The progress of the human race has long been dominated by the top X%, where "X" is some rather small number. Much of the rest, in progress terms, have mostly just come along for the ride.
(Which doesn't mean they are necessarily useless; anybody who, like me, doesn't want to be a garbage man, sewer man, or janitor should have great respect for those who are. I mean that, literally. But there is a definite distinction between those who are doing real work for the team, and those slacking off. It's hard to tell if more people are slacking off ("dead-weight manager", I like that phrase!), or if they are just getting louder and better funded.)
In copyrights I imagine that they have some sort of measurement for when a new work is derivative of an old one.
No. They use sourcing, and sourcing alone. A derivative work is literally what that word means, a work derived from another.
If you produce a work that happens to be similar to another, but can prove you've never even seen it (removing the possibility of deriving anything), then you will also have a copyright. There is a famous, and old, case of two musicians coming up with the same tune, and the court finally found they both have a copyright on it.
The reason distance is a factor is a practical one, not a legal one. Copyrights are civil issues, not criminal, so you don't have the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard. If you wrote a book that was just like a Grisham novel except for a few words, even if you really did just write the book that way without ever seeing Grisham's, you're going to have a hard time convincing a court that you didn't just copy Grisham's book, as by far the more likely case is that you did. Proving you did not see something is quite tough.
Distance is a sufficient, but not necessary, proof that you did not derive, so generally speaking it is worth trying to stay away from the work of others; fortunately for very large works like novels or programs that is very easy. For jingles, it can be very hard.
It is interesting to consider how this applies to smells. I won't try to lay it out, since I don't think there is one true answer under the current system. (I'm not a pure cynic but it is difficult to deny the trend of "protect the ones with money" and sometimes that means the decision changes based on which big company brings the first suit.)
almost instantly, water would be expelled from the other end.
You can quantify that better. It basically travels at the speed of sound in the medium, because it uses the same forces that sound does.
This is also the solution to the relativity paradox, "What if I take an infinitely rigid rod and tap it on one end, causing the other end to instantly vibrate, with the tap exceeding the speed of light?" The answer is that in this universe, no such infinitely rigid rod is possible; the maximum speed possible is still the speed of light.
This also implies that fluidic computing will always be slower than electronics, because the fundmental speed is orders of magnitudes slower. Which doesn't mean it is useless, I'm just killing two birds with one stone here, showing why this is no threat to electronics:-)
If we're going to argue against patents, then let's see the evidence that they actually choked-off innovation;
It isn't stopping me, but it does scare me. I'm trying to get into the billing software industry, and hoping and praying that the industry doesn't have any patents to speak of, but who knows?
To the extent I control the company's purse (not the only owner), I'm going to want to build up a war chest much sooner than I should have to under normal circumstances, because who knows what shit some other company might try to throw at me? This will inhibit the growth of the company. Did you see the article a couple of days back about the company just making random infringement claims on companies building open source software?
Now, the obvious counter is that I just feel scared and you might think to assure me that I am not threatened. But the real threat level doesn't matter. If I feel threatened, that is enough to stifle innovation, and a more timid person might just give up in advance. The atmosphere is a sufficient argument.
Try again. I didn't offer any advice. I pointed out the arguments were logically fallacious and physically impossible.
You, apparently, are one of the many people so set in their ways that they read everything into their own black and white viewpoint, even when it really makes no sense at all, like you just did. You should consider if this is causing you to miss out on an entire dimension of discourse that you are currently unaware of, in this case including simple logic.
Again: Don't be surprised if this fails to convince me of anything, including the value of signing, or fails to move me at all. In fact, it tends to re-inforce my perception that Kyoto is like the Patriot act, wrapping itself in environmentalism instead of patriotism, but the same basic levels of effectiveness and true underlying purposes entirely orthogonal to the claimed ones.
The environment is too important to think with your heart. Try using your head, it is much more effective.
Yes, it is easy to postulate yourself into a wonderland when your second step is equivalent to "And then we do the physically impossible."
Also your alternative is wrong. We are not in a black and white "Kyoto or die!" situation. Far, far from it.
When these are the best arguments, physical impossibilities and bog-standard logical fallacies, you should not be surprised that you fail to convince people.
Actually, I would argue that your definitions are still quite vague.
