If it has to be one of the two, I suppose it's the latter. If you RTFA, you'll see that the "machine-or-transformation" test was rejected as a reason to throw out the Bilski patent.
If you fire a cannon, measure where the projectile lands, and conclude that the difference between that and the value calculated by Newton's equations has anythnig to do with relativity, then you have either a very powerful cannon or a very powerful imagination.
Thanks for the link. That does clarify the material from my previous readings considerably.
I must admit it still feels like there's a gap in there somewhere, but I'll have to wait until I have some free time to read further on the matter. The immediate question this raises in my mind is: does theory support the idea of more than two mutually-entangled particles, and if so what do we get if three SPOT detectors are used at 0, +30, and -30 mutual angles...
If I read that right, you're saying that no honest person who understands the system believes in the concept of judicial activism. That's quite a claim.
A big part of my job is to interpret business requirements and produce technical specifications that fulfill those requirements. If the business says "we need a system that calculates a 20% discount for our best customers", and I spec out a system that calculates a 25% discount, I'm no longer interpreting - I'm making my own policies in their stead. That is what is meant by "legislating from the bench". Just because it's their role to interpret doesn't mean that every interpretation they might dream up is valid; and there is a difference between interpretation and authoring.
Are the thers "judicial activism" and "legislating from the bench" often used in self-serving, political contexts where they don't apply? Yes. So are terms like "corruption", but that doesn't mean that corruption isn't a real phenomenon.
I hear this "judges can do no wrong" nonsense pretty regularly, and it's just as political and self-serving as are false charges of over-reaching judical decisions.
I've read descriptions of the experiment that is supposed to rule out "hidden variables". It is statistical in nature, and I didn't (probably still don't) have a good enough grounding in the theory to really understand it (as physics isn't actually my field). So I can only say that all the credible texts on the subject claim that hidden variables could not account for what is observed.
It's called "spooky" because that was a term Einstein used to describe his initial dissatisfaction with the theory.
"There are a few complexities to work out, such as the -270 degrees Celsius requirement to stop the light."...
"an experiment to measure how these fundamental effects interact could be as simple as putting one crystal in the back of my car and going for a drive."
The back of your car can hold a temperature of -270C?
Inforamtion (a 3d pattern of photons) is stored in the crystal; it can later be read, once and only once. That means it's memory, with a peculiar sort of volatility.
I think your comment about communication is based on confusion about how entanglement works. You cannot send information through entanglement.
On one hand, I'm puzzled by the fact that you started your comment with the word "but"; it implies that you think your point somehow relates to and contradicts something I said, which I don't see. My post did not address the merits (or lack thereof) of Muslim policy on censorship; it addressed the complete lack of merit in ascribing that policy to fear.
On the other hand, I do think you're almost entirely wrong in the point of view you're expressing. As long as your idea for how the two sides can communicate is that the side that isn't you can change and behave the way you want it to, you will remain part of the problem.
Religion is a defining characeristic of the cultures in countries like Pakistan. Your preferences, your "should" or "should not", don't enter into the equation; religion is a player. You don't allow or disallow others from deciding what processes they use to reach their conclusions.
Similarly, arguments that project motives onto those you wish to disagree with (such as stating that Muslm laws are based on fear) are worthy of nothing but absolute scorn.
The most serious failures in western relations with the Muslim world are based on failure of each to understand the motives of the other, typically because one side is trying to figure out what would drive itself to act the way the other is acting. You may think that people are all the same, but cultures are not.
Voting is a duty and is critical to the functioning of a representative government. It is a special case where freedom from outside influence needs special protection.
Signing a petition is a choice; if you want to have your voice heard in that way, you choose to do so.
The purpose of a petition is to show a threshold level of support for an issue before bothering to hold a vote. If you can't come up with X signatures from people who are willing to stand by their belief, then you don't have that threshold level of support.
On the flip side of the coin, if we allow anonymous petition-signing, then what becomes of the right of the dissent to audit the signatures?
Actually, it seems a bit odd, given the facts presented, that the conclusion indicates the claim holds up. If the conclusion were "it pretty much holds up, far more than you could expect for marketing", I'd be on board... but I think a true purist would withhold the claim of "retinal" resolution for another generation or two, for a couple reasons:
1) Perhaps nitpicky, but this measurement assumes a viewing distance of 12" on the basis that the ability to resolve detail may be best at 12". However, at 6" the arc spacing of the pixels would be twice as large; whereas my ability to resolve detail at 6" may not be optimal, but probably isn't only half what it would be at 12". Now you can justify that away, I suppose, by arguing that nobody would try to use a touchscreen at a viewing distance of 6", but...
