A page from the OED is a great contrary example - have a look...
I don't find a page, then read the whole thing from the first line - there are all kinds of cues (font, font size, colour, indentation) to the ability to read across a document, rather than linearly through it. I go back and forth over these structures within a page, not just to get there.
Christ Almighty, try to understand the greater meaning of my point rather than fixating on the literal meaning of my specific choice of words. When I used the word page, it was not to imply that once we reach the "page" level of organization, we start reading linearly. I used that word because it was a convenient point of similar terminology between encyclopedias and web sites. I shouldn't have to, but I will explain the point I was trying to make: Once you have found the what you are searching for (the encyclopedia entry, the web article, the OED entry, etc.) you start reading in the classic linear, serial fashion. This is the way human language works.
Powersats? Don't tell me , something along the lines of beaming down
megawatts of microwave power thats been a staple of bad science fiction
for years? Couple of minor points - A) Rather dangerous to anyone
or anything who accidentaly gets under the beam or if the beam shifts
due to faults on the satellite
You know, any orbital power station is going to be a little more sophisticated than a raw firehose of energy blasting earthwards. There are dozens of ways you can build the system such that, were the reciver and transmitter to become misaligned, the power would shut down immediatly. Trotting out the "it'll go crazy and fry people at random!" argument makes one look highly ignorant.
and B) you can generate the power on
the ground anyway , so why bother?
Exactly. A well-designed fission plant is a far more practical approach. Stick with that argument. Stay away from the "robot run amok" hysteria one.
"Written text has the very interesting property of linearity, which matches it to the linear processing of spoken discourse, for which we have hardwired functions in brain. How could you "improve" on that?"
When you start to read the WWW, do you start with TBL's original pages? No, hypertext is something different... so why should this only apply (inadequately) between documents, and not within them?
Because at some point you have to start feeding the brain information in the linear, spoken format it's designed to interpret. Linking and indexing is great for finding information, but not so good for consuming it. When you find the page you're looking for in the encyclopedia or on the web, you stop dealing with indices and hyperlinks, and start reading linearly. That's where the real gruntwork of information comprehension happens. There's no mystical transcendent mode of "uber-literacy" that allows one to absorb information better than the linear, serial way around which our human languages are designed, and for which we have trained ourselves to process since birth.
Make the people in charge look like fools that cannot keep something as simple as say an internet
I have highlighted the major flaw in your reasoning above for your convenience.
You make those people wonder about stuff like that, they'll get scared.
Scared? Unlikely. Try "angry". Fear of death is the top fear. One random bomb on a SUBWAY will strike fear in the hearts of most subway riders for months after. An internet attack would have people pissed off at the tier 1 carriers and the government. What is there to fear? Most people remember life before the internet, and they remember that they didn't DIE from the lack of it.
It was just a throwaway comment, like "stand up to the Man." The Man's everywhere, and everywhere there's the phone, there's Ma Bell. Don't freak out about it.
Throwaway or not, it's still stupid. Ma Bell isn't a generic term for phone companies, it's the nickname of "Bell Telephone" AKA the old pre-1984 AT&T. It's as ignorant and lame as calling the shell on a Linux box "MS-DOS".
Take Two Interactive now owns all rights to the game series and fortunately, the franchise is still a mainstay at Firaxis...so we feel pretty protective of the IP.
Apparently, Take Two also owns all rights to the Sid Meier's Personal Opinion franchise.
He's probably in an awkward position. He likely is heartened that his game concepts inspire others to produce similar (but not as interesting) variants, but has likely been warned by lawyers in the past not to make even the slightest remark that might be interpretted as condoning it, just in case it somehow ends up in court.
The scary thing is it makes you wonder is some terrorist who has intimate knowledge of how Tier 1 ISP's work doing a trial run in the middle of the night by knocking out Level 3 and Verio backbones so later they could try to knock out ALL the backbones in a co-ordinated terrorist attack. (eek!)
Oh please. You know, it's pretty easy to figure out if it's something likely to be attempted by terrorists or not. The simple test is does it cause mass "terror". As annoying as it might be, lack of internet access is an annoyance. Perhaps a very expensive and exasperating annoyance, but it won't cause mass terror. Terrorists prefer things like bombs, or poison gas, or disease. Some other things people get worked up about but terrorists are unlikely to attempt: sabotaging bridges and tunnels to cause traffic jams; sabotaging electricity distribution to cause blackouts; sabotaging railroad tracks, making commuters late for work!. Think DEATH, not irritation. Quit with the automatic "terrorist hysteria" already, people!