Damn straight they're vague, because I know that if I try to nail it down in the next post you'll go all "Oh, I don't know about that detail, and isn't that a little racist, and" pickity poke poke poke, all dancing around the fundamental point that such people exist. You can define and classify all you want, but they exist, they act, they live. No, I can't give you a name of a random militant in Iraq for you to dither on whether or not he really hates our freedom or if he was just a poor, misguided soul taken in by a strong-minded Mullah, but it really doesn't matter.
You can't nitpick these people out of existance. Somebody toppled the World Trade Center, and that is hate. I'll be the first to say classification is useful, but to insist on extraneous detail so you can poke at it until you find something that allows you to dismiss it and makes you feel comfortable again is sheer intellectual dishonesty. (Yeah, I'm extrapolating a bit here but I'm pretty confident about it.)
The only "laser protective eyewear" that could exist that would be effective against all wavelengths of visible light (don't miss that clause!) would be a full camera-feeding-LCD-eyepiece setup. Anything less must leave a wavelength unabsorbed, because fully absorbtive is black. You can then make a laser that matches that wavelength and shine it right through. This works because the LCD may even completely saturate but it still won't burn any eyes. However, at this point, the word "eyewear" really isn't applicable anymore, and it would have other major problems at this time as well, namely not matching the resolution the human eye is capable of, and piloting is like the canonical example of a person who needs their full eye's resolving power.
In other words, "laser protective eyewear" is a myth made up by an idiotic Slashdot article submitter (as GP poster said, it doesn't exist in the article). Therefore, using it as a (sarcastic, no less!) argument merely shows your comprehension of high-school physics is as weak as the article submitters. It is you who doesn't know what they are talking about, albeit aided and abetted by stormfish, the submitter.
Radical Muslims, the ones training the suicide bombers (although not always the bombers themselves) hate us because we do not live under Sharia, and are therefore worthy of death. I'd say this qualifies as "hate".
Sharia is an extremely restrictive set of rules, especially for women, but probably nearly every person reading this would fall afoul of some major part of it or other. If you'd like to learn more about Sharia, Google is that-a-way.
If you seriously doubt that "they hate our freedom" for some suitable definition of "they" (and for damn near any definition of "freedom"!), you are far, far more out of touch then either of the candidates. If you are just making the point that this would be an interesting question, I agree that a clear answer would be very interesting, but unfortunately politicians are trained to avoid giving clear answers.
(To preempt the obvious psuedo-rebuttal, what to do about the fact that there are people who hate our freedom is another entirely seperate and valid topic of debate. That does not change the empirical fact that such people exist and really do hate us and our freedom... although their stated reasons are not always their real reasons. In fact there are several reasons; for my example "precisely reasoned argument" I submit a basic human emotion: jealousy. It isn't the only argument, but it is a sufficient one.)
Finally, I doubt there's any Americans on Slashdot who haven't made up their minds who to vote for (For those of you who haven't, what rock have you been living under?). Therefore, I think it's worth asking questions about non election-deciding issues to get an insight into where the mainstream of both parties are on them.
Ah, now that is a point worth making. (To counter my response to the first reply.)
Upon reflection, I still think it is a marginal issue, but good argument.
Wake up! The president has a huge influence over isses that they don't directly rule on.
No shit, Sherlock. It is also no shit, Sherlock, that they have much more influence over things they do directly rule on. Much, much, much more. This is a marginal issue not worth wasting a valuable question on. Observing that the value is not zero, which is all you did, proves nothing about the relative value of the question, and that's the entire point of this little exercise.
OK, maybe there is some value to breaking the questions down like that, but if ever there was a time that we needed a cap much larger than 5, this posting is it.
(Or perhaps re-post all the +5 questions, with a post that doesn't have the +5 limit.)
Outlawing Alcohol didn't require an amendment, just as the proposed Family whatchamacallit act to define "family" doesn't. The point was that by putting it in the Constitution that it would be extremely difficult to slap down. Which is also the point of the Family amendment.
It's like a law on Steroids. And that's why the Founding Fathers set the bar high for them; the 18th amendment is the clearest example of abuse in an otherwise fairly tolerable history (unless you semi-religiously believe that the Fed has no grounds to collect income tax:-) ).
I disagree with the 5 rating on this (as I write it). Who cares what the President thinks of this? Changing our voting system would require a Constitutional amendment (at least for the Presidency), and if I recall correctly, under no scenario does the President have anything to do with that, just State legislators and Congress.
