Hindsight is useless. So try foresight next time.
on
How Did Wikileaks Do It?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Remember, we are not seeing what the soldiers see here here. We can watch the video fifty times on slow-mo, squinting to see if that dude's carrying an RPG or a camera: the soldiers are making snap decisions on half-second glimpses. Contrariwise, the soldiers have a much wider perspective on the entire battlefront, and see things we can't. Our hindsight second-guessing is pointless.
But my point here is not to defend the soldiers or the military: it's to say that since hindsight is useless, we should try foresight. BEFORE we send troops into a country, we should understand that shit like this WILL happen. Absolute precision in warfare is impossible: conflict WILL result in innocents getting slaughtered by terrified boys with heavy weapons.
So when the option of war starts being discussed, we should not ask, "is our cause righteous? Are we prepared to sacrifice our sons' lives for it?" but rather, "Is our cause righteous enough that we can watch the mass slaughter of innocents, and still say we did the right thing?"
As I've said earlier, while this piece of paper saying "Hi. We won't nuke you. Love, The USA" is pretty useless, it's a major concrete improvement over a piece of paper that says "Yo. We might nuke you if we feel like it. Do you feel lucky?", which was the Bush administration's love letter to the world in 2002.
Secondly, this is just an announcement to the world of the administration's view of nuclear weapons. Which is unchanged in reality from our stance since the Russians got the bomb. We aren't going to start a nuclear war because someone could retaliate, and noone would win that fight. Not to mention the morality of indisciminately slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent non-combatants.
Yes, it matches U.S. policy going back to the 1950s... with the exception of an 8-year gap from 2002 to 2010.
The Bush administration's version of this document specifically declared that the U.S. should be prepared to use nuclear weapons on a first-strike basis, and even against non-nuclear states.
You're right, a pronouncement that "we're not gonna nuke ya" isn't worth the paper that it's printed on. But it's a big concrete improvement over a previous pronouncement that "we might nuke ya."
I served on a jury last summer for a case of armed home invasion. The victim, if you can call him that, was a multiply-convicted white crack user. The victim claimed the defendant forced his way into the defendant's house with a gun, as part of a dispute over the defendant's missing cell phone following a drug deal.
The defense attorney's goal was to convince us that there was no way to determine beyond a reasonable doubt whether the defendant committed the crime, or his brother. The police did a horribly sloppy job of gathering evidence, the DNA was so contaminated that while it matched the victim, it also had good odds of matching the defendant's brother or about 1 in 5 random people off the street. The victim lied on the stand several times and showed no reliability as an eyewitness, and all the other evidence (phone calls, evidence collected at defendant's house) pointed to *some* member of the defendant's family, but no way to know who.
So we found him not guilty. Kind of a shame since the defendant probably *was* a drug dealer, but no way to prove it wasn't his brother. And the kicker: if they bring the brother to trial, he can use the same defense.
I can't find any information on one key question: was "moral reasoning" the ONLY mental process affected? Or was cognitive ability in general impaired?
After all, if you interfere with my ability to think clearly by blasting me with loud noises, giving me mind-altering drugs, or electrocuting me every 10 seconds, I will have difficulty making complex moral decisions... but I'll also have difficulty remembering multiplication tables.
A better experiment would mix in the moral choice questions with other questions to test general memory, sensory, language, and deductive skills. If all of *those* are similarly impaired, you haven't learned anything but "messing with the currents in peoples' brains makes it hard for them to think."
What, a 15% increase in focus on actual outcomes rather imputed intent based on extremely abstract (and in fact utterly impossible) hypothetical situations? What would that be useful for, exactly?
Hand out "end justify the means" helmets to all of the soldiers you command, and you'll get less backtalk and desertion when it comes time to burn villages, rape children, and gun down peaceful protesters for the glory of the republic.
You are welcome to cite examples where international law has been applied and/or enforced outside of L1
Sure thing. The Outer Space Treaty requires parties to it to conduct their exploration in a way which "avoids harmful contamination" of celestial bodies. This requirement is one of several factors which inform NASA's current policy on preventing biological contamination of Mars and Europa.
So the Outer Space Treaty is being *applied* in contexts outside Earth orbit. Nobody's tried to *enforce* it yet, but let's be honest: international treaties are rarely "enforced" by an outside authority: they're either agreed to or violated by their member nations.
Here's a short list of authentication problems which we rely on government-issued ID to solve:
Immigration Tax recordkeeping Driver's licensing Alcohol/tobacco age verification Workplace security Credit cards Banking security Airline security Criminal recordkeeping Terror watchlists Government benefits (unemployment assistance, medicare, medicaid, food stamps, etc)
If the concern is that a national ID will allow the government to monitor me, it's far, far too late for that. Government already has access to all this information. Before 9/11, all it took to get full access was a judge's okay: now even that roadblock is gone.