It wasn't me, but some people refuse to mod funny because the poster gets no karma for it.
That's why you get underrated, insightful, interesting, etc on funny posts lately.
I do that when I mod as well, only I've actually read the pull down menu contents and only use +1 - Underrated instead of something else that doesn't fit. This is the preferred way to bestow karma upon a funny poster. It preserves the "Funny" from previous mods (and also doesn't show up in meta moderation...)
We have satellites orbiting Earth that can read the numbers on a license plate and they can't get a good shot of the lander?
I always get a laugh out of this assertion, because it's provably false regardless of the quality of the cameras. Orbital imaging sats take pics when they are as close as possible to the target and have the least amount of atmospheric interference-- i.e. when they are directly overhead or as close as they can get to directly overhead. Even if the satellites had fine enough resolution to read detail at the sub-centimetric level, they still wouldn't be able to read a metal plate mounted vertically on the front or rear of a car!
Actually, natural gas is already being used to fuel cars. Out here in Vegas, many taxicabs use natural gas for fuel. I'm not sure where they get it as I haven't seen a commercial fueling station for them but I assume that they have their own fueling areas for when they need to fill up.
Fleet vehicles generally have their own pump operated and maintained by the company that runs the fleet. Public CNG fillup stations are usually regarded as a bad idea due to the obvious danger of trusting Joe Sixpack and his 90 IQ with compressed flammable gas. Gasoline is bad enough and it's a non-explosive liquid at room temperature.
Heh. Man, do I hate that show. The "secret shuttle" thing is what finally got me banned from the living room while my wife watches it. Apparently some people would rather just watch a ludicrous program unfold rather than listen to an enumeration of lazy, inexcusable, glaring errors committed by writers who apparently can't even be bothered to do a Google search!
Curiously I am entirely unfamiliar with the
Superman mythos
The first superman movie with Christpher Reeve hadd Lex Luthor plotting to get rich by 1) buying cheap inland desert property, 2) hacking into SAC and launching a nuke at the San Andreas Fault, thereby 3) triggering "the big one" which 4) would cause half of California to "fall into the ocean". The scheme was successful, but was "undone" by Superman turning the earth backwards to reverse time and fix everything. Even by comic book standards this was pretty weak story.
I am however living in California and I have
seen plenty of talk about a major earthquake
and how it could cause a tsunami and wipe
out most stuff to the south of Mojave.
Such talk is nonsense. Most of the Los Angeles basin is well above 150' elevation. A 60' surge would wreck a lot of beachfront and beach-adjacent construction, but that's all. There are no less than THREE mountain ranges between Mojave and the coast. Whoever said that doesn't know anything about the local geography or tsunamis.
.In any
case, I was just giving a hypothetical
example.
I guess examples don't work for some people.
Sorry. I'm some nut who likes hypothetical things to by possible. Fairies, the Easter Bunny, and California falling into the ocean are just too fanciful for me to take seriously.
I guess examples don't work for some people.
Let's generalise. A large complex structure
is vulnerable to:
1. Geological changes - earthquakes etc.
2. Climate changes - imagine Nevada become hurricane land or tornado land
3. Planetary-scale changes - e.g. major meteor hit
4. Man-made changes - wars, looting, etc.
5. Erosion
6. Wildlife infestation
The list goes on.
Indeed, I totally agree with you there. Man's struggle to make a permanent mark upon the world is an age-old folly. Heck, we have entire religions (Buddhism) based on accepting the impermanence of everything!
Here's one scenario: Californian earthquake, major parts of California
break off and fall into the ocean,
My god, did you get your education solely from Superman movies? The eastern edge of the pacific plate is not going to "break off". It is moving in a general northwesterly direction and eventually (in perhaps a quarter million years) a slice of western California will separate from the north american plate and water will fill behind it. NOTE: this will happen gradually; in fact, it'll happen so slow that no one will notice. So quit buying desert real estate like Lex Luthor waiting for "the big one" to turn it into beach front property.
estoppel - A bar which precludes someone from denying the truth of a fact which has been determined in an official proceeding or by an authoritative body. An estopple arises when someone has done some act which the policy of the law will not permit her to deny.
In other words, the court would rule "yep, you said it, and you can't deny it".
