Good, an intelligent reply. Those're getting rarer these days.
It is a very hard problem, though it's a very common technique in optical and radio astronomy for determining the gasses in a remote planetary atmosphere. Mind you, you're talking serious compute power and serious observatories. It's unlikely your system, for example, could boast a sensor the size of the Lovell radio telescope.
It's not entirely correct to say that the problem is intractible - there will be a finite dictionary that you need to look through, where you can rule out any candidate when too many bits of the spectrum that should be absorbed aren't (experimental error means you can't depend on just one). However, it would be fair to say that it's very very very close to being intractible.
Mind you, we already know that. They'd hardly be offer ten mil for a junior high science project.
Nonetheless, if what is wanted is a medical tricorder type of device (ie: a hand-held remote sensor, not a directly interacting one) that is trying to observe molecules, your options are limited. Yes, they say "portable" and technically that would include anything you could pack into a 65,000 lb. bundle that'll fit into a truck. However, I'm assuming that this device is intended for remote jungles or mountainous terrain where you can't just take the patient to a fixed diagnostic center instead. I also assume they want a lower risk to the patient than standard medical appliances, which means it has to emit less radiation than a CAT scan.
That pretty much rules out NMR, or blasting the patient with ultra-pure x-rays from a synchotron. In fact, it pretty much eliminates any active device whatsoever, since it's no use having a 5 lb. tricorder that needs a 5 gigawatt power station.
So the requirement is basically for a hand-held passive remote sensor that can detect molecules. Not necessarily perfectly, just better than a doctor could with an agar plate, a microscope and other common household appliances. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2153218&cid=36123084# I'm not saying you're wrong - indeed I agree with what you post entirely - merely that if I am correct in thinking they want to be able to take this device into the mountains of Africa or the deepest parts of the Amazon, there's a definite limit to what is even worth considering. There are very few signatures that would both be unique and passively detectable at a distance. The only logical approach is to enumerate the types of signature and cross them off when you can show them unworkable.
The only thing to consider is that it's got to be $10,000,000+ worth of unworkable. That makes things that are merely very very difficult a whole lot more plausible.
Every molecule has a unique absorption frequency. So long as you can identify what absorbption bands are present - very very accurately - you're 99% of the way there. The other 1% requires you to create a catalog of such frequencies by scanning pure samples of pathogens.
A second approach would require nanotech and would be extremely slow. Basically, the idea would be to build a device that mimics the cell's mechanism for reading DNA strands and to maintain some sort of internal state that acted in the manner of a cryptographic hash. Once it has calculated the hash, you'd need some way of reading the value. Not sure how you'd do that part, or how you'd even retrieve the device. But again you're getting a value and hunting through a dictionary to see if it is present. If it is, the pathogen is there. If it isn't, it isn't.
GENESIS is a neural net that simulates biological neural networks rather than comp-sci ones. It is also so horribly complex that they've rebuilt it from the ground up three times. If they now have to handle supernodes, active queue management and load balancing, they'll be on version 4 before 3 even gets past the alpha releases. This is not an insignificant change.
You are still ignoring my point (that what has been said is omitting details, and I want those details adequately explained, I don't CARE whose details, NOR do I care what the details show, only that they are there).
You question what I know but don't want to know what I know... right...
I've read the articles from the Hague, the Geneva Convention and the UN Charter of Human Rights. As you'd know, if you were a regular reader, as I used these extensively on the stories covering Manning.
I've read the US Constitution, the British Constitution (which the US stole for theirs), the Magna Carta, the Doom Book of Alfred the Great, the surviving laws of Æthelberht of Kent (c. 602 AD), Ine of Wessex (c. 694 AD) and Offa of Mercia (c. 786 AD), the Napoleonic system on which French law is based, and assorted other systems.
I don't sound honest? I don't sound like I want the answers? I hate to put it to you but only a moron would actually believe that. What's more, a moron who had never bothered to understand who he was replying to. If I ask a question, here, on K5, on the Grauniad website, or whatever, the question isn't rhetorical. It is because there is an unacceptable conflict and I want that conflict resolved.
If we were to go with your theory (which, frankly, must sound utterly deluded to anyone who does know me by even a few posts), you run into a problem almost immediately. The birther nutjobs wanted to "prove" a point about a specific person and would not accept evidence. I've left it 100% clear (a) it could be anyone in a very very long chain that has responsibility, and (b) that said responsibility was the RIGHT decision. Something your paranoid delusions cannot comprehend.
You seem to assume that someone wanting to have information is no different from someone wanting to abuse another. Well, the only one who could think that way is a person who is mentally sick beyond hope of recovery. I'll give you the opportunity to show you are not, but you only get the one. The right-wingers, the "blue dog" left, those "undecideds" who actually believed the birther nonsense, and anyone left over who believed Bush was being honest about an Iraq threat - they need to be placed in padded cells and left to rot. They ARE sick and there is no chance they could ever be treated.
I'm proposing that either he should have been taken alive by whatever means - peppersprays, those nice shiny microwave pain inducers the army likes to flaunt, a plastic bullet - he was point-blank, or a good, old-fashioned wallop to the head or we should be given honest, clear information as to why this could not be done.
I don't mind which. I don't care which. I do mind people people being "economical with the truth" (see: UK vs. Australia, Spycatcher saga) with the object of not permitting a fair and free discussion on what could be done.
And that is just it. I don't give a damn if you think killing him was right, wrong or indifferent. I do give a damn that you don't have a choice in what you think. You have been given a few selected facts that change on a regular basis. That's not giving you a choice of anything.
Is it so very wrong that I want you to be able to freely come to your own conclusions?
Ok, have him tried in Britain, where the law governing no second trials was abolished for serious offences for which further information came to light.