As fascinating as this question is, why not ask questions that actually reflect how the candidates will be in office?
Overpopulation is largely a bugaboo. Birth rates are dropping in the industrialized world and the sprawl is growing due to immigration and a real estate bubble which makes development far more lucrative than it should be, the latter of which will be popping anytime soon. This is a great 1970s question; this question is less relevant in the 2000s, where the growth rate is slowing and population projections for 20 years down the road seem to drop every year.
Also, Go West, My Son, and talk to me about overpopulation. Be sure to keep the gas tank more than half full, you never know where the next gas station is.
Oh, this one I'd like to see. It is a clear, short question and it will be obvious if they weasel. Which they both will, but something interesting may yet come of the answer.
Read this question out loud to yourself, slowly and clearly. It took me a full minute. Too long.
It's getting modded as a troll, which may be unfair; that may be a reflection of the way it spends too much time leading the witness, so to speak. Yes, I assure you, both candidates will promise you anything you want after asking a question like that, and the 15 trillion I spend will be better spent than the 15 trillion the other guy would spend.
Drop the first part of the question. All it will draw are generic homilies about the importance of IP, how wonderfully innovative Americans are, and how Americans will be more innovative with me than the other guy.
Specificity doesn't guarentee answers, but it makes evasion more obvious and sometimes that's all you can hope for.
However people who spout this act like you can't tamper with physical records. You can.
No, people who "spout" this think that it is much harder to systematically tamper with physical records than electronic records, and that this fact shows no signs of becoming less true any time soon.
Moreover, auditable electronic voting combines many of the nice parts of electronic voting with all of the nice parts of physical voting.
I think us "physically auditable voting"-type folks understand what is going on; it is exactly that understanding that has us calling for the hybrid, best-of-both-worlds solution, instead of the "God only knows what happened for sure" world of electronic-only voting.
I always felt that the need for the electoral college was to prevent the candidates from only campaigning in large cities where they would get the most bang for their buck.
Another major advantage of the Electoral college was to keep the choas isolated to Florida. Imagine a close election without the Electoral college. Now you've got all fifty states counting and recounting and getting the various Supreme Courts involved and bogging down the news media until someone with a direct neural tap couldn't keep up with even the summaries of the news.
I will never support a voting system that does not manage to isolate voting irregularities like the electoral college, or better. It only sounds irrelevant because you've never had to live through an election failure of this magnitude, and you can't adequately internalize and imagine it.
(Note that here I am defending the Electoral College as a structural system for collating votes by state; to date I see no reason to elect voters to then cast their vote at the physical college meeting, which may change their mind and thereby disenfranchise an entire district. One person really shouldn't have that power.)
Heh, have you tried the computer version of Survivor? (Links to the reviews page on GameFAQs. Yeah, that may not be the best but the opinions there are numerous and representative.)
My mother-in-law got it for my wife. It is one of only two games to enter my residence and never be installed; the other is Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic which I purchased on the cheap last week (before it disappeared) and is awaiting a computer that can actually run it. Crap-tastic. Survivor, that is, not KOTOR.
They artificially constructed a 'storyline' in which the woman got to show as many emotions as possible, and due to the lack of a talented writer they ended up with nonsense and kitsch galore.
Ah. That explains it. Thank goodness I'm not the only one who thought the entire scenario was so contrived as to be pointless. In fact I was kind of hoping the main char would hurry up and off herself by the middle; if I had known how much longer the movie would take I would have simply deleted it then.
Normally when faced with stuff like that I try to analyse it as art, but the piece just defied me. I couldn't find any lesson, any moral, any philosophy, hell, any logic. "An excuse to show as many emotions as possible" does seem the best fit I've seen to date.
With all the people lauding it I was thought it likely I was missing something; guess not.
Slashdot Mirror
The progress of the human race has long been dominated by the top X%, where "X" is some rather small number. Much of the rest, in progress terms, have mostly just come along for the ride.
(Which doesn't mean they are necessarily useless; anybody who, like me, doesn't want to be a garbage man, sewer man, or janitor should have great respect for those who are. I mean that, literally. But there is a definite distinction between those who are doing real work for the team, and those slacking off. It's hard to tell if more people are slacking off ("dead-weight manager", I like that phrase!), or if they are just getting louder and better funded.)