2) The threshold spacing TFA calculated is greater than the spacing of pixels along the short axis, but not along the long axis.
Yeah, just because it's an RFC doesn't make it accurate.
The legal/philosophical issues are debatable; the author does a fair job of making his opinion on the matter clear, but I can't say I found it all that compelling.
When the author tries to lay out technical issues, though, it just gets laughable:
He mentions that there are thousands of languages and questions which one to use in choosing the label... well, how about the same one from which the other TLD abbreviations are taken? Do you think.com is meaningful in German, Russian, Chinese, countless Indian dialects, etc.?
Pointing out that the protocol won't fully enforce the rule is not actually pointing out a technical hurdle. In the spirit of his "postal mail" analogy - It's illegal to commit fraud via U.S. mail, but the mailboxes don't stop you from doing it.
Other people could point non-.xxx names at a.xxx site; true, but so what? If you have any sort of legal force behind use of the.xxx domain, you word it around the act of making explicit material available through a non-.xxx name; and then the person who pointed a non-.xxx name at the porn is liable, not the porn site's operator.
And on and on with a parade of attempts to make something this guy doesn't want to see happen sound implausible. BFD
I think you're misunderstanding the spirit of this exercise.
If you want me to believe you "know" something that shows this type of device is dangerous, then you're going to need to provide a citation.
If you can't show that the type of device he's building has the problem you're talking about, then you're just spreading FUD over all thigns nuclear. Do you know what kind of device he's building, so that perhaps you at least have the search keywords to use in supporting your claim; or is "it's nuclear" the only fact you have?
If we take as a premise that the material in qustion can be patented - which is not the same as if it should be patented, or even if it should be possible to patent it:
Deciding on principle not to file for a patent is ok, but either way you need a strategy to make sure someone else doesn't end up owning the patent. Even if you've not told anyone else about your work, you still might be racing the clock (as someone else could be doing similar work and reaching similar conclusions).
Assuming the submitter is free to acquire a patent (i.e. said patent wouldn't automatically become someone else's property), one strategy is to file it and, if it is granted, license it to everyone for free. The idea of allowing certain things to be patented may be stupid (but when I say "may be", I mean exactly that; I'm not convinced exactly where the lines should be or why), but even in such cases it isn't the patent itself that's evil; its a question of what is done with said patent.
Of course, filing a patent costs money. It's one thing to say "I put quite a bit of time into this idea, but based on my values and ideals I want it to be free"; it's another to say "Moreoever I'm willing to spend my own money on top of it all, for artificial fees to keep the idea free". The latter probably isn't for everyone.
Another option - if your employer automatically usurps your patents, then possibly your only option - is to make as much noise about the material as possible without patenting it, to try to create conditions in which the PTO would not grant anyone the patent. You're then relying on a lot of uncertain circumstances to work out favorably - that you can make enough noise and be noticed, that having been noticed you will be taken seriously, that the conditions you create by making noise really do render the idea unpatentable, that the PTO (and/or the courts after-the-fact) get this right...
And what, exactly, makes you think it's dangerous? If you're going to call it dangerous, you should be able to lay out a plausible failure scenario that shows the risk; do you know enough about the devices these guys are building to do that, or are you just afraid of anything that uses the word "nuclear"?
Which is probably why he said "linux PC's or mobile devices" rather than "linux installs".
I'm not sure if the stat is meaningful. I guess I'd have to think about what mobile devices are running Linux before I'd want to comment further. (Beating out the Linux desktop in terms of web presence isn't a terribly meaningful benchmark IMO, so it'd have to be the mobile devices...) On the flip side of the coin, you can use an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad without surfing the web, too...
But for whatever the stat is worth, it was presented with sufficient weasle-wordage to be accurate.
You're conflating government agencies. If you want to worry that the government is reading your email, you want to talk about the NSA. DARPA is more likely to be building toys for the military.
Ever wonder how they test nuclear weapon designs these days?
Well, Captain Science, I don't know why you're asking me to "imagine" circumstances I already fully understand. Probably it's because you're the kind of idiot who posts snarky nonsense as AC so you can pretend that the tiny bits of knowledge you have are so monumental that surely the others in the conversation don't already possess them.