The problem with people like you, however, is that you so quickly flip-flop when the parents do try and monitor/control their kids behaviour. It's people like you who scream "1984!" at any suggestion of a GPS-enabled cell phone that parents can track, or RFID school passes that make sure kids are in class, or any other tools created to help parents do exactly what you (at least for now) are demanding parents do.
Well adjusted, responsibly parented children don't need ridiculously invasive tracking schemes. Such "solutions" are a weak band-aid attempt to address the issue of insufficient parental involvement. Is a child who doesn't skip school simply because he knows he'll get caught really the same as a student who doesn't skip school because his parents impressed upon him the improtance of education? Fitting children with sophisticated equivalents of radio collars only suppresses the symptom that is truancy, without addressing the real root problem. It's not a flip-flop. It's a perfectly consistent position.
To address your "proof", offered in another post, that it's the same people claiming both things: unless you have been tracking usernames and tallying positions, that's not proof at all. People in an uproar over something they find outrageous will always out-post those that are in the "it's fine by me-- who cares?" camp. Your assumption that all people post equally to all stories regardless of their opinion is puzzling.
You write:
Thompson resorted to mere name-calling when he couldn't win his argument.
Then:
What a fucking moron.
IMO you need to work on your consistency.
Your opinion is unsupported by the circumstances. Thompson declared that the reasoned and rational argument coming from his opponent was invalid simply because his opponent was a child. This type of behavior is perfectly reasonable grounds upon which to conclude that Thompson is indeed a fucking moron. Note that OP was talking about name-calling as a response to rational debate, not all of name-calling in general.
See, banks aren't just a big company that you trust, but are subject to strict government regulations _and_ backing. You essentially don't even have to trust your bank, because there's a whole legal framework that's not only there to kick them in the teeth if they tried to run away with it, but also to make sure that you _will_ get your money back. From your government, if all else fails.
By comparison, PayPal is... what?
I don't know where people got the idea that PayPal was anything like a bank in the first place. They're more like a bare-bones cheap credit card processing service. You'd get the same lack of service and callous disregard for your money from those "$25/mo plus 5% of each transaction" card processing folks. Buyer disputes a charge? You're mostly SOL! If you want good service as a merchant, you gotta pay for it. Get a decent payment processing service. If you're so bent on accepting paypal, find a service provider like Andale who will middleman it for you.
How about a new exhaust system that complies with his state's new emissions law?
FWIW, you don't have to comply with any emissions regs beyond what was required at the time the vehicle was sold. Changing the engine doesn't change the year of manufacture of the car.
Yeah, I know. Totally irrelevant tangent. I am, however, one of those nutcases who put a subaru engine in a VW Vanagon....
For you, and people that agree with you, I suggest visiting www.infowars.com
Oh, please. infowars.com is a classic example of hysterical paranoia. They parrot the standard unrealistic assumptions I already addressed above. I quote:
Echelon monitors every phone conversation, every fax, and every email on the planet, encrypted or not. It provides intelligence analysts with audio recordings and printed transcripts of communications containing certain keywords. A real life example of the intrusiveness of Echelon is the mother who, speaking on the phone with a friend, gave her assessment of her son's performance in the school play she had just attended. Within hours, the transcript of her private conversation was handed over to an investigator because of her comment, "He bombed."
Notice how they fail to consider the staggeringly unrealistic amount of analyst manpower it would take to go over every telephone utterance of such a mundane phrase as "he bombed". Notice also how the anecdotal story is completely devoid of detail, such as names, dates, and (most importantly) how it is they know that an investigator for such a super-secret program had a transcript!
It's bollocks, dude. There's a thin veneer of truth over all that stuff, but beneath that it's wholly paranoid fantasy.
The name of the game is "Petals Around the Rose", not "Petals of the Rose".
Indeed, the first time it was presented to me it was erroneously calledd "petals on the rose" by the presenter. After I puzzled over it for a while, someone else came over and said "ah, the old Petals Around the Rose puzzle". It annoyed me because the real clue that is in the name is the word AROUND. As soon as I heard that word and realized the puzzle was about something with a CENTER, it was obvious. The famous story about Bill Gates notes that he probably had more difficulty because, as indicated by a program he wrote to calculate the score, he thought it was called "PEDALS Around the Rose".
Anyone know what ever happened to the ECHELON project, which is a system intended to monitor literally every piece of human communication on the planet and mine it for analysis later?