You may be 100% correct but there's still gaps in the chain of thinking and I abhor nothing more than incomplete reasoning being presented as truth. Remember, the very best way to lie is to tell carefully selected truths.
Why? I'd say thwacking him over the conk, dragging him to a ship and finally putting him in an isolated prison in the manner Rudolph Hess was, would essentially take the guy out of every loop that existed. For starters, even if he found a way to communicate with the outside (unlikely), there's no way that anyone could trust that the communications were from him.
Leave him in his fortress, but destroy all AV systems and turn it into a prison unto itself, nobody enters, nobody leaves. Pakistan remains oblivious to anything happening, aside from the support network OSL had which would then expose itself to the US.
So theoretical alternatives existed. Were they practical options? The SEALs know better than I and aren't saying. Were they permitted options? The President knows better than I and I don't believe what he's saying.
Although there are tactics in Israel I'm not keen on, that's a brilliant one for dealing with such cases. Was it an option in this case? I don't know. But if it was a possibility, it seems only fair to ask why it wasn't used. There may be an answer, a good precise answer. The question is whether such an answer will be given.
I can't tell you whether it's a good answer or a bad answer, or somewhere in between, until I hear it. And since that is unlikely to ever happen, I'm stuck with saying that I cannot accept that the decision was inevitable OR who made the decision inevitable, only that it was (at some point) inevitable and that we're not getting told who, where or why.
Sadly you are correct. It is why I like the British system where one house is (in theory) a meritocracy. It means you've people who can question dangerous decisions without fear of retaliation. It needs improvement, but the underlying concept is fairly sound.
First, I dislike killing of other people, period. War is inevitable, at least for now, but as Sun Tzu pointed out, the objective of war is to win. It is NOT to kill as many of your opponents as you can, NOR is it to destroy as much of their territory as you can. Sun Tzu was quite clear on that.
I have no beef with liberals. Republicans I loath and destest, and nationalists are the cockroaches of society.
Nor did I say anything bad about Obama. I said that whoever gave the order to kill OBL should be honest and upfront that they did so. I don't care who it is, I don't care what rank they are, I don't give a damn if the dog they took on that mission could talk and brainwashed them. I just want an HONEST account of what took place and an HONEST explanation of how OSL was expected to be able to surrender as per the Rules of Engagement. I'm not even saying that I would blame such a person. If the person came clean and explained the reasoning such that demonstrated that it was the only possible tactic given what was known in the circumstances, I would accept it 100%.
Y'see, unlike those who WANT to blame, I hate blaming. I detest blaming. I detest blaming as much as I detest smoke and mirror games. All I'm asking is that the smoke and mirrors go away. That is it.
No, it is NEVER a good thing that a person is killed. There are times when it is necessary, but only a fool confuses "necessary" for "good". In this case, OBL had become
No, "bad men" generally don't exist either. Some will be insane and need treatment. Some will be misinformed and fed half-truths for the purpose of embittering them. They need imprisonment under conditions that eliminate the toxic influences, plus therapy to counter the toxins in place. If the toxins can't be removed, then it needs to be life in prison.
Personal responsibility vs Collective responsibility? I reject both. Responsibility is bounded by your capacity to do something different and further bounded by your capacity to think of those things. Personal responsibility is almost never 100%, but then it's never 0% either. Neither of the quaint and rather trite terms used have any reality behind them. But in my way of thinking, there will be many, many others - more than a few on the American side - who have a significant percent of the guilt pie. But you're not dividing the pie, are you? You're way too scared of what that might mean.
Me? Finding negatives? Where? C'mon, be a man and say how me asking honest, sincere questions about where the chain of command gave the order to kill on sight can be a negative thing? Did I say that the President would be a bad man if he gave the order? Noooooo. I said that I'd want him to come clean. Not one iota of judgement there.
As far as Obama is concerned, I consider him an acceptable President, but I'd prefer him to be more socialist in principles. I'd also prefer him to stop negotiating with the mad hatters at the Tea Party. They don't want results, they want conflict. That doesn't make them bad people, merely sick.
Which boils down to what I was saying. Either the President lied about ordering his capture if possible or the army is lying in that all rules of engagement were followed. Can't have both.
I am not judging one way or the other the action of the SEALs. They did the job they were sent to do and the results were the only ones possible given the metholdology they were ordered to use.
My beef isn't with the outcome, at least not in this debate. In this debate, I'm focussed entirely on the issue that the collection of statements and evidence we have been given indicate that we aren't being told the parts of the story that matters: who made the decision to make surrender impossible? If it was from high-up, then I want the President to admit that NO order that permitted capture was given and to say why. If it was by the troops on the ground, I want an explanation as to why they believed it to be necessary, from them and no-one else.
In the case of the troops, they'd faced one armed person (everyone else in the building was unarmed) and he had been killed the moment the SEALs fired. There was no firefight. I'll accept - for now - that this may have been claimed through the fog of war. I'll also accept that the SEALs may well have expected a firefight at any moment, giving them an itchy trigger finger. I'll accept that when they found Bin Laden's room, they expected some sort of suicide system or for him to be armed. He hadn't and he wasn't.
But did the troops get a briefing that psyched them specifically to be so neurotic as to make any other results possible? Was the President's order phrased such that even if the SEALs were rational and calm, they had a Presidential command to kill this man? If they didn't get such a briefing and their orders WERE to try and capture Bin Laden, I want a full, workable explanation on how they would have carried it out.
This is the important part of the equation that most discussions totally miss out on. The rights and wrongs are incidental at this point, they have to be because we don't know whose rights and whose wrongs created the outcome. This is like blaming an illness on a fever. Until we have better information, blame needs to be thrown out the window.