Of course, the most glaring flaw in your logic is hidden in the phrase "...at that point...". Yes, at the point where you actually ignite your pressurized O2, that's a bigger problem than long-term health effects; and if we assume you're going to find yourself "at that point" then that is what you should worry about.
Then again, when's the last time you heard of a smoker igniting his O2 tank? I've personally known people who continued damaging their lungs and thereby shortened their lives by smoking while dragging around an O2 tank. I've never known, nor even heard a story of, anyone blowing themselves up in the manner you suggest.
It doesn't matter what the bigger risk is 'at the point' where you ignite the tank; it matters what the bigger risk is day to day.
Not sure what you mean when you say "There's nothing in Logan's Run that needs 3D." Since the screenplay hasn't even been written, I guess maybe you're confusing the yet-to-be-made-in-3D movie with the made-long-ago movie, and observing that nothing in the made-long-ago movie requires 3D. I suspect that because you have no idea what will be in the yet-to-be-made movie, so you cannot know if it will contain elements that require 3D.
Perhaps you meant "nothing in the original story requires 3D". Well, nothing in the original story requires color, either (we're pretty good at interpolating from grey). For that matter, nothing in the original story requires video or audio (it was originally a written short story). They've chosen a 3D movie as the medium for the remake, and they will adapt the story to that medium, just as they adapted it to a 2D movie the last time around. Whether this adaptation will take effective advantage of the chosen medium remains to be seen.
If the question is "why did they choose 3D as a medium?", that would be for the same reason everyone else is making movies in 3D lately. Only time will tell for sure, but it's surely one of the following two, so take your pick:
1) Because 3D will turn out to be the future of video entertainment (like the addition of color, among other things)
2) Because 3D is a fad that will eventually fade away but it is making money in the mean time (like the last time 3D movies made the rounds)
The chemical properties of oxygen are only one of the reasons people on oxygen are told not to smoke. Actually the more obvious reason has to do with the fact that their lungs are clearly already screwed up.
And if you think all patients on oxygen accept this bit of seemingly-obvious advice, you would be sadly mistaken.
Oversight doesn't have to be better-than-iffy if the decision-makers know they're personally accountable for the natural consequences of their actions after the fact. The mistakes at Deepwater Horizon were possible because, as far as anyone can credibly foresee, nobody will go to jail for the 11 deaths (among other things).
I think a major revision to drilling policy - either in terms of cutting off deep-water drilling or in terms of opening up shallow-water drilling - would be an extremely poor response to this disaster. So in principle I agree with a lot of what you're saying; but I do not agree with the notion that another disaster like this one is unavoidable regardless of the rules.
Yes, there is always risk. No, you can't chalk the direct consequences of negligent decision-making up to "these things are always going to happen".
Yeah, sort of. But in GP's analogy, the guy in the field is "all of us", not BP.
Based on the facts as they've been presented, I believe elements of BP's management team are directly responsible for the 11 deaths on the rig, plus the environmental and economic impact of the spill. That does not mean that I think drilling policy needs to be rolled back, any more than a "sudden acceleration" problem in certain Toyotas would mean that we should abandon the use of cars.
What it does mean to me is:
1) If specific decisions (such as premature removal of drilling fluid) can be demonstrated to have contributed to - or even probably contributed to - the explosion, then future decisions along the same lines should be outlawed with personal criminal liability for those responsible.
2) In general the corporate system of reward, accountability, and liability should not be allowed to continue heavily favoring risk-taking where the downside hits people other than the decision maker. Managers who aren't qualified to understand the technical apsects of a decision (but perfectly qualfied to ogle at the dollar signs attached to that decision) should be forced to understand the need to defer and delegate. The fact is most companies pull the same type of stunt BP did, but (a) usually it doesn't blow up in their face, and (b) when it does it's usually not as spectacular as the Deepwater Horizon failure.
Political haymaking about oil policy in response to an individual disaster that should not have happened (and probably would not have happened but for government-sanctioned corporate greed) is just as cynical as any other political haymaking.
Slashdot Mirror
If it has to be one of the two, I suppose it's the latter. If you RTFA, you'll see that the "machine-or-transformation" test was rejected as a reason to throw out the Bilski patent.