In copyrights I imagine that they have some sort of measurement for when a new work is derivative of an old one.
No. They use sourcing, and sourcing alone. A derivative work is literally what that word means, a work derived from another.
If you produce a work that happens to be similar to another, but can prove you've never even seen it (removing the possibility of deriving anything), then you will also have a copyright. There is a famous, and old, case of two musicians coming up with the same tune, and the court finally found they both have a copyright on it.
The reason distance is a factor is a practical one, not a legal one. Copyrights are civil issues, not criminal, so you don't have the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard. If you wrote a book that was just like a Grisham novel except for a few words, even if you really did just write the book that way without ever seeing Grisham's, you're going to have a hard time convincing a court that you didn't just copy Grisham's book, as by far the more likely case is that you did. Proving you did not see something is quite tough.
Distance is a sufficient, but not necessary, proof that you did not derive, so generally speaking it is worth trying to stay away from the work of others; fortunately for very large works like novels or programs that is very easy. For jingles, it can be very hard.
It is interesting to consider how this applies to smells. I won't try to lay it out, since I don't think there is one true answer under the current system. (I'm not a pure cynic but it is difficult to deny the trend of "protect the ones with money" and sometimes that means the decision changes based on which big company brings the first suit.)
almost instantly, water would be expelled from the other end.
:-)
You can quantify that better. It basically travels at the speed of sound in the medium, because it uses the same forces that sound does.
This is also the solution to the relativity paradox, "What if I take an infinitely rigid rod and tap it on one end, causing the other end to instantly vibrate, with the tap exceeding the speed of light?" The answer is that in this universe, no such infinitely rigid rod is possible; the maximum speed possible is still the speed of light.
This also implies that fluidic computing will always be slower than electronics, because the fundmental speed is orders of magnitudes slower. Which doesn't mean it is useless, I'm just killing two birds with one stone here, showing why this is no threat to electronics
If we're going to argue against patents, then let's see the evidence that they actually choked-off innovation;
It isn't stopping me, but it does scare me. I'm trying to get into the billing software industry, and hoping and praying that the industry doesn't have any patents to speak of, but who knows?
To the extent I control the company's purse (not the only owner), I'm going to want to build up a war chest much sooner than I should have to under normal circumstances, because who knows what shit some other company might try to throw at me? This will inhibit the growth of the company. Did you see the article a couple of days back about the company just making random infringement claims on companies building open source software?
Now, the obvious counter is that I just feel scared and you might think to assure me that I am not threatened. But the real threat level doesn't matter. If I feel threatened, that is enough to stifle innovation, and a more timid person might just give up in advance. The atmosphere is a sufficient argument.
I have to ask: Does it work, or just make you feel better? :-)
Looks like they won't be suing me for running UCSD's p-code interpreter on my Apple ][ way back when.
Which obliquely brings up a point worth thinking about. Patents are just now expiring from 17 years ago... that's 1987.
Aren't we all glad those are finally free?
Yeesh.
Lead by example, not hypocrisy.
"Hypocracy" means saying one thing and doing another. Using it as a label is a sign of weak thinking.
So, tell me: When did the US Military tell people that nobody should think about how to take down satellites?
If you can't answer that... and you can't... it is not hypocracy. It may be other things but that isn't it.
Try again. I didn't offer any advice. I pointed out the arguments were logically fallacious and physically impossible.
You, apparently, are one of the many people so set in their ways that they read everything into their own black and white viewpoint, even when it really makes no sense at all, like you just did. You should consider if this is causing you to miss out on an entire dimension of discourse that you are currently unaware of, in this case including simple logic.
Again: Don't be surprised if this fails to convince me of anything, including the value of signing, or fails to move me at all. In fact, it tends to re-inforce my perception that Kyoto is like the Patriot act, wrapping itself in environmentalism instead of patriotism, but the same basic levels of effectiveness and true underlying purposes entirely orthogonal to the claimed ones.
The environment is too important to think with your heart. Try using your head, it is much more effective.
Yes, it is easy to postulate yourself into a wonderland when your second step is equivalent to "And then we do the physically impossible."
Also your alternative is wrong. We are not in a black and white "Kyoto or die!" situation. Far, far from it.