Of course, half of what I'm insisting we should know is heavily classsified, the rest is even more heavily classified, mostly for operational reasons. That information won't be seen in 50 years, the US government has been heavily reluctant to declassify information over a hundred years old. (The CIA only just revealed that you could use lemon juice as a secret ink, and other World War I spy secrets.) It is possible won't ever be known.
Without it, though, we're copying the Charge of the Light Brigade - charging the heavily-armed, heavily-fortified walls of military procedure and military secrecy with a means that is neither appropriate nor intelligent.
A better solution would be a review board that is quasi-independent of not just the military but the government as well whose purvue would be to see such classified information and ensure that there's better accountability. The military are horribly reluctant (Tillman). Besides which, self-awareness is suicide on a battlefield. You don't have the time for that kind of analysis. Because of the way the system works, generals are under-trained on the nuances and long-term effects of their actions - again, a trait that is likely to ensure a soldier never lives to see that rank. A second pair of eyes that is sufficiently on the outside as to not be limited to a sole type of thinking (and also to not cause turf wars) and yet sufficiently on the inside to be able to reduce bogus public statements and possibly suugest bugfixes for mission plans... that could work.
It wouldn't be acceptable to the military, as it stands, the right-wing would consider it larger not smaller government, the left who like war don't want to see cleaner communication if it could damage their chances in elections, and the left who don't like war don't want to see war that is more ethical and better communicated as that could damage their position.
Yes, but how is that important? The question is not whether they had everyone, or even a majority, in positions of Total R&D. The question is surely whether those in such positions exhibited normal (or better) levels of distractability. The claim I'm arguing against states that it is the amount of grey matter, not the upbringing, social status, or wealth, that determines distractability, which means that those we do know about and are recorded should have exhibited this behaviour.
If, on the other hand, I am correct that restlessness is directly proportional to the difference between what brain power is available and what brain power is utilized, without regard to whether that is more than normal, less than normal, or purple, then you will find NO examples of those with Total R&D who showed the claimed restlessness. You will ALSO find examples of underemployed people, in all of history, who DO exhibit the claimed restlessness no matter what their intelligence or brain structure.
The idea that there's some unknown number of people who never got a chance to shine, whilst depressing, is so not the point. The point is whether the brain structure is a symptom of illness or whether it is society itself that is sick. Treating the wrong one could be disastrous.
There are believed to be links between autism and schizophrenia, you may well have made a discovery of what such links involve. I'm serious. Regardless, we see retention in grey matter, or even a sudden surge of growth, in any occupation requiring fantastic amounts of knowledge (such as London cab drivers, who have been studied extensively). I'm quite convinced the brain matter is harmless at worst, beneficial at best.
Brain rot has already been demonstrated to always apply to unused parts of the brain. If these people don't rot as much brain, it's because they're using more of it. This requires some link to learning skills requiring different parts of the brain and that is something uniquely done by the intelligent.
Far as I'm concerned, case closed.
I would regard the ideal as to have no brain rot at all. Indeed, I've posted a few times on that subject on Slashdot. It should be possible to teach someone such a range of skills that all the brain is utilized and nothing is there to decay.
Would this be useful? Those with less brain rot are proven already to delay dementia in direct proportion to the reduction in decay. That, alone, should be sufficient.
However, I'll also throw in that some neurological conditions, such as the speech loss suffered by Scott Adams, can be treated by bypassing the affected area. This is only possible when there's some spare capacity somewhere you can bypass through.
For good measure, I'll add that those with less decayed brains will be able to learn better (albiet not by a vast amount) than those with "normal" brains in adulthood. The adult brain forms connections, but far fewer of them and far more slowly. The latency of the neural connections won't change, but the number that can be formed will increase. Greater bandwidth, rather than lower latency.
And finally, if the NAGC had been teaching ADHD kids, I'd have noticed as ADHD couldn't have been solved by merely making the challenges harder. If anything, you'd expect the results to be far worse. This was not the realirt of the situation. Ergo, ADHD is not involved, by proof of absence.
No, it could equally well prove the claim that retension of grey matter is a product of how much you learn. Autistic people lack filters to select what they learn, so learn far far more. The volume of information is overwhelming. Thus more grey matter. The grey matter is thus a mere side-effect and not causal of the condition or any other condition.
That fact (or legitimate trials) plus negotiations in good faith produced Stormont. Not the ideal parliament, perhaps, but a magnificent testament to what can be achieved by taking the right risks.
Ignoring the legalities of what you're saying (because that won't get anyone anywhere), what you are saying is that the President lied when he said there were no orders to kill Bin Laden. Orders can be implicit as well as explicit, but we'll go with your scenario that they were very explicit indeed. Since he couldn't have known in advance that the door was going to get kicked in, and since no general giving orders was likely to have taken chances on him not having a concealed detonation device, what you are saying is that the orders were indeed to kill him on sight and to not take him alive. There's simply no other way to read your post.
I am not saying here whether I agree or disagree with that decision, tactically, legally, politically or by any other measure. What I am saying is that I find the idea of concealing any such order in order to avoid tactical, legal, political or other consequence, to be highly denigrating and insulting to both the office of the President and to the US itself. If the highest in the land is not willing to face up to their own actions and take full responsibility for them, publicly and honestly, what chance those who model themselves after the nation's selected role-model?
If, on the other hand, NO such order was given, implicitly OR explicitly, by the President or any person of appropriate authority beneath him, I would want a full, honest, complete and realistic account of how the soldiers would have accepted a surrender or affected a capture of any kind.
In other words, someone is not taking full responsibility. I don't care whom, I don't care why. These are adults, they should be expected to behave like adults. (Ok, they should behave like society asks adults to behave, as we all know that no adult ever actually does and that lying, cheating and swindling are indeed indicators of behaving like adults actually behave.)