If you fire a cannon, measure where the projectile lands, and conclude that the difference between that and the value calculated by Newton's equations has anythnig to do with relativity, then you have either a very powerful cannon or a very powerful imagination.
Thanks for the link. That does clarify the material from my previous readings considerably.
I must admit it still feels like there's a gap in there somewhere, but I'll have to wait until I have some free time to read further on the matter. The immediate question this raises in my mind is: does theory support the idea of more than two mutually-entangled particles, and if so what do we get if three SPOT detectors are used at 0, +30, and -30 mutual angles...
If I read that right, you're saying that no honest person who understands the system believes in the concept of judicial activism. That's quite a claim.
A big part of my job is to interpret business requirements and produce technical specifications that fulfill those requirements. If the business says "we need a system that calculates a 20% discount for our best customers", and I spec out a system that calculates a 25% discount, I'm no longer interpreting - I'm making my own policies in their stead. That is what is meant by "legislating from the bench". Just because it's their role to interpret doesn't mean that every interpretation they might dream up is valid; and there is a difference between interpretation and authoring.
Are the thers "judicial activism" and "legislating from the bench" often used in self-serving, political contexts where they don't apply? Yes. So are terms like "corruption", but that doesn't mean that corruption isn't a real phenomenon.
I hear this "judges can do no wrong" nonsense pretty regularly, and it's just as political and self-serving as are false charges of over-reaching judical decisions.
I've read descriptions of the experiment that is supposed to rule out "hidden variables". It is statistical in nature, and I didn't (probably still don't) have a good enough grounding in the theory to really understand it (as physics isn't actually my field). So I can only say that all the credible texts on the subject claim that hidden variables could not account for what is observed.
It's called "spooky" because that was a term Einstein used to describe his initial dissatisfaction with the theory.
"There are a few complexities to work out, such as the -270 degrees Celsius requirement to stop the light." ...
"an experiment to measure how these fundamental effects interact could be as simple as putting one crystal in the back of my car and going for a drive."
The back of your car can hold a temperature of -270C?
I think you must have misread the explanation.
Inforamtion (a 3d pattern of photons) is stored in the crystal; it can later be read, once and only once. That means it's memory, with a peculiar sort of volatility.
I think your comment about communication is based on confusion about how entanglement works. You cannot send information through entanglement.
On one hand, I'm puzzled by the fact that you started your comment with the word "but"; it implies that you think your point somehow relates to and contradicts something I said, which I don't see. My post did not address the merits (or lack thereof) of Muslim policy on censorship; it addressed the complete lack of merit in ascribing that policy to fear.
On the other hand, I do think you're almost entirely wrong in the point of view you're expressing. As long as your idea for how the two sides can communicate is that the side that isn't you can change and behave the way you want it to, you will remain part of the problem.
Religion is a defining characeristic of the cultures in countries like Pakistan. Your preferences, your "should" or "should not", don't enter into the equation; religion is a player. You don't allow or disallow others from deciding what processes they use to reach their conclusions.
Even if I agreed with you, you only addressed the least important of my arguments.
Similarly, arguments that project motives onto those you wish to disagree with (such as stating that Muslm laws are based on fear) are worthy of nothing but absolute scorn.
The most serious failures in western relations with the Muslim world are based on failure of each to understand the motives of the other, typically because one side is trying to figure out what would drive itself to act the way the other is acting. You may think that people are all the same, but cultures are not.
No.
Voting is a duty and is critical to the functioning of a representative government. It is a special case where freedom from outside influence needs special protection.
Signing a petition is a choice; if you want to have your voice heard in that way, you choose to do so.
The purpose of a petition is to show a threshold level of support for an issue before bothering to hold a vote. If you can't come up with X signatures from people who are willing to stand by their belief, then you don't have that threshold level of support.
On the flip side of the coin, if we allow anonymous petition-signing, then what becomes of the right of the dissent to audit the signatures?
...I'm glad that's resolved.
Actually, it seems a bit odd, given the facts presented, that the conclusion indicates the claim holds up. If the conclusion were "it pretty much holds up, far more than you could expect for marketing", I'd be on board... but I think a true purist would withhold the claim of "retinal" resolution for another generation or two, for a couple reasons:
1) Perhaps nitpicky, but this measurement assumes a viewing distance of 12" on the basis that the ability to resolve detail may be best at 12". However, at 6" the arc spacing of the pixels would be twice as large; whereas my ability to resolve detail at 6" may not be optimal, but probably isn't only half what it would be at 12". Now you can justify that away, I suppose, by arguing that nobody would try to use a touchscreen at a viewing distance of 6", but...