Paranoid nutcases with little knowledge of basic electronic intelligence strategy have flooded the internet with hysterical rants and lunatic ravings about ECHELON. It's almost always traceable to a specific error in reading comprehension, i.e. the failure to distinguish between "capable of monitoring any communication" and "capable of monitoring all communication". The former is true. The latter is not. There does not exist enough electronic analytical capacity to monitor all communications. Anyone who has worked in electronic intelligence knows that one of the primary focuses is tasking: knowing when and where to apply limited collection resources. 99.99% of the electronic communication in the world is inconsequential chatter, and is very easily identifiable as such. NEWS FLASH! The NSA knows your 90 year old grandmother's phone calls aren't worth listening to, so they don't! I speak from experience as a former Signal Intelligence Analyst with the US Army-- they spend most of their time trying to RDUCED the amount of stuff they have to analyze. Really, the theory of "ECHELON listens to everything, all the time" fails the common sense test on so many levels, it boggles the mind why anyone would take it seriously. So the computer flags (say) every utterance of the word "bomb" and "embassy" or some such, eh? Well THEN what? Who goes through the enormous daily log of such flagged conversations? The obvious answer is that they cut down the log by not bothering to monitor communications between irrelevant parties. The tin foil hat crowd thinks the government is listening to them, when the truth is the government doesn't give a shit about them because they don't matter.
I personally like the petals of the rose
Bill Gates is said to have solved the problem by memorizing the combinations first, the brute force approach.
It ones of those that requires a knack for seeing the simple things
I wonder which name for it is the "true name"? I've heard it called both "Petals on the Rose" and "Petals around the Rose". I've always thought that "around" was more of a hint (almost a dead giveaway, even) than "on".
Slashdot Mirror
Christ Almighty, try to understand the greater meaning of my point rather than fixating on the literal meaning of my specific choice of words. When I used the word page, it was not to imply that once we reach the "page" level of organization, we start reading linearly. I used that word because it was a convenient point of similar terminology between encyclopedias and web sites. I shouldn't have to, but I will explain the point I was trying to make: Once you have found the what you are searching for (the encyclopedia entry, the web article, the OED entry, etc.) you start reading in the classic linear, serial fashion. This is the way human language works.
You know, any orbital power station is going to be a little more sophisticated than a raw firehose of energy blasting earthwards. There are dozens of ways you can build the system such that, were the reciver and transmitter to become misaligned, the power would shut down immediatly. Trotting out the "it'll go crazy and fry people at random!" argument makes one look highly ignorant.
and B) you can generate the power on the ground anyway , so why bother?
Exactly. A well-designed fission plant is a far more practical approach. Stick with that argument. Stay away from the "robot run amok" hysteria one.
When you start to read the WWW, do you start with TBL's original pages? No, hypertext is something different... so why should this only apply (inadequately) between documents, and not within them?
Because at some point you have to start feeding the brain information in the linear, spoken format it's designed to interpret. Linking and indexing is great for finding information, but not so good for consuming it. When you find the page you're looking for in the encyclopedia or on the web, you stop dealing with indices and hyperlinks, and start reading linearly. That's where the real gruntwork of information comprehension happens. There's no mystical transcendent mode of "uber-literacy" that allows one to absorb information better than the linear, serial way around which our human languages are designed, and for which we have trained ourselves to process since birth.
I have highlighted the major flaw in your reasoning above for your convenience.
You make those people wonder about stuff like that, they'll get scared.
Scared? Unlikely. Try "angry". Fear of death is the top fear. One random bomb on a SUBWAY will strike fear in the hearts of most subway riders for months after. An internet attack would have people pissed off at the tier 1 carriers and the government. What is there to fear? Most people remember life before the internet, and they remember that they didn't DIE from the lack of it.
Throwaway or not, it's still stupid. Ma Bell isn't a generic term for phone companies, it's the nickname of "Bell Telephone" AKA the old pre-1984 AT&T. It's as ignorant and lame as calling the shell on a Linux box "MS-DOS".
Apparently, Take Two also owns all rights to the Sid Meier's Personal Opinion franchise.
He's probably in an awkward position. He likely is heartened that his game concepts inspire others to produce similar (but not as interesting) variants, but has likely been warned by lawyers in the past not to make even the slightest remark that might be interpretted as condoning it, just in case it somehow ends up in court.