The "jackbooted thugs" already have full access, and gain nothing from a national ID: the only people it helps are citizens, businesses, and non-jackbooted government agencies.
I am currently carrying at least a dozen different objects whose sole purpose is to tell someone who I am, ranging from my driver's license to my supermarket customer loyalty card. The businesses and government agencies I deal with spend billions, probably trillions, each year dealing with authentication and identity problems.
The government has a unique ability to be a final trusted arbiter for authentication. A National ID card doesn't have to be a terrifying dossier containing everything everyone knows about you -- name, fingerprints, political party, criminal record, shopping habits -- all it has to do is verify your identity to anyone who asks.
"Is the person standing in front of me actually John Smith?" Yes or no.
Any info *about* me, ranging from my date of birth to how many cans of Diet Coke I buy a week, should be kept on a company or government agency's own servers. The national ID would provide identity verification of everyone to anyone, and nothing else.
As for how to implement it, let's put it this way. Every day, I and hundreds of thousands of other people use a more secure authentication system to get access to the World of Warcraft than is used to buy a handgun or drive a two-ton vehicle at lethal speeds on the highway. Two-factor authentication isn't perfect, but it's a damn sight better than our current system of forgeable cards and
Wow. Facts aside, this is the clearest, most straightforward legal/PR writing I've read in years. Makes the point with no dodging and evasion, no complicated jargon, it's short, clear, and on point.
Kids, if you ever wonder why English 101 is mandatory at your college, this is why: so maybe someday you'll be able to write like this.
Lots of good ideas here for doing this if you have unlimited cash. Fewer good ideas for doing it on a budget. I don't like the idea of using an SLR camera: you're going to have perspective and lighting problems which you'll need to correct in software.
Here's my idea: 1) Lay out map on large table. 2) Remove top lid from $80 scanner. 3) Flip scanner upside down, place on map. 4) Stitch the images together, or geolocate the individual images. 5) Profit!
According to the ground loop audio, rocket goes supersonic at 1:38 in that video; launch is at 0:12. So mach 1 is at T+84 seconds or so. This matches my calculations in another thread, which I did using published Atlas rocket launch profiles.
The amateur video in the summary shows the phenomenon 75 seconds after launch. So while the rocket isn't yet supersonic, it's close. And that makes sense: in the transsonic region just shy of Mach 1, you get violent and irregular pressure-wave phenomena.
If the vehicle was far above Mach 1, you're right, you'd see a series of perfectly elliptical shock fronts. But if the vehicle was far short of Mach 1, you'd see nothing at all.
Shows how remarkable this video is: not just perfect weather and perfect observer location, but perfect timing too.
Some debate here as to whether what we're seeing is a sonic boom, or just loud low-frequency sound waves. Let's do the math...
Basic question: is the rocket going at Mach 1 or greater when the phenomenon happens?
In the video, the launch happens at 0:38, and the ripples are seen at 1:53, 75 seconds later.
Here's a handy document showing the launch profile of an Atlas V. It doesn't show velocity vs time, but on page 19 there's an acceleration vs time graph for the Atlas V 401, the specific vehicle used in this launch. It shows the average thrust during the first 75 seconds is 1.4 +/-.05 g's (uncertain because I can't read the graph that accurately.)
Subtract out 1 g for gravity pulling the rocket down, to get a vehicle acceleration of 0.4 +/- 0.05 g, which over 75 seconds will lead to a final velocity of 294 +/- 36 m/s.
The speed of sound is 330 m/s. So at the time we see the ripples, the rocket is riiiiight about at the speed of sound, maybe a little over, maybe a little under, impossible to tell.
This transition to supersonic flow is often chaotic and irregular, which would explain the intense but complicated ripples seen. If the rocket was going at mach 2 or 3, we'd see a perfectly shaped set of concentric rings; if it was going at far less than mach 1, we'd see nothing at all.
The purpose of this device is to keep people from cheating on their hours. You can get all Big Brothery all you like, but there is one and only one technology that can reliably ensure that people come to work and do the jobs they're paid to do.
It's called "management". The way it works is, you know your employees' names, you stop by their workstations, both to help them with problems they're having and to check to see that they're doing their jobs. You build up a culture of trust, so that when they need to leave work they *tell* you, and you arrange for them to make up the time.
Or you can treat them like condemned criminals, and let them be monitored by machines while you sit in your throne of an office eating donuts and browsing bmw.com. It's really up to you.
