallacy. In reality, we all live in the same world. These people are trying to make the world we all live in into their fantasy world -- this wouldn't be so bad if it weren't impossible because it's based on their ridiculous mythology.
My wife is a psychiatric nurse. She deals with lots of people who live in fantasy worlds but aren't trying to kill anybody. There are lots more that don't come within the remit of psychiatric services who live in fantasy worlds but aren't trying to kill anybody. On the other hand, there are ultra-rationalists who do want to kill me or don't care whether I die as collateral in their political and ideological conflicts. I say again, and it's not a fallacy: the issue isn't whether or not they're living in a fantasy world, it's whether they're trying to kill people.
He says that a nuclear first strike on the Muslim world "may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe", despite the fact that he reckons there would probably be a Muslim retaliation "in which much of the world's population could be annihilated on account of religious ideas..." (note: he doesn't see it as being because of the nuclear first strike, which he sees as rational and scientific, but the fault of Muslims for not agreeing with him in the first place).
Slashdot Mirror
Don't get me wrong -- 150,000 miles would be over 10 year's driving for me, and I don't expect many parts of my car to last that long without replacement. It's a good lifetime. But it's that warranty that challenges the myth of poor battery life, not finding what might be an occasional statistical outlier.
The number of taxi-miles is an irrelevant metric. 300,000 taxis each driving for one mile wouldn't tell you anything useful about the service life of the batteries. The question is about the wear-out phase of the battery lifecycle, not the constant failure rate phase.
How is open source a better solution when your only source of troubleshooting is Google?
Google is all the support I have ever had for Microsoft products, too. Sure, I could have paid to speak to somebody reading off a script somewhere that labour is cheap if I'd got into real trouble with a Microsoft product. As opposed to open source, where for a lot of products you can get straight through to the development team.
Why?
I can see how using OpenOffice is beneficial for me, since I rarely do any work on my home PC and a $free word processor is better than $200 for MS Office, but how would OpenOffice be a better solution for a business customer if it doesn't come with any support for the employees?
It comes with as much support as MS Office does. None. Further support can be purchased, for either product. And unless the employees are already using Office 2007, the OpenOffice.org solution is likely to look more familiar and need less support. I really don't see what issue you're trying to raise.
Always thought that was for Cthulhu.
Really one of the Great Old Ones, rather than a deity, though I see from Wikipedia that August Derleth has tried to claim him to be a god.
It was easy enough except for W, and that only because I didn't think of Wotan until I'd hit "Submit". Sorry, Wotan (just in case).
And "A" for Allah.
And "B" for Baal.
And "C" for Ceridwen.
And "D" for Demeter.
And "E" for Ereskigal.
And "F" for Frigg.
And "G" for Ganesha.
And "H" for Horus.
And "I" for Ishtar.
And "J" for Juno.
And "K" for Krishna.
And "L" for Loki.
And "M" for Mithras.
And "N" for Neptune.
And "O" for Osiris.
And "P" for Pan.
And "Q" for Quetzalcoatl.
And "R" for Rama.
And "S" for Shen-Yi.
And "T" for Tiamat.
And "U" for Uzume.
And "V" for Vulcan.
And "W" for Xi Wang-mu.
And "X" for the other bit of Xi Wang-mu.
"Y" for Yhwh, as you say, and the other bit of Shen-Yi
and "Z" for "Zeus".
Talk about a loose specification? "The Deity"?
The real problem with filters is that they don't work. There will still be some innocent looking link to a page thats far from innocent.
Oh, agreed completely. And there will be suspicious looking pages that contain important and relevant information. I understand there is something called "good parenting" which is claimed to be more effective than filtering. Unfortunately, it seems nobody makes a profit from it, which is probably why other techniques get more attention.
I don't see a problem with kids knowing about sex (although I did hear a comedy skit recently that the amount of porn kids see nowadays is likely to lead to give them problems having kids of their own, because the boys will prod around for a while then pull out and ejaculate on the girl's face), but straightforward porn is far from the worst thing on the web.
I have a 16-year-old and an 18-year-old using the laptops in this house. Are they likely to listen? I'll let you guess the answer to that.
Or maybe budget allocation should be based on business need rather than what favours are due?
In 18 months Moore's Law will kick in anyway.
Who cares? If the laptop is doing its job I don't plan to upgrade. I don't need state-of-the-art to do any of my work, and I don't needs state-of-the-art for my personal laptop. Word processing, presentations and Eclipse work fine on an old laptop -- as long as it isn't falling apart. (Anything that needs high spec -- which to be honest is just games for me -- I run on a desktop computer).
Yes, but after about 18 months the case on my Dell was falling apart, similarly a Sony Vaio, and after a similar period keys were falling off my son's IBM Thinkpad. Will the same happen to my son's Macbook? Well, I don't know, but it doesn't look as if it will.