Oh please. You know, it's pretty easy to figure out if it's something likely to be attempted by terrorists or not. The simple test is does it cause mass "terror". As annoying as it might be, lack of internet access is an annoyance. Perhaps a very expensive and exasperating annoyance, but it won't cause mass terror. Terrorists prefer things like bombs, or poison gas, or disease. Some other things people get worked up about but terrorists are unlikely to attempt: sabotaging bridges and tunnels to cause traffic jams; sabotaging electricity distribution to cause blackouts; sabotaging railroad tracks, making commuters late for work!. Think DEATH, not irritation. Quit with the automatic "terrorist hysteria" already, people!
True. I guess it's only "preferred" in the limited sense that it generates no negative feedback, e.g. "+1 insightful? WTF?" posts.
Mine is to mod something ridiculous as 'insightful', every now and then. It tends to add to the joke :)
Good point. Those can indeed be most humorous. :)
I do that when I mod as well, only I've actually read the pull down menu contents and only use +1 - Underrated instead of something else that doesn't fit. This is the preferred way to bestow karma upon a funny poster. It preserves the "Funny" from previous mods (and also doesn't show up in meta moderation...)
I always get a laugh out of this assertion, because it's provably false regardless of the quality of the cameras. Orbital imaging sats take pics when they are as close as possible to the target and have the least amount of atmospheric interference-- i.e. when they are directly overhead or as close as they can get to directly overhead. Even if the satellites had fine enough resolution to read detail at the sub-centimetric level, they still wouldn't be able to read a metal plate mounted vertically on the front or rear of a car!
Fleet vehicles generally have their own pump operated and maintained by the company that runs the fleet. Public CNG fillup stations are usually regarded as a bad idea due to the obvious danger of trusting Joe Sixpack and his 90 IQ with compressed flammable gas. Gasoline is bad enough and it's a non-explosive liquid at room temperature.
Heh. Man, do I hate that show. The "secret shuttle" thing is what finally got me banned from the living room while my wife watches it. Apparently some people would rather just watch a ludicrous program unfold rather than listen to an enumeration of lazy, inexcusable, glaring errors committed by writers who apparently can't even be bothered to do a Google search!
The first superman movie with Christpher Reeve hadd Lex Luthor plotting to get rich by 1) buying cheap inland desert property, 2) hacking into SAC and launching a nuke at the San Andreas Fault, thereby 3) triggering "the big one" which 4) would cause half of California to "fall into the ocean". The scheme was successful, but was "undone" by Superman turning the earth backwards to reverse time and fix everything. Even by comic book standards this was pretty weak story.
I am however living in California and I have seen plenty of talk about a major earthquake and how it could cause a tsunami and wipe out most stuff to the south of Mojave.
Such talk is nonsense. Most of the Los Angeles basin is well above 150' elevation. A 60' surge would wreck a lot of beachfront and beach-adjacent construction, but that's all. There are no less than THREE mountain ranges between Mojave and the coast. Whoever said that doesn't know anything about the local geography or tsunamis.
Sorry. I'm some nut who likes hypothetical things to by possible. Fairies, the Easter Bunny, and California falling into the ocean are just too fanciful for me to take seriously.
I guess examples don't work for some people. Let's generalise. A large complex structure is vulnerable to: 1. Geological changes - earthquakes etc. 2. Climate changes - imagine Nevada become hurricane land or tornado land 3. Planetary-scale changes - e.g. major meteor hit 4. Man-made changes - wars, looting, etc. 5. Erosion 6. Wildlife infestation The list goes on.
Indeed, I totally agree with you there. Man's struggle to make a permanent mark upon the world is an age-old folly. Heck, we have entire religions (Buddhism) based on accepting the impermanence of everything!
My god, did you get your education solely from Superman movies? The eastern edge of the pacific plate is not going to "break off". It is moving in a general northwesterly direction and eventually (in perhaps a quarter million years) a slice of western California will separate from the north american plate and water will fill behind it. NOTE: this will happen gradually; in fact, it'll happen so slow that no one will notice. So quit buying desert real estate like Lex Luthor waiting for "the big one" to turn it into beach front property.
estoppel - A bar which precludes someone from denying the truth of a fact which has been determined in an official proceeding or by an authoritative body. An estopple arises when someone has done some act which the policy of the law will not permit her to deny.
In other words, the court would rule "yep, you said it, and you can't deny it".