2) The threshold spacing TFA calculated is greater than the spacing of pixels along the short axis, but not along the long axis.
Yeah, just because it's an RFC doesn't make it accurate.
The legal/philosophical issues are debatable; the author does a fair job of making his opinion on the matter clear, but I can't say I found it all that compelling.
When the author tries to lay out technical issues, though, it just gets laughable:
He mentions that there are thousands of languages and questions which one to use in choosing the label... well, how about the same one from which the other TLD abbreviations are taken? Do you think .com is meaningful in German, Russian, Chinese, countless Indian dialects, etc.?
Pointing out that the protocol won't fully enforce the rule is not actually pointing out a technical hurdle. In the spirit of his "postal mail" analogy - It's illegal to commit fraud via U.S. mail, but the mailboxes don't stop you from doing it.
Other people could point non-.xxx names at a .xxx site; true, but so what? If you have any sort of legal force behind use of the .xxx domain, you word it around the act of making explicit material available through a non-.xxx name; and then the person who pointed a non-.xxx name at the porn is liable, not the porn site's operator.
And on and on with a parade of attempts to make something this guy doesn't want to see happen sound implausible. BFD
I think you're misunderstanding the spirit of this exercise.
If you want me to believe you "know" something that shows this type of device is dangerous, then you're going to need to provide a citation.
If you can't show that the type of device he's building has the problem you're talking about, then you're just spreading FUD over all thigns nuclear. Do you know what kind of device he's building, so that perhaps you at least have the search keywords to use in supporting your claim; or is "it's nuclear" the only fact you have?
If we take as a premise that the material in qustion can be patented - which is not the same as if it should be patented, or even if it should be possible to patent it:
Deciding on principle not to file for a patent is ok, but either way you need a strategy to make sure someone else doesn't end up owning the patent. Even if you've not told anyone else about your work, you still might be racing the clock (as someone else could be doing similar work and reaching similar conclusions).
Assuming the submitter is free to acquire a patent (i.e. said patent wouldn't automatically become someone else's property), one strategy is to file it and, if it is granted, license it to everyone for free. The idea of allowing certain things to be patented may be stupid (but when I say "may be", I mean exactly that; I'm not convinced exactly where the lines should be or why), but even in such cases it isn't the patent itself that's evil; its a question of what is done with said patent.
Of course, filing a patent costs money. It's one thing to say "I put quite a bit of time into this idea, but based on my values and ideals I want it to be free"; it's another to say "Moreoever I'm willing to spend my own money on top of it all, for artificial fees to keep the idea free". The latter probably isn't for everyone.
Another option - if your employer automatically usurps your patents, then possibly your only option - is to make as much noise about the material as possible without patenting it, to try to create conditions in which the PTO would not grant anyone the patent. You're then relying on a lot of uncertain circumstances to work out favorably - that you can make enough noise and be noticed, that having been noticed you will be taken seriously, that the conditions you create by making noise really do render the idea unpatentable, that the PTO (and/or the courts after-the-fact) get this right...
And what, exactly, makes you think it's dangerous? If you're going to call it dangerous, you should be able to lay out a plausible failure scenario that shows the risk; do you know enough about the devices these guys are building to do that, or are you just afraid of anything that uses the word "nuclear"?
They say "at least"; I'd take that to mean "if it was any less deep than that, we'd see some trace of the bottom".
Which is probably why he said "linux PC's or mobile devices" rather than "linux installs".
I'm not sure if the stat is meaningful. I guess I'd have to think about what mobile devices are running Linux before I'd want to comment further. (Beating out the Linux desktop in terms of web presence isn't a terribly meaningful benchmark IMO, so it'd have to be the mobile devices...) On the flip side of the coin, you can use an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad without surfing the web, too...
But for whatever the stat is worth, it was presented with sufficient weasle-wordage to be accurate.
You're conflating government agencies. If you want to worry that the government is reading your email, you want to talk about the NSA. DARPA is more likely to be building toys for the military.
Ever wonder how they test nuclear weapon designs these days?