When these are the best arguments, physical impossibilities and bog-standard logical fallacies, you should not be surprised that you fail to convince people.
Actually, I would argue that your definitions are still quite vague.
Damn straight they're vague, because I know that if I try to nail it down in the next post you'll go all "Oh, I don't know about that detail, and isn't that a little racist, and" pickity poke poke poke, all dancing around the fundamental point that such people exist. You can define and classify all you want, but they exist, they act, they live. No, I can't give you a name of a random militant in Iraq for you to dither on whether or not he really hates our freedom or if he was just a poor, misguided soul taken in by a strong-minded Mullah, but it really doesn't matter.
You can't nitpick these people out of existance. Somebody toppled the World Trade Center, and that is hate. I'll be the first to say classification is useful, but to insist on extraneous detail so you can poke at it until you find something that allows you to dismiss it and makes you feel comfortable again is sheer intellectual dishonesty. (Yeah, I'm extrapolating a bit here but I'm pretty confident about it.)
The only "laser protective eyewear" that could exist that would be effective against all wavelengths of visible light (don't miss that clause!) would be a full camera-feeding-LCD-eyepiece setup. Anything less must leave a wavelength unabsorbed, because fully absorbtive is black. You can then make a laser that matches that wavelength and shine it right through. This works because the LCD may even completely saturate but it still won't burn any eyes. However, at this point, the word "eyewear" really isn't applicable anymore, and it would have other major problems at this time as well, namely not matching the resolution the human eye is capable of, and piloting is like the canonical example of a person who needs their full eye's resolving power.
In other words, "laser protective eyewear" is a myth made up by an idiotic Slashdot article submitter (as GP poster said, it doesn't exist in the article). Therefore, using it as a (sarcastic, no less!) argument merely shows your comprehension of high-school physics is as weak as the article submitters. It is you who doesn't know what they are talking about, albeit aided and abetted by stormfish, the submitter.
Radical Muslims, the ones training the suicide bombers (although not always the bombers themselves) hate us because we do not live under Sharia, and are therefore worthy of death. I'd say this qualifies as "hate".
Sharia is an extremely restrictive set of rules, especially for women, but probably nearly every person reading this would fall afoul of some major part of it or other. If you'd like to learn more about Sharia, Google is that-a-way.
If you seriously doubt that "they hate our freedom" for some suitable definition of "they" (and for damn near any definition of "freedom"!), you are far, far more out of touch then either of the candidates. If you are just making the point that this would be an interesting question, I agree that a clear answer would be very interesting, but unfortunately politicians are trained to avoid giving clear answers.
(To preempt the obvious psuedo-rebuttal, what to do about the fact that there are people who hate our freedom is another entirely seperate and valid topic of debate. That does not change the empirical fact that such people exist and really do hate us and our freedom... although their stated reasons are not always their real reasons. In fact there are several reasons; for my example "precisely reasoned argument" I submit a basic human emotion: jealousy. It isn't the only argument, but it is a sufficient one.)
Finally, I doubt there's any Americans on Slashdot who haven't made up their minds who to vote for (For those of you who haven't, what rock have you been living under?). Therefore, I think it's worth asking questions about non election-deciding issues to get an insight into where the mainstream of both parties are on them.
Ah, now that is a point worth making. (To counter my response to the first reply.)
Upon reflection, I still think it is a marginal issue, but good argument.
Wake up! The president has a huge influence over isses that they don't directly rule on.
No shit, Sherlock. It is also no shit, Sherlock, that they have much more influence over things they do directly rule on. Much, much, much more. This is a marginal issue not worth wasting a valuable question on. Observing that the value is not zero, which is all you did, proves nothing about the relative value of the question, and that's the entire point of this little exercise.
Get some context.
? #1: Score +5, Interesting
? #2: Score +5, Interesting
? #3: Score +5, Interesting
? #4: Score -1, Troll
? #5: Score +5, Interesting
? #6: Score +5, Interesting
OK, maybe there is some value to breaking the questions down like that, but if ever there was a time that we needed a cap much larger than 5, this posting is it.
(Or perhaps re-post all the +5 questions, with a post that doesn't have the +5 limit.)
Outlawing Alcohol didn't require an amendment, just as the proposed Family whatchamacallit act to define "family" doesn't. The point was that by putting it in the Constitution that it would be extremely difficult to slap down. Which is also the point of the Family amendment.