The evidence gathered by the NAGC (and as a former teacher for them I can say I saw this in person) is that certainly for hyper-intelligent children if you give them challenges relative to their intelligence they are NOT more easily distracted. In fact, I observed the opposite. They demonstrate a focus that is awe-inspiring. The evidence for adults is much slimmer, but I'd argue that there's no reason to assume that adult brains would be significantly different.
Sadly, the Humanties are often not taught or not taught very well. Back when I were a lad (y'know, when the Dark Satanic Mills still loomed large) the school I was at taught Greek, Roman, Norse, Egyptian, Christian and Buddhist mythologies. It was a very respectable, fairly well-rounded collection. If I were to design such a course today, I'd probably want to substitute the Roman system for something else, get better global coverage, and I'd probably swap Christianity for Sumerian/Akkadian religion as Judeo-Christian traditions can be derived from Greek, Akkadian and Egyptian. There's no need to include derivatives if you've covered the fundamentals (so to speak).
Private schools may be permitted to teach anything, but Federal accreditation should insist on absolutely the highest possible standards and integrity. In other words, no Federally-funded university or other institution should recognize a malpracticing school or any award given by them.
In Britain, this was actually done in practice for some time. The universities associated with the JMB insisted on firm evidence of matriculation in certain subjects and if your school didn't meet their standards you had to sit the necessary matriculation exams to prove core competencies at sufficient level. Further, all universities were entitled to place whatever requirements they liked on any individual's exam results, so if your exam board was recognized but not regarded very highly they'd simply shift the entrance requirements accordingly. It worked extremely well. (Oxford and Cambridge even had their own independent entrance exams, in conjunction with the standard exam requirements.)
The problem lies with absolute standardization, which is absolute folly. To the greatest extent that is humanly possible, each student with their own specific background and their own specific skills should be looked at as an individual and assessed as such.
How does this affect the evolution battle? Well, if the rest of America basically told extremist schools that, personal beliefs aside, they either accept and follow the minimum standards required or go jump in a lake, the schools would have no choice. Private schools aren't cheap and if the students were absolutely guaranteed to never be employed or employable, enough parents would back down to make the schools completely uneconomic if they maintained their fanatical approach.
I dunno. Texas' education board seems to be making it easy to find specimins of Cro Magnon, which is exactly what you want in a classroom for teaching evolution.
HIV is notoriously fragile. It's impressive it doesn't fall apart when a victim sneezes. This is a good thing, because if it could survive under a wider range of conditions we'd be in far worse trouble.
15 min warming at 65'C indicates that the researchers are talking about colagulation of the protein in at least some of the cases. Since colagulation is reversible, I would require firm evidence that decolagulation doesn't revive the virus. If it does, then the heating does not kill the virus, it merely puts it into a possibly temporary state where it is not harmful. If the conditions needed for decolagulation can arise in the production of a vaccine, in transit or in the human body, impermanent deactivation would give you live virus. The problem, of course, is that a vaccine is only useful if it can train the immune system into responding to an actual attack. If you damage the virus too much, the body will learn nothing.
Going back to the example of HIV, we can see that inactivation isn't all it is cracked up to be - HIV is notorious for re-activating itself after being deactivated, which is why vaccines have proven so very difficult to produce. Clearly, if HIV can reactivate itself, many existing deactivation techniques must be reversible by one mechanism or another. It makes no difference how HIV performs the reversal, what matters is that a biochemical process exists that would permit a supposedly inactive virus to become wholly active. And if it's reversible, even if the virus can't do it itself, then the virus isn't dead.
This doesn't mean you shouldn't get vaccines. Clearly, reactivation is sufficiently rare that the chances of harm from existing vaccines are not meaningful. My issue is not with the vaccines but with the claim that the virus is dead. In some cases, it will indeed be dead. The DNA or RNA may be damaged in some way that still permits the human immune system to learn but makes reactivation impossible. Corruption of the epigenome could have the same result. In cases where the protein coating has to have very specific qualities that can't be restored by unbinding water molecules or other trivial transforms, you again can treat the virus as dead.
Retroviruses are likely to be the big nasties, as they interact directly with cellular DNA rather than hijack other cell mechanisms. This means that deactivating the free virus form will only take you so far. If any cell infected by the virus survives, the virus won't be affected no matter how well the free-floating form has been stopped. Worse, the free-floating form won't need anything complicated outside of the DNA/RNA core to be able to infect a cell. Complicated mechanisms tend to be much easier to break than simple ones. We know from "fossil" viruses in the human genome being reactivated that once a cell has been contaminated, a virus can remain reactivatable so long as the cell survives. And, as shown, there are cells that can survive some amazing conditions.
Now, it is certainly true that there are exceedingly few retroviruses that can jump species and none that I know of that can attack both extremophiles and humans. Well, not naturally, though it's very likely some idiot of a geneticist will eventually figure out a way to embed a human retrovirus into an extremophile. That's not likely to happen in the near future, though. I'm much more concerned with the fact that there are a-priori assumptions being made about viruses where there is strong evidence that these assumptions are not only unfounded but definitively false except in special cases.
The virologists are likely far more aware than I am of all the nuances and implications, and have likely been designing experiments, tests and equipment accordingly. The did, after all, spot the reactivation of HIV rather than assume it wouldn't happen. It's the doctors who, quite frankly, have much less knowledge on such subjects and very high pressures on time and budgets, that are a concern. They're going to cut corners. We already know they do. Nurses have even greater pr
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Good, an intelligent reply. Those're getting rarer these days.
