Other than more steps to the end product, it doesn't wind up being much more complex, unless you want to get into some really extreme down-in-the-weeds engine modelling. You define an engine torque curve, and a transmission with a set of gears, and tires with particular traction characteristics, and a coefficient of friction from air drag, and you can iteratively simulate feeding more gas to the engine until you're flat out and can't go any faster.
I'm not a geologist, but the fact that the crater is described as being oblate -- 30x40 miles -- puts it out of the vast majority of impact craters, which are circular; it takes an impact at a very low angle (under 10) to get significant distortion of the crater. Interestingly, if you look at the map of the crater location and compare it to a map of the previous eruptions of the supervolcano hot spot now under Yellowstone (larger image here), you could also draw the conclusion that it was the crater from an eruption of the hotspot around 18-20 million years ago. The violence of a supervolcano eruption compared to a normal eruption could account for the presence of shatter cones. Comparing this site to the other known calderas from that hot spot.
How are you going to be able to run surveillance backward from a car bomb detonating to the origin point of the bombers -- or forward, following them to where they're hiding -- without a pervasive net of surveillance? And once you have the capacity to do this in a hostile environment, where you can assume that the opposing forces will place a priority on disabling the surveillance system, it's no stretch at all, given the track record of the Heimatsicherheitsdienst, to see the government deploying these systems in the US for our 'protection', where the populace would have much less incentive to disable surveillance (after all, if you don't have anything to hide, why would you object to someone watching you?) -- particularly since this link in TFA, where it's specifically stated "The primary application is for homeland security"; you might want to try reading more deeply than just a light scan of the first few paragraphs. The potential of this technology reminds me strongly of David Drake's dystopian story collection Lacey and His Friends, written back in the '70s.
Anyone that has used Windows with an NT base like 2k/XP/Vista knows that 99% of the time you can still 'Close and sometimes Minimize/Move' a crashed application; and in Vista it is 100% of the time on all of the above.
If I had a nickel for every time that I've had a.pdf file opening in my browser on my Win2K system at work, then had Acrobat Reader go off into hyperspace and lock my browser, I would be able to retire. Sometimes I can minimize the window, but if I try to close the browser, I always get the 'program not responding' pop-up window; the only way I can get control of my browser back is to forcex the Acrobat process, and about half the time that doesn't work and I'll have to forced the browser.
What would be interesting data, and which would address more clearly display the actual state of affairs, is how many of these 'uncertified' applications were actually submitted for certification, whether Microsoft or the 'independent lab' (whoever actually receives the payment for certification testing) has declined to accept any requests for certification, and which, if any, software that failed its first test has had to go through more than one retest after modification, and whether the testing report consisted of anything more than a simple listing of the features that don't work (or don't work the way Microsoft feels that a "Vista-certified application" should).
...and the 'independent lab' reports any particularly innovative or useful features back to Microsoft for them to "reverse engineer" and incorporate into their own products to preserve their competitive advantage?
I understand there is already an object-oriented version of COBOL extant, which, according to the existing naming convention for the OO version of an existing language, was called ADD_ONE_TO_COBOL_GIVING_COBOL.
"I sincerely wish we could see our government so secured as to depend less on the character of the person in whose hands it is trusted. Bad men will sometimes get in and with such an immense patronage may make great progress in corrupting the public mind and principles. This is a subject with which wisdom and patriotism should be occupied." -- Thomas Jefferson to Moses Robinson