Impossible to answer at present. As another responder said, Shannon's information theory tells us that a signal can be highly redundant or noisy: its information content depends on how much of the garbage you can remove and still reconstruct the message.
But you can only figure that out if you have a *receiver* which can detect and reformulate the signal. We can measure the brain's electrical signals, but we have no idea how to turn those back into thoughts. Until we can do so, we have no way to tell which aspects of those electrical signals are important to thought, and which are irrelevant "non-information".
N = 3, each of which lasted about 15 years. While that doesn't live up to our society's moral expectations, I doubt many people reading this will manage even *one* 15-year marriage.
1) This is a boost-phase defense, so it works when the missile is over the hostile country, not over the U.S. 2) Because of Russia's size, we probably won't be able to use this weapon against them unless they let us fly our airborne laser over their country, which is unlikely. This is for defending against launches by smaller countries. 3) It's pretty much impossible to cause a nuke to detonate by firing a weapon at it. 4) Debris from a shot-down nuke may be unhealthy if it lands on your house, but it's a whole lot better than vaporizing Manhattan.
My microwave oven is a lot more efficient than my charcoal grill, but the microwave oven doesn't work so well when I throw a tailgate party and have nowhere to plug it in.
There's nothing better than chemical fuel for storing lots of energy in a small space with no extension cords -- which is the usual design requirement for vehicle-mounted technology.
How about the Titan II launches for the Gemini space missions? They were basically retrofitted ICBMs with two dudes on top instead of a bomb. They weren't fired as weapons, but they were definitely not tests.
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Remember, we are not seeing what the soldiers see here here. We can watch the video fifty times on slow-mo, squinting to see if that dude's carrying an RPG or a camera: the soldiers are making snap decisions on half-second glimpses. Contrariwise, the soldiers have a much wider perspective on the entire battlefront, and see things we can't. Our hindsight second-guessing is pointless.
But my point here is not to defend the soldiers or the military: it's to say that since hindsight is useless, we should try foresight. BEFORE we send troops into a country, we should understand that shit like this WILL happen. Absolute precision in warfare is impossible: conflict WILL result in innocents getting slaughtered by terrified boys with heavy weapons.
So when the option of war starts being discussed, we should not ask, "is our cause righteous? Are we prepared to sacrifice our sons' lives for it?" but rather, "Is our cause righteous enough that we can watch the mass slaughter of innocents, and still say we did the right thing?"
Good analogy. Try these headlines on for size: "Skunk Just Minding Its Own Business" vs "Skunk Looks Pissed, Aims its Butt Menacingly At You".
It doesn't change how the skunk will respond to a threat, but it *does* affect your immediate reaction to the skunk.
As I've said earlier, while this piece of paper saying "Hi. We won't nuke you. Love, The USA" is pretty useless, it's a major concrete improvement over a piece of paper that says "Yo. We might nuke you if we feel like it. Do you feel lucky?", which was the Bush administration's love letter to the world in 2002.
Secondly, this is just an announcement to the world of the administration's view of nuclear weapons. Which is unchanged in reality from our stance since the Russians got the bomb. We aren't going to start a nuclear war because someone could retaliate, and noone would win that fight. Not to mention the morality of indisciminately slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent non-combatants.
Yes, it matches U.S. policy going back to the 1950s... with the exception of an 8-year gap from 2002 to 2010.
The Bush administration's version of this document specifically declared that the U.S. should be prepared to use nuclear weapons on a first-strike basis, and even against non-nuclear states.
You're right, a pronouncement that "we're not gonna nuke ya" isn't worth the paper that it's printed on. But it's a big concrete improvement over a previous pronouncement that "we might nuke ya."
http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/nwgs/npr_review.pdf
... not as defendant, but as a juror.
I served on a jury last summer for a case of armed home invasion. The victim, if you can call him that, was a multiply-convicted white crack user. The victim claimed the defendant forced his way into the defendant's house with a gun, as part of a dispute over the defendant's missing cell phone following a drug deal.
The defense attorney's goal was to convince us that there was no way to determine beyond a reasonable doubt whether the defendant committed the crime, or his brother. The police did a horribly sloppy job of gathering evidence, the DNA was so contaminated that while it matched the victim, it also had good odds of matching the defendant's brother or about 1 in 5 random people off the street. The victim lied on the stand several times and showed no reliability as an eyewitness, and all the other evidence (phone calls, evidence collected at defendant's house) pointed to *some* member of the defendant's family, but no way to know who.
So we found him not guilty. Kind of a shame since the defendant probably *was* a drug dealer, but no way to prove it wasn't his brother. And the kicker: if they bring the brother to trial, he can use the same defense.