It is a very hard problem, though it's a very common technique in optical and radio astronomy for determining the gasses in a remote planetary atmosphere. Mind you, you're talking serious compute power and serious observatories. It's unlikely your system, for example, could boast a sensor the size of the Lovell radio telescope.
It's not entirely correct to say that the problem is intractible - there will be a finite dictionary that you need to look through, where you can rule out any candidate when too many bits of the spectrum that should be absorbed aren't (experimental error means you can't depend on just one). However, it would be fair to say that it's very very very close to being intractible.
Mind you, we already know that. They'd hardly be offer ten mil for a junior high science project.
Nonetheless, if what is wanted is a medical tricorder type of device (ie: a hand-held remote sensor, not a directly interacting one) that is trying to observe molecules, your options are limited. Yes, they say "portable" and technically that would include anything you could pack into a 65,000 lb. bundle that'll fit into a truck. However, I'm assuming that this device is intended for remote jungles or mountainous terrain where you can't just take the patient to a fixed diagnostic center instead. I also assume they want a lower risk to the patient than standard medical appliances, which means it has to emit less radiation than a CAT scan.
That pretty much rules out NMR, or blasting the patient with ultra-pure x-rays from a synchotron. In fact, it pretty much eliminates any active device whatsoever, since it's no use having a 5 lb. tricorder that needs a 5 gigawatt power station.
So the requirement is basically for a hand-held passive remote sensor that can detect molecules. Not necessarily perfectly, just better than a doctor could with an agar plate, a microscope and other common household appliances.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2153218&cid=36123084#
I'm not saying you're wrong - indeed I agree with what you post entirely - merely that if I am correct in thinking they want to be able to take this device into the mountains of Africa or the deepest parts of the Amazon, there's a definite limit to what is even worth considering. There are very few signatures that would both be unique and passively detectable at a distance. The only logical approach is to enumerate the types of signature and cross them off when you can show them unworkable.
The only thing to consider is that it's got to be $10,000,000+ worth of unworkable. That makes things that are merely very very difficult a whole lot more plausible.
....to use /dev/urandom rather than the built-in rand() function?
Every molecule has a unique absorption frequency. So long as you can identify what absorbption bands are present - very very accurately - you're 99% of the way there. The other 1% requires you to create a catalog of such frequencies by scanning pure samples of pathogens.
A second approach would require nanotech and would be extremely slow. Basically, the idea would be to build a device that mimics the cell's mechanism for reading DNA strands and to maintain some sort of internal state that acted in the manner of a cryptographic hash. Once it has calculated the hash, you'd need some way of reading the value. Not sure how you'd do that part, or how you'd even retrieve the device. But again you're getting a value and hunting through a dictionary to see if it is present. If it is, the pathogen is there. If it isn't, it isn't.
GENESIS is a neural net that simulates biological neural networks rather than comp-sci ones. It is also so horribly complex that they've rebuilt it from the ground up three times. If they now have to handle supernodes, active queue management and load balancing, they'll be on version 4 before 3 even gets past the alpha releases. This is not an insignificant change.
You are still ignoring my point (that what has been said is omitting details, and I want those details adequately explained, I don't CARE whose details, NOR do I care what the details show, only that they are there).
You question what I know but don't want to know what I know... right...
Ok, you're a troll. Debate closed.
I've read the articles from the Hague, the Geneva Convention and the UN Charter of Human Rights. As you'd know, if you were a regular reader, as I used these extensively on the stories covering Manning.
I've read the US Constitution, the British Constitution (which the US stole for theirs), the Magna Carta, the Doom Book of Alfred the Great, the surviving laws of Æthelberht of Kent (c. 602 AD), Ine of Wessex (c. 694 AD) and Offa of Mercia (c. 786 AD), the Napoleonic system on which French law is based, and assorted other systems.
I don't sound honest? I don't sound like I want the answers? I hate to put it to you but only a moron would actually believe that. What's more, a moron who had never bothered to understand who he was replying to. If I ask a question, here, on K5, on the Grauniad website, or whatever, the question isn't rhetorical. It is because there is an unacceptable conflict and I want that conflict resolved.
If we were to go with your theory (which, frankly, must sound utterly deluded to anyone who does know me by even a few posts), you run into a problem almost immediately. The birther nutjobs wanted to "prove" a point about a specific person and would not accept evidence. I've left it 100% clear (a) it could be anyone in a very very long chain that has responsibility, and (b) that said responsibility was the RIGHT decision. Something your paranoid delusions cannot comprehend.
You seem to assume that someone wanting to have information is no different from someone wanting to abuse another. Well, the only one who could think that way is a person who is mentally sick beyond hope of recovery. I'll give you the opportunity to show you are not, but you only get the one. The right-wingers, the "blue dog" left, those "undecideds" who actually believed the birther nonsense, and anyone left over who believed Bush was being honest about an Iraq threat - they need to be placed in padded cells and left to rot. They ARE sick and there is no chance they could ever be treated.
I'm proposing that either he should have been taken alive by whatever means - peppersprays, those nice shiny microwave pain inducers the army likes to flaunt, a plastic bullet - he was point-blank, or a good, old-fashioned wallop to the head or we should be given honest, clear information as to why this could not be done.
I don't mind which. I don't care which. I do mind people people being "economical with the truth" (see: UK vs. Australia, Spycatcher saga) with the object of not permitting a fair and free discussion on what could be done.
And that is just it. I don't give a damn if you think killing him was right, wrong or indifferent. I do give a damn that you don't have a choice in what you think. You have been given a few selected facts that change on a regular basis. That's not giving you a choice of anything.
Is it so very wrong that I want you to be able to freely come to your own conclusions?
Ok, have him tried in Britain, where the law governing no second trials was abolished for serious offences for which further information came to light.