I don't like Apple's hardware lock-in, but my son just got a macbook and I have to admit that although the technical spec seems low for the price the build standard is incredibly good; it looks and feels as if it's actually going to last the course, whereas most of the notebooks I've ever had have failed because of the casing or connectors. So there's clearly something missing from Microsoft's analysis (surprise!), although they're right that that pitches it at the high-end market. Does anybody have hardware reliability comparisons for Macbooks and comparably priced Windows laptops?
Some of the stuff in the report is more blatant nonsense, of course: "A re-buy of Office for Mac starts at $150" (whose fault is that?) -- so Office for the PC is free, is it? Or do they think that all Mac users will buy Office for Windows too, just to keep Microsoft happy?
I don't know the politics behind this -- am I correct in reading it as Waddoup being fine with everybody else being spammed, and only objecting when he discovered that he could get spammed too?
Never mind the wheat -- beer, cream cakes and chocolate are all (potentially) vegetarian.
It seems that Chris is the only one who is making a public fuss about what Sam said and then being quoted, mostly blindly.
Well, I suppose this is public too. I'd never heard of Chris, so I'm certainly not quoting him blindly -- I'm not quoting him at all.
Being the cynic I am I have to doubt if Chris's selective quoting of Sam is for anything but profit.
I think his -- and my -- reading remains valid in the light of the complete passage. After all, the complete passage is how I came to my understanding of what he was saying.
He does of course have a book to sell called "I Don't Believe in Atheists". He is also religious so this probably colours his interpretation of the book a little.
I don't have a book to sell, and am agnostic, albeit a religious agnostic (ie, my religion is more hope than belief). I've read a lot on both sides of the "is religion evil" debate, and am concerned that both sides are ramping up hostility. I don't believe that either side has as certain a case as it thinks it has, and I think that the escalation on both sides is what is most likely to lead to violence that gets out of control.
The passage involving a nuclear first strike against an Islamic regime that has nuclear weapons is a hypothetical. It explores the possibility and as Sam says himself the whole situation is "perfectly insane".
Yes, perfectly insane, but "we may have no choice" but be "perfectly insane"? No, actually, we would always have a choice (unless he's digressed into the free will debate). All "we have no choice" ever means is "I prefer this to the alternative".
I think the most important part of the passage is this:
"I have just described a plausible scenario in which much of the world's population could be annihilated on account of religious ideas that belong on the same shelf with Batman, the philosopher's stone, and unicorns. That it would be a horrible absurdity for so many of us to die for the sake of myth does not mean, however, that it could not happen.
I agree that it's the most important passage, but apparently for a different reason to you. You see, Islamic states getting long-range nuclear capability doesn't make us nuke them, any more than North Korea getting long-range nuclear capability nuclear capability makes us nuke them. Launching a first strike and saying "It's therir fault for developing the same sort of capabilities as we have and for having different beliefs" is moral nonsense. It wouldn't be their fault at all, it would be the fault of the aggressor who launched the first strike. And incidentally, if policy makers started talking seriously about a first strike on any Islamic nation with long-range nuclear capability, what would the likely response of a state with such a capability be? "Better launch our attack before they find out". Nothing religious about that, just the standard cold-war thinking that Harris denies is possible.
The whole point he is making is that if it comes to this absurd situation it will be caused by the fact that a group of supposedly mature adults insist upon holding on to a belief in an imaginary friend. Human civilisation could be brought, close if not fully, to an end because of fantasy and fairytale.
Like a mugger who says that he had to kill his victim because the victim might have had a gun, so it's the victim's fault. Sure.
Sam does not in any way endorse or call for a first strike against Islam
He says we "may have no choice", which means that he says it may be preferable to the alternative. That's endorsement.
He's done it to prove his point that religious faith is dangerous.
Or his response to religious faith is dangerous. Do you not see that there are two sides to this?
Sam is correct when he says that faith is the cause of
DIGITIG: "Militant atheist Sam Harris, according to "The End of Faith" apparently wants to see humanity exterminated"
www.samharris.org/site/full_text/response-to-controversy2
Thanks for the link. As I said, I was basing my interpretation on the book alone. Having now read that link -- well, I'm not sure anything has changed. It confirms that others have independently read the same passage and come to the same interpretation as me. Harris doesn't deny the accusation but "leaves the reader to judge" -- well, I'd already done that; he's added nothing new. The passages he highlights show that he considers it as a last resort, the passages I highlighted show that he considers it to be better than the alternative. That's all consistent. If he doesn't hold the view that he's publically responding to, why the hell doesn't he just say that he doesn't hold that view?
So, are you a troll or are you just reading the book through fundamentalist coloured glasses?
No and no. I'm fiercly anti-idealogue (and that includes anti-fundamentalist) and I -- in common with others, it seems -- read his words at face value as meaning what I interpret them to mean. By showing me that others read the passage in the same way as I do you have confirmed that my reading is not a completely eccentric one, and by pointing to his refusal to deny it you have deepened my concerns.