Well, Captain Science, I don't know why you're asking me to "imagine" circumstances I already fully understand. Probably it's because you're the kind of idiot who posts snarky nonsense as AC so you can pretend that the tiny bits of knowledge you have are so monumental that surely the others in the conversation don't already possess them.
Of course, the most glaring flaw in your logic is hidden in the phrase "...at that point...". Yes, at the point where you actually ignite your pressurized O2, that's a bigger problem than long-term health effects; and if we assume you're going to find yourself "at that point" then that is what you should worry about.
Then again, when's the last time you heard of a smoker igniting his O2 tank? I've personally known people who continued damaging their lungs and thereby shortened their lives by smoking while dragging around an O2 tank. I've never known, nor even heard a story of, anyone blowing themselves up in the manner you suggest.
It doesn't matter what the bigger risk is 'at the point' where you ignite the tank; it matters what the bigger risk is day to day.
Not sure what you mean when you say "There's nothing in Logan's Run that needs 3D." Since the screenplay hasn't even been written, I guess maybe you're confusing the yet-to-be-made-in-3D movie with the made-long-ago movie, and observing that nothing in the made-long-ago movie requires 3D. I suspect that because you have no idea what will be in the yet-to-be-made movie, so you cannot know if it will contain elements that require 3D.
Perhaps you meant "nothing in the original story requires 3D". Well, nothing in the original story requires color, either (we're pretty good at interpolating from grey). For that matter, nothing in the original story requires video or audio (it was originally a written short story). They've chosen a 3D movie as the medium for the remake, and they will adapt the story to that medium, just as they adapted it to a 2D movie the last time around. Whether this adaptation will take effective advantage of the chosen medium remains to be seen.
If the question is "why did they choose 3D as a medium?", that would be for the same reason everyone else is making movies in 3D lately. Only time will tell for sure, but it's surely one of the following two, so take your pick:
1) Because 3D will turn out to be the future of video entertainment (like the addition of color, among other things)
2) Because 3D is a fad that will eventually fade away but it is making money in the mean time (like the last time 3D movies made the rounds)
The chemical properties of oxygen are only one of the reasons people on oxygen are told not to smoke. Actually the more obvious reason has to do with the fact that their lungs are clearly already screwed up.
And if you think all patients on oxygen accept this bit of seemingly-obvious advice, you would be sadly mistaken.
Oversight doesn't have to be better-than-iffy if the decision-makers know they're personally accountable for the natural consequences of their actions after the fact. The mistakes at Deepwater Horizon were possible because, as far as anyone can credibly foresee, nobody will go to jail for the 11 deaths (among other things).
I think a major revision to drilling policy - either in terms of cutting off deep-water drilling or in terms of opening up shallow-water drilling - would be an extremely poor response to this disaster. So in principle I agree with a lot of what you're saying; but I do not agree with the notion that another disaster like this one is unavoidable regardless of the rules.
Yes, there is always risk. No, you can't chalk the direct consequences of negligent decision-making up to "these things are always going to happen".
Yeah, sort of. But in GP's analogy, the guy in the field is "all of us", not BP.
Based on the facts as they've been presented, I believe elements of BP's management team are directly responsible for the 11 deaths on the rig, plus the environmental and economic impact of the spill. That does not mean that I think drilling policy needs to be rolled back, any more than a "sudden acceleration" problem in certain Toyotas would mean that we should abandon the use of cars.
What it does mean to me is:
1) If specific decisions (such as premature removal of drilling fluid) can be demonstrated to have contributed to - or even probably contributed to - the explosion, then future decisions along the same lines should be outlawed with personal criminal liability for those responsible.
2) In general the corporate system of reward, accountability, and liability should not be allowed to continue heavily favoring risk-taking where the downside hits people other than the decision maker. Managers who aren't qualified to understand the technical apsects of a decision (but perfectly qualfied to ogle at the dollar signs attached to that decision) should be forced to understand the need to defer and delegate. The fact is most companies pull the same type of stunt BP did, but (a) usually it doesn't blow up in their face, and (b) when it does it's usually not as spectacular as the Deepwater Horizon failure.
Political haymaking about oil policy in response to an individual disaster that should not have happened (and probably would not have happened but for government-sanctioned corporate greed) is just as cynical as any other political haymaking.
I'm not going to get into a debate about whether self-determination is possible under communism.
Instead, I'm going to reiterate my original point: Where in the definition of cult do you see anything about self-determination?