You may be 100% correct but there's still gaps in the chain of thinking and I abhor nothing more than incomplete reasoning being presented as truth. Remember, the very best way to lie is to tell carefully selected truths.
Why? I'd say thwacking him over the conk, dragging him to a ship and finally putting him in an isolated prison in the manner Rudolph Hess was, would essentially take the guy out of every loop that existed. For starters, even if he found a way to communicate with the outside (unlikely), there's no way that anyone could trust that the communications were from him.
Leave him in his fortress, but destroy all AV systems and turn it into a prison unto itself, nobody enters, nobody leaves. Pakistan remains oblivious to anything happening, aside from the support network OSL had which would then expose itself to the US.
So theoretical alternatives existed. Were they practical options? The SEALs know better than I and aren't saying. Were they permitted options? The President knows better than I and I don't believe what he's saying.
Although there are tactics in Israel I'm not keen on, that's a brilliant one for dealing with such cases. Was it an option in this case? I don't know. But if it was a possibility, it seems only fair to ask why it wasn't used. There may be an answer, a good precise answer. The question is whether such an answer will be given.
I can't tell you whether it's a good answer or a bad answer, or somewhere in between, until I hear it. And since that is unlikely to ever happen, I'm stuck with saying that I cannot accept that the decision was inevitable OR who made the decision inevitable, only that it was (at some point) inevitable and that we're not getting told who, where or why.
Sadly you are correct. It is why I like the British system where one house is (in theory) a meritocracy. It means you've people who can question dangerous decisions without fear of retaliation. It needs improvement, but the underlying concept is fairly sound.
First, I dislike killing of other people, period. War is inevitable, at least for now, but as Sun Tzu pointed out, the objective of war is to win. It is NOT to kill as many of your opponents as you can, NOR is it to destroy as much of their territory as you can. Sun Tzu was quite clear on that.
I have no beef with liberals. Republicans I loath and destest, and nationalists are the cockroaches of society.
Nor did I say anything bad about Obama. I said that whoever gave the order to kill OBL should be honest and upfront that they did so. I don't care who it is, I don't care what rank they are, I don't give a damn if the dog they took on that mission could talk and brainwashed them. I just want an HONEST account of what took place and an HONEST explanation of how OSL was expected to be able to surrender as per the Rules of Engagement. I'm not even saying that I would blame such a person. If the person came clean and explained the reasoning such that demonstrated that it was the only possible tactic given what was known in the circumstances, I would accept it 100%.
Y'see, unlike those who WANT to blame, I hate blaming. I detest blaming. I detest blaming as much as I detest smoke and mirror games. All I'm asking is that the smoke and mirrors go away. That is it.
No, it is NEVER a good thing that a person is killed. There are times when it is necessary, but only a fool confuses "necessary" for "good". In this case, OBL had become
No, "bad men" generally don't exist either. Some will be insane and need treatment. Some will be misinformed and fed half-truths for the purpose of embittering them. They need imprisonment under conditions that eliminate the toxic influences, plus therapy to counter the toxins in place. If the toxins can't be removed, then it needs to be life in prison.
Personal responsibility vs Collective responsibility? I reject both. Responsibility is bounded by your capacity to do something different and further bounded by your capacity to think of those things. Personal responsibility is almost never 100%, but then it's never 0% either. Neither of the quaint and rather trite terms used have any reality behind them. But in my way of thinking, there will be many, many others - more than a few on the American side - who have a significant percent of the guilt pie. But you're not dividing the pie, are you? You're way too scared of what that might mean.
Me? Finding negatives? Where? C'mon, be a man and say how me asking honest, sincere questions about where the chain of command gave the order to kill on sight can be a negative thing? Did I say that the President would be a bad man if he gave the order? Noooooo. I said that I'd want him to come clean. Not one iota of judgement there.
As far as Obama is concerned, I consider him an acceptable President, but I'd prefer him to be more socialist in principles. I'd also prefer him to stop negotiating with the mad hatters at the Tea Party. They don't want results, they want conflict. That doesn't make them bad people, merely sick.
Which boils down to what I was saying. Either the President lied about ordering his capture if possible or the army is lying in that all rules of engagement were followed. Can't have both.
I am not judging one way or the other the action of the SEALs. They did the job they were sent to do and the results were the only ones possible given the metholdology they were ordered to use.
My beef isn't with the outcome, at least not in this debate. In this debate, I'm focussed entirely on the issue that the collection of statements and evidence we have been given indicate that we aren't being told the parts of the story that matters: who made the decision to make surrender impossible? If it was from high-up, then I want the President to admit that NO order that permitted capture was given and to say why. If it was by the troops on the ground, I want an explanation as to why they believed it to be necessary, from them and no-one else.
In the case of the troops, they'd faced one armed person (everyone else in the building was unarmed) and he had been killed the moment the SEALs fired. There was no firefight. I'll accept - for now - that this may have been claimed through the fog of war. I'll also accept that the SEALs may well have expected a firefight at any moment, giving them an itchy trigger finger. I'll accept that when they found Bin Laden's room, they expected some sort of suicide system or for him to be armed. He hadn't and he wasn't.
But did the troops get a briefing that psyched them specifically to be so neurotic as to make any other results possible? Was the President's order phrased such that even if the SEALs were rational and calm, they had a Presidential command to kill this man? If they didn't get such a briefing and their orders WERE to try and capture Bin Laden, I want a full, workable explanation on how they would have carried it out.
This is the important part of the equation that most discussions totally miss out on. The rights and wrongs are incidental at this point, they have to be because we don't know whose rights and whose wrongs created the outcome. This is like blaming an illness on a fever. Until we have better information, blame needs to be thrown out the window.