If you think a republic is proof against tyranny, you might want to re-read your Roman and French history.
I can't find any information on one key question: was "moral reasoning" the ONLY mental process affected? Or was cognitive ability in general impaired?
After all, if you interfere with my ability to think clearly by blasting me with loud noises, giving me mind-altering drugs, or electrocuting me every 10 seconds, I will have difficulty making complex moral decisions... but I'll also have difficulty remembering multiplication tables.
A better experiment would mix in the moral choice questions with other questions to test general memory, sensory, language, and deductive skills. If all of *those* are similarly impaired, you haven't learned anything but "messing with the currents in peoples' brains makes it hard for them to think."
What, a 15% increase in focus on actual outcomes rather imputed intent based on extremely abstract (and in fact utterly impossible) hypothetical situations? What would that be useful for, exactly?
Hand out "end justify the means" helmets to all of the soldiers you command, and you'll get less backtalk and desertion when it comes time to burn villages, rape children, and gun down peaceful protesters for the glory of the republic.
You are welcome to cite examples where international law has been applied and/or enforced outside of L1
Sure thing. The Outer Space Treaty requires parties to it to conduct their exploration in a way which "avoids harmful contamination" of celestial bodies. This requirement is one of several factors which inform NASA's current policy on preventing biological contamination of Mars and Europa.
So the Outer Space Treaty is being *applied* in contexts outside Earth orbit. Nobody's tried to *enforce* it yet, but let's be honest: international treaties are rarely "enforced" by an outside authority: they're either agreed to or violated by their member nations.
http://books.google.com/books?id=EolLMX5gx4QC&pg=PA13&lpg=PA13&dq=%22outer+space+treaty%22+mars&source=bl&ots=8ncm43r58z&sig=ogiRCZoXYFbOs1OtErsEzxRM9Ps&hl=en&ei=NXuxS5TXAcL88AassvHLAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CBoQ6AEwBjgK#v=onepage&q=%22outer%20space%20treaty%22%20mars&f=false
Here's a short list of authentication problems which we rely on government-issued ID to solve:
Immigration
Tax recordkeeping
Driver's licensing
Alcohol/tobacco age verification
Workplace security
Credit cards
Banking security
Airline security
Criminal recordkeeping
Terror watchlists
Government benefits (unemployment assistance, medicare, medicaid, food stamps, etc)
If the concern is that a national ID will allow the government to monitor me, it's far, far too late for that. Government already has access to all this information. Before 9/11, all it took to get full access was a judge's okay: now even that roadblock is gone.
The "jackbooted thugs" already have full access, and gain nothing from a national ID: the only people it helps are citizens, businesses, and non-jackbooted government agencies.
I am currently carrying at least a dozen different objects whose sole purpose is to tell someone who I am, ranging from my driver's license to my supermarket customer loyalty card. The businesses and government agencies I deal with spend billions, probably trillions, each year dealing with authentication and identity problems.
The government has a unique ability to be a final trusted arbiter for authentication. A National ID card doesn't have to be a terrifying dossier containing everything everyone knows about you -- name, fingerprints, political party, criminal record, shopping habits -- all it has to do is verify your identity to anyone who asks.
"Is the person standing in front of me actually John Smith?" Yes or no.
Any info *about* me, ranging from my date of birth to how many cans of Diet Coke I buy a week, should be kept on a company or government agency's own servers. The national ID would provide identity verification of everyone to anyone, and nothing else.
As for how to implement it, let's put it this way. Every day, I and hundreds of thousands of other people use a more secure authentication system to get access to the World of Warcraft than is used to buy a handgun or drive a two-ton vehicle at lethal speeds on the highway. Two-factor authentication isn't perfect, but it's a damn sight better than our current system of forgeable cards and
Wow. Facts aside, this is the clearest, most straightforward legal/PR writing I've read in years. Makes the point with no dodging and evasion, no complicated jargon, it's short, clear, and on point.
Kids, if you ever wonder why English 101 is mandatory at your college, this is why: so maybe someday you'll be able to write like this.
Lots of good ideas here for doing this if you have unlimited cash. Fewer good ideas for doing it on a budget. I don't like the idea of using an SLR camera: you're going to have perspective and lighting problems which you'll need to correct in software.
Here's my idea:
1) Lay out map on large table.
2) Remove top lid from $80 scanner.
3) Flip scanner upside down, place on map.
4) Stitch the images together, or geolocate the individual images.
5) Profit!
Callin' bullshit on that article.
Not quite 2 minutes.