Well adjusted, responsibly parented children don't need ridiculously invasive tracking schemes. Such "solutions" are a weak band-aid attempt to address the issue of insufficient parental involvement. Is a child who doesn't skip school simply because he knows he'll get caught really the same as a student who doesn't skip school because his parents impressed upon him the improtance of education? Fitting children with sophisticated equivalents of radio collars only suppresses the symptom that is truancy, without addressing the real root problem. It's not a flip-flop. It's a perfectly consistent position.
To address your "proof", offered in another post, that it's the same people claiming both things: unless you have been tracking usernames and tallying positions, that's not proof at all. People in an uproar over something they find outrageous will always out-post those that are in the "it's fine by me-- who cares?" camp. Your assumption that all people post equally to all stories regardless of their opinion is puzzling.
Errr, other than "eyeballs=$$$" for Slashdot?
Your opinion is unsupported by the circumstances. Thompson declared that the reasoned and rational argument coming from his opponent was invalid simply because his opponent was a child. This type of behavior is perfectly reasonable grounds upon which to conclude that Thompson is indeed a fucking moron. Note that OP was talking about name-calling as a response to rational debate, not all of name-calling in general.
And you can't already do that with any other gateway server?
By comparison, PayPal is... what?
I don't know where people got the idea that PayPal was anything like a bank in the first place. They're more like a bare-bones cheap credit card processing service. You'd get the same lack of service and callous disregard for your money from those "$25/mo plus 5% of each transaction" card processing folks. Buyer disputes a charge? You're mostly SOL! If you want good service as a merchant, you gotta pay for it. Get a decent payment processing service. If you're so bent on accepting paypal, find a service provider like Andale who will middleman it for you.
FWIW, you don't have to comply with any emissions regs beyond what was required at the time the vehicle was sold. Changing the engine doesn't change the year of manufacture of the car.
Yeah, I know. Totally irrelevant tangent. I am, however, one of those nutcases who put a subaru engine in a VW Vanagon....
Oh, please. infowars.com is a classic example of hysterical paranoia. They parrot the standard unrealistic assumptions I already addressed above. I quote:
Notice how they fail to consider the staggeringly unrealistic amount of analyst manpower it would take to go over every telephone utterance of such a mundane phrase as "he bombed". Notice also how the anecdotal story is completely devoid of detail, such as names, dates, and (most importantly) how it is they know that an investigator for such a super-secret program had a transcript!It's bollocks, dude. There's a thin veneer of truth over all that stuff, but beneath that it's wholly paranoid fantasy.
Indeed, the first time it was presented to me it was erroneously calledd "petals on the rose" by the presenter. After I puzzled over it for a while, someone else came over and said "ah, the old Petals Around the Rose puzzle". It annoyed me because the real clue that is in the name is the word AROUND. As soon as I heard that word and realized the puzzle was about something with a CENTER, it was obvious. The famous story about Bill Gates notes that he probably had more difficulty because, as indicated by a program he wrote to calculate the score, he thought it was called "PEDALS Around the Rose".
Paranoid nutcases with little knowledge of basic electronic intelligence strategy have flooded the internet with hysterical rants and lunatic ravings about ECHELON. It's almost always traceable to a specific error in reading comprehension, i.e. the failure to distinguish between "capable of monitoring any communication" and "capable of monitoring all communication". The former is true. The latter is not. There does not exist enough electronic analytical capacity to monitor all communications. Anyone who has worked in electronic intelligence knows that one of the primary focuses is tasking: knowing when and where to apply limited collection resources. 99.99% of the electronic communication in the world is inconsequential chatter, and is very easily identifiable as such. NEWS FLASH! The NSA knows your 90 year old grandmother's phone calls aren't worth listening to, so they don't! I speak from experience as a former Signal Intelligence Analyst with the US Army-- they spend most of their time trying to RDUCED the amount of stuff they have to analyze. Really, the theory of "ECHELON listens to everything, all the time" fails the common sense test on so many levels, it boggles the mind why anyone would take it seriously. So the computer flags (say) every utterance of the word "bomb" and "embassy" or some such, eh? Well THEN what? Who goes through the enormous daily log of such flagged conversations? The obvious answer is that they cut down the log by not bothering to monitor communications between irrelevant parties. The tin foil hat crowd thinks the government is listening to them, when the truth is the government doesn't give a shit about them because they don't matter.
I wonder which name for it is the "true name"? I've heard it called both "Petals on the Rose" and "Petals around the Rose". I've always thought that "around" was more of a hint (almost a dead giveaway, even) than "on".