Of course, half of what I'm insisting we should know is heavily classsified, the rest is even more heavily classified, mostly for operational reasons. That information won't be seen in 50 years, the US government has been heavily reluctant to declassify information over a hundred years old. (The CIA only just revealed that you could use lemon juice as a secret ink, and other World War I spy secrets.) It is possible won't ever be known.
Without it, though, we're copying the Charge of the Light Brigade - charging the heavily-armed, heavily-fortified walls of military procedure and military secrecy with a means that is neither appropriate nor intelligent.
A better solution would be a review board that is quasi-independent of not just the military but the government as well whose purvue would be to see such classified information and ensure that there's better accountability. The military are horribly reluctant (Tillman). Besides which, self-awareness is suicide on a battlefield. You don't have the time for that kind of analysis. Because of the way the system works, generals are under-trained on the nuances and long-term effects of their actions - again, a trait that is likely to ensure a soldier never lives to see that rank. A second pair of eyes that is sufficiently on the outside as to not be limited to a sole type of thinking (and also to not cause turf wars) and yet sufficiently on the inside to be able to reduce bogus public statements and possibly suugest bugfixes for mission plans... that could work.
It wouldn't be acceptable to the military, as it stands, the right-wing would consider it larger not smaller government, the left who like war don't want to see cleaner communication if it could damage their chances in elections, and the left who don't like war don't want to see war that is more ethical and better communicated as that could damage their position.
Yes, but how is that important? The question is not whether they had everyone, or even a majority, in positions of Total R&D. The question is surely whether those in such positions exhibited normal (or better) levels of distractability. The claim I'm arguing against states that it is the amount of grey matter, not the upbringing, social status, or wealth, that determines distractability, which means that those we do know about and are recorded should have exhibited this behaviour.
If, on the other hand, I am correct that restlessness is directly proportional to the difference between what brain power is available and what brain power is utilized, without regard to whether that is more than normal, less than normal, or purple, then you will find NO examples of those with Total R&D who showed the claimed restlessness. You will ALSO find examples of underemployed people, in all of history, who DO exhibit the claimed restlessness no matter what their intelligence or brain structure.
The idea that there's some unknown number of people who never got a chance to shine, whilst depressing, is so not the point. The point is whether the brain structure is a symptom of illness or whether it is society itself that is sick. Treating the wrong one could be disastrous.
There are believed to be links between autism and schizophrenia, you may well have made a discovery of what such links involve. I'm serious. Regardless, we see retention in grey matter, or even a sudden surge of growth, in any occupation requiring fantastic amounts of knowledge (such as London cab drivers, who have been studied extensively). I'm quite convinced the brain matter is harmless at worst, beneficial at best.
Brain rot has already been demonstrated to always apply to unused parts of the brain. If these people don't rot as much brain, it's because they're using more of it. This requires some link to learning skills requiring different parts of the brain and that is something uniquely done by the intelligent.
Far as I'm concerned, case closed.
I would regard the ideal as to have no brain rot at all. Indeed, I've posted a few times on that subject on Slashdot. It should be possible to teach someone such a range of skills that all the brain is utilized and nothing is there to decay.
Would this be useful? Those with less brain rot are proven already to delay dementia in direct proportion to the reduction in decay. That, alone, should be sufficient.
However, I'll also throw in that some neurological conditions, such as the speech loss suffered by Scott Adams, can be treated by bypassing the affected area. This is only possible when there's some spare capacity somewhere you can bypass through.
For good measure, I'll add that those with less decayed brains will be able to learn better (albiet not by a vast amount) than those with "normal" brains in adulthood. The adult brain forms connections, but far fewer of them and far more slowly. The latency of the neural connections won't change, but the number that can be formed will increase. Greater bandwidth, rather than lower latency.
And finally, if the NAGC had been teaching ADHD kids, I'd have noticed as ADHD couldn't have been solved by merely making the challenges harder. If anything, you'd expect the results to be far worse. This was not the realirt of the situation. Ergo, ADHD is not involved, by proof of absence.
No, it could equally well prove the claim that retension of grey matter is a product of how much you learn. Autistic people lack filters to select what they learn, so learn far far more. The volume of information is overwhelming. Thus more grey matter. The grey matter is thus a mere side-effect and not causal of the condition or any other condition.
Stealth helicopters might well have been modified to be quiet, and for all I know he was in the homemade studio and studios are soundproofed.
That fact (or legitimate trials) plus negotiations in good faith produced Stormont. Not the ideal parliament, perhaps, but a magnificent testament to what can be achieved by taking the right risks.
Ignoring the legalities of what you're saying (because that won't get anyone anywhere), what you are saying is that the President lied when he said there were no orders to kill Bin Laden. Orders can be implicit as well as explicit, but we'll go with your scenario that they were very explicit indeed. Since he couldn't have known in advance that the door was going to get kicked in, and since no general giving orders was likely to have taken chances on him not having a concealed detonation device, what you are saying is that the orders were indeed to kill him on sight and to not take him alive. There's simply no other way to read your post.
I am not saying here whether I agree or disagree with that decision, tactically, legally, politically or by any other measure. What I am saying is that I find the idea of concealing any such order in order to avoid tactical, legal, political or other consequence, to be highly denigrating and insulting to both the office of the President and to the US itself. If the highest in the land is not willing to face up to their own actions and take full responsibility for them, publicly and honestly, what chance those who model themselves after the nation's selected role-model?
If, on the other hand, NO such order was given, implicitly OR explicitly, by the President or any person of appropriate authority beneath him, I would want a full, honest, complete and realistic account of how the soldiers would have accepted a surrender or affected a capture of any kind.