:-) ).
It's like a law on Steroids. And that's why the Founding Fathers set the bar high for them; the 18th amendment is the clearest example of abuse in an otherwise fairly tolerable history (unless you semi-religiously believe that the Fed has no grounds to collect income tax
I disagree with the 5 rating on this (as I write it). Who cares what the President thinks of this? Changing our voting system would require a Constitutional amendment (at least for the Presidency), and if I recall correctly, under no scenario does the President have anything to do with that, just State legislators and Congress.
As fascinating as this question is, why not ask questions that actually reflect how the candidates will be in office?
Overpopulation is largely a bugaboo. Birth rates are dropping in the industrialized world and the sprawl is growing due to immigration and a real estate bubble which makes development far more lucrative than it should be, the latter of which will be popping anytime soon. This is a great 1970s question; this question is less relevant in the 2000s, where the growth rate is slowing and population projections for 20 years down the road seem to drop every year.
Also, Go West, My Son, and talk to me about overpopulation. Be sure to keep the gas tank more than half full, you never know where the next gas station is.
Oh, this one I'd like to see. It is a clear, short question and it will be obvious if they weasel. Which they both will, but something interesting may yet come of the answer.
Read this question out loud to yourself, slowly and clearly. It took me a full minute. Too long.
It's getting modded as a troll, which may be unfair; that may be a reflection of the way it spends too much time leading the witness, so to speak. Yes, I assure you, both candidates will promise you anything you want after asking a question like that, and the 15 trillion I spend will be better spent than the 15 trillion the other guy would spend.
Drop the first part of the question. All it will draw are generic homilies about the importance of IP, how wonderfully innovative Americans are, and how Americans will be more innovative with me than the other guy.
Specificity doesn't guarentee answers, but it makes evasion more obvious and sometimes that's all you can hope for.
However people who spout this act like you can't tamper with physical records. You can.
No, people who "spout" this think that it is much harder to systematically tamper with physical records than electronic records, and that this fact shows no signs of becoming less true any time soon.
Moreover, auditable electronic voting combines many of the nice parts of electronic voting with all of the nice parts of physical voting.
I think us "physically auditable voting"-type folks understand what is going on; it is exactly that understanding that has us calling for the hybrid, best-of-both-worlds solution, instead of the "God only knows what happened for sure" world of electronic-only voting.
I always felt that the need for the electoral college was to prevent the candidates from only campaigning in large cities where they would get the most bang for their buck.
Another major advantage of the Electoral college was to keep the choas isolated to Florida. Imagine a close election without the Electoral college. Now you've got all fifty states counting and recounting and getting the various Supreme Courts involved and bogging down the news media until someone with a direct neural tap couldn't keep up with even the summaries of the news.
I will never support a voting system that does not manage to isolate voting irregularities like the electoral college, or better. It only sounds irrelevant because you've never had to live through an election failure of this magnitude, and you can't adequately internalize and imagine it.
(Note that here I am defending the Electoral College as a structural system for collating votes by state; to date I see no reason to elect voters to then cast their vote at the physical college meeting, which may change their mind and thereby disenfranchise an entire district. One person really shouldn't have that power.)
Heh, have you tried the computer version of Survivor? (Links to the reviews page on GameFAQs. Yeah, that may not be the best but the opinions there are numerous and representative.)
My mother-in-law got it for my wife. It is one of only two games to enter my residence and never be installed; the other is Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic which I purchased on the cheap last week (before it disappeared) and is awaiting a computer that can actually run it. Crap-tastic. Survivor, that is, not KOTOR.
They artificially constructed a 'storyline' in which the woman got to show as many emotions as possible, and due to the lack of a talented writer they ended up with nonsense and kitsch galore.
Ah. That explains it. Thank goodness I'm not the only one who thought the entire scenario was so contrived as to be pointless. In fact I was kind of hoping the main char would hurry up and off herself by the middle; if I had known how much longer the movie would take I would have simply deleted it then.
Normally when faced with stuff like that I try to analyse it as art, but the piece just defied me. I couldn't find any lesson, any moral, any philosophy, hell, any logic. "An excuse to show as many emotions as possible" does seem the best fit I've seen to date.
With all the people lauding it I was thought it likely I was missing something; guess not.