Rather than "wants" it's perhaps fairer to say that he reluctantly considers that we will have to risk it because that's better than allowing religion (Islam specifically) to continue to exist. It's not that he wants most of humanity to be wiped out, it's just that he wants it more than the continued existence of Islam. I've quoted the actual words and page number elsewhere in the thread.
There's a lot of room for religion to cause harm without actually causing death. Ask anyone tortured but not killed by the inquisition, or for that matter any of these kids taught only about abstinence.
Or, indeed, ask my wife about her schooldays, when friendship was forbidden (and team sports banned because they fostered friendship) because friendship meant treating some citizens more favourably than others. That was an attempt to seriously screw up social relationships (it failed dismally, fortunately) but of course was done in the name of an atheistic ideology (Maoism) rather than religion. As you say, "these kinds of badness are not reserved for the religious."
To my mind there are two bad kinds of religious people: Those who are fucking up the world by expecting everyone to be like them, and those who are letting the world go to hell while assuming that they aren't. There are certainly people whose religion suggests that they go out and do good works but don't try to shit on people, and those people are not bad people. The rest of them are, and I'm not going to apologize for that.
I want to say also that these kinds of badness are not reserved for the religious
Yes, that's why I've been careful not to talk about "tolerance" -- there are things we should not be tolerant of, and things we should. We can fall off the horse on either side, but it's infamously difficult to find a satisfactory point of balance.
With all this said, I do not believe you can stamp out religion by eliminating religious freedom
Albania probably tried the hardest of any of the communist states, ruthlessly killing anybody who was suspected of religious belief. Since the collapse of communism there it became very religious again very quickly.
so I'm not advocating the forcible elimination of the stuff. However, I think that an educated populace (and by educated I mean taught how to use their brain, not what to think with it) will eventually reject religion. So far, statistics have borne this out, as well as the converse; religion impedes education.
Agree completely, but be careful: in a lot of the anti-religious talk I hear -- here on /. and elsewhere -- I hear echoes that are so similar to the communist persecution of the religious that it's creepy, and one aspect of that was seeing any dissent as either a sign of lack of education or of mental illness, leading to the religious (along with anybody else who dissented from state dogma) at risk of being sent for "re-education" or of being committed to a mental hospital. So a wholehearted "yes" to an education that teaches "how to use their brain, not what to think with it" provided the educators accept that if a product of that system doesn't think what they're "supposed" to then the education has failed in some way and needs to be continued more forcefully.
You fail. Atheism is just another religion.
Care to define religion in a way all of /. can agree on? I think I see goalposts moving...
This is a lie! Please cite.
Elsewhere in the thread I have backed this up with direct quotes (page 129 of the edition that I have). Sorry, but it's not a lie; you weren't reading carefully enough.
DIGITIG, YOU HAVE DELIBERATELY LIED TO THE READERS.
Nope, I just read the book more carefully than you did.
I disagree. An argument based on hard numbers and evidence of present actions is much more sound than a nebulous hand-waving about potential threats that don't yet exist (as you admit here) and one which you haven't even accounted for external factors (as you admit in the next point).
It's not so long ago the threat was from the communists, the slogan was "better dead than red" and the real perceived problem with the communists was that they were "godless". A lot of my inlaws were killed by the Chinese during the cultural revolution. This isn't a "potential threat" that doesn't yet exist, this is something real that people of my generation lived through and that hasn't gone away yet. The most cursory examination of 20th century history would tell you that the problem isn't religion, the problem is blind ideology whatever flavour it comes in, and I'm no happier to be killed by a right- or left-wing extremist atheist than I am being killed by a religious fundamentalist.
To be honest, I don't care whether people live in their own fantasy worlds or not, as long as they leave me alone and in particular don't try to kill me.
That's a complete fallacy. In reality, we all live in the same world. These people are trying to make the world we all live in into their fantasy world -- this wouldn't be so bad if it weren't impossible because it's based on their ridiculous mythology.
My wife is a psychiatric nurse. She deals with lots of people who live in fantasy worlds but aren't trying to kill anybody. There are lots more that don't come within the remit of psychiatric services who live in fantasy worlds but aren't trying to kill anybody. On the other hand, there are ultra-rationalists who do want to kill me or don't care whether I die as collateral in their political and ideological conflicts. I say again, and it's not a fallacy: the issue isn't whether or not they're living in a fantasy world, it's whether they're trying to kill people.
He says that a nuclear first strike on the Muslim world "may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe", despite the fact that he reckons there would probably be a Muslim retaliation "in which much of the world's population could be annihilated on account of religious ideas..." (note: he doesn't see it as being because of the nuclear first strike, which he sees as rational and scientific, but the fault of Muslims for not agreeing with him in the first place).