In other words, someone is not taking full responsibility. I don't care whom, I don't care why. These are adults, they should be expected to behave like adults. (Ok, they should behave like society asks adults to behave, as we all know that no adult ever actually does and that lying, cheating and swindling are indeed indicators of behaving like adults actually behave.)
The evidence gathered by the NAGC (and as a former teacher for them I can say I saw this in person) is that certainly for hyper-intelligent children if you give them challenges relative to their intelligence they are NOT more easily distracted. In fact, I observed the opposite. They demonstrate a focus that is awe-inspiring. The evidence for adults is much slimmer, but I'd argue that there's no reason to assume that adult brains would be significantly different.
Sadly, the Humanties are often not taught or not taught very well. Back when I were a lad (y'know, when the Dark Satanic Mills still loomed large) the school I was at taught Greek, Roman, Norse, Egyptian, Christian and Buddhist mythologies. It was a very respectable, fairly well-rounded collection. If I were to design such a course today, I'd probably want to substitute the Roman system for something else, get better global coverage, and I'd probably swap Christianity for Sumerian/Akkadian religion as Judeo-Christian traditions can be derived from Greek, Akkadian and Egyptian. There's no need to include derivatives if you've covered the fundamentals (so to speak).
Private schools may be permitted to teach anything, but Federal accreditation should insist on absolutely the highest possible standards and integrity. In other words, no Federally-funded university or other institution should recognize a malpracticing school or any award given by them.
In Britain, this was actually done in practice for some time. The universities associated with the JMB insisted on firm evidence of matriculation in certain subjects and if your school didn't meet their standards you had to sit the necessary matriculation exams to prove core competencies at sufficient level. Further, all universities were entitled to place whatever requirements they liked on any individual's exam results, so if your exam board was recognized but not regarded very highly they'd simply shift the entrance requirements accordingly. It worked extremely well. (Oxford and Cambridge even had their own independent entrance exams, in conjunction with the standard exam requirements.)
The problem lies with absolute standardization, which is absolute folly. To the greatest extent that is humanly possible, each student with their own specific background and their own specific skills should be looked at as an individual and assessed as such.
How does this affect the evolution battle? Well, if the rest of America basically told extremist schools that, personal beliefs aside, they either accept and follow the minimum standards required or go jump in a lake, the schools would have no choice. Private schools aren't cheap and if the students were absolutely guaranteed to never be employed or employable, enough parents would back down to make the schools completely uneconomic if they maintained their fanatical approach.
I dunno. Texas' education board seems to be making it easy to find specimins of Cro Magnon, which is exactly what you want in a classroom for teaching evolution.
HIV is notoriously fragile. It's impressive it doesn't fall apart when a victim sneezes. This is a good thing, because if it could survive under a wider range of conditions we'd be in far worse trouble.
15 min warming at 65'C indicates that the researchers are talking about colagulation of the protein in at least some of the cases. Since colagulation is reversible, I would require firm evidence that decolagulation doesn't revive the virus. If it does, then the heating does not kill the virus, it merely puts it into a possibly temporary state where it is not harmful. If the conditions needed for decolagulation can arise in the production of a vaccine, in transit or in the human body, impermanent deactivation would give you live virus. The problem, of course, is that a vaccine is only useful if it can train the immune system into responding to an actual attack. If you damage the virus too much, the body will learn nothing.
Going back to the example of HIV, we can see that inactivation isn't all it is cracked up to be - HIV is notorious for re-activating itself after being deactivated, which is why vaccines have proven so very difficult to produce. Clearly, if HIV can reactivate itself, many existing deactivation techniques must be reversible by one mechanism or another. It makes no difference how HIV performs the reversal, what matters is that a biochemical process exists that would permit a supposedly inactive virus to become wholly active. And if it's reversible, even if the virus can't do it itself, then the virus isn't dead.
This doesn't mean you shouldn't get vaccines. Clearly, reactivation is sufficiently rare that the chances of harm from existing vaccines are not meaningful. My issue is not with the vaccines but with the claim that the virus is dead. In some cases, it will indeed be dead. The DNA or RNA may be damaged in some way that still permits the human immune system to learn but makes reactivation impossible. Corruption of the epigenome could have the same result. In cases where the protein coating has to have very specific qualities that can't be restored by unbinding water molecules or other trivial transforms, you again can treat the virus as dead.
Retroviruses are likely to be the big nasties, as they interact directly with cellular DNA rather than hijack other cell mechanisms. This means that deactivating the free virus form will only take you so far. If any cell infected by the virus survives, the virus won't be affected no matter how well the free-floating form has been stopped. Worse, the free-floating form won't need anything complicated outside of the DNA/RNA core to be able to infect a cell. Complicated mechanisms tend to be much easier to break than simple ones. We know from "fossil" viruses in the human genome being reactivated that once a cell has been contaminated, a virus can remain reactivatable so long as the cell survives. And, as shown, there are cells that can survive some amazing conditions.
Now, it is certainly true that there are exceedingly few retroviruses that can jump species and none that I know of that can attack both extremophiles and humans. Well, not naturally, though it's very likely some idiot of a geneticist will eventually figure out a way to embed a human retrovirus into an extremophile. That's not likely to happen in the near future, though. I'm much more concerned with the fact that there are a-priori assumptions being made about viruses where there is strong evidence that these assumptions are not only unfounded but definitively false except in special cases.
The virologists are likely far more aware than I am of all the nuances and implications, and have likely been designing experiments, tests and equipment accordingly. The did, after all, spot the reactivation of HIV rather than assume it wouldn't happen. It's the doctors who, quite frankly, have much less knowledge on such subjects and very high pressures on time and budgets, that are a concern. They're going to cut corners. We already know they do. Nurses have even greater pr