According to the ground loop audio, rocket goes supersonic at 1:38 in that video; launch is at 0:12. So mach 1 is at T+84 seconds or so. This matches my calculations in another thread, which I did using published Atlas rocket launch profiles.
The amateur video in the summary shows the phenomenon 75 seconds after launch. So while the rocket isn't yet supersonic, it's close. And that makes sense: in the transsonic region just shy of Mach 1, you get violent and irregular pressure-wave phenomena.
If the vehicle was far above Mach 1, you're right, you'd see a series of perfectly elliptical shock fronts. But if the vehicle was far short of Mach 1, you'd see nothing at all.
Shows how remarkable this video is: not just perfect weather and perfect observer location, but perfect timing too.
Some debate here as to whether what we're seeing is a sonic boom, or just loud low-frequency sound waves. Let's do the math...
Basic question: is the rocket going at Mach 1 or greater when the phenomenon happens?
In the video, the launch happens at 0:38, and the ripples are seen at 1:53, 75 seconds later.
Here's a handy document showing the launch profile of an Atlas V. It doesn't show velocity vs time, but on page 19 there's an acceleration vs time graph for the Atlas V 401, the specific vehicle used in this launch. It shows the average thrust during the first 75 seconds is 1.4 +/- .05 g's (uncertain because I can't read the graph that accurately.)
Subtract out 1 g for gravity pulling the rocket down, to get a vehicle acceleration of 0.4 +/- 0.05 g, which over 75 seconds will lead to a final velocity of 294 +/- 36 m/s.
The speed of sound is 330 m/s. So at the time we see the ripples, the rocket is riiiiight about at the speed of sound, maybe a little over, maybe a little under, impossible to tell.
This transition to supersonic flow is often chaotic and irregular, which would explain the intense but complicated ripples seen. If the rocket was going at mach 2 or 3, we'd see a perfectly shaped set of concentric rings; if it was going at far less than mach 1, we'd see nothing at all.
The purpose of this device is to keep people from cheating on their hours. You can get all Big Brothery all you like, but there is one and only one technology that can reliably ensure that people come to work and do the jobs they're paid to do.
It's called "management". The way it works is, you know your employees' names, you stop by their workstations, both to help them with problems they're having and to check to see that they're doing their jobs. You build up a culture of trust, so that when they need to leave work they *tell* you, and you arrange for them to make up the time.
Or you can treat them like condemned criminals, and let them be monitored by machines while you sit in your throne of an office eating donuts and browsing bmw.com. It's really up to you.
Oh, and Blackwater / Xe.
Nobody changes their name because they "want to take credit" for things they're "proud of".
Comcast, do you really want to have your name mentioned alongside Phillip Morris ... errr, "Altria"? At least you're not *killing* your customers.
Impossible to answer at present. As another responder said, Shannon's information theory tells us that a signal can be highly redundant or noisy: its information content depends on how much of the garbage you can remove and still reconstruct the message.
But you can only figure that out if you have a *receiver* which can detect and reformulate the signal. We can measure the brain's electrical signals, but we have no idea how to turn those back into thoughts. Until we can do so, we have no way to tell which aspects of those electrical signals are important to thought, and which are irrelevant "non-information".
N = 3, each of which lasted about 15 years. While that doesn't live up to our society's moral expectations, I doubt many people reading this will manage even *one* 15-year marriage.
An impressive amount of wrong in a one-line post.
1) This is a boost-phase defense, so it works when the missile is over the hostile country, not over the U.S.
2) Because of Russia's size, we probably won't be able to use this weapon against them unless they let us fly our airborne laser over their country, which is unlikely. This is for defending against launches by smaller countries.
3) It's pretty much impossible to cause a nuke to detonate by firing a weapon at it.
4) Debris from a shot-down nuke may be unhealthy if it lands on your house, but it's a whole lot better than vaporizing Manhattan.
My microwave oven is a lot more efficient than my charcoal grill, but the microwave oven doesn't work so well when I throw a tailgate party and have nowhere to plug it in.
There's nothing better than chemical fuel for storing lots of energy in a small space with no extension cords -- which is the usual design requirement for vehicle-mounted technology.
How about the Titan II launches for the Gemini space missions? They were basically retrofitted ICBMs with two dudes on top instead of a bomb. They weren't fired as weapons, but they were definitely not tests.
Great, a ballistic missile defense that only works when the plane is struck by lightning.
Don't forget to add "if you break our cargo, you pay for it."
If you want space transport to work like a trucking business, you should pay for it the way you pay a trucking business.
If you want space transport to work like a bottomless money black hole, you should fund it like a bottomless money black hole.
You get what you pay for, and what you get depends on *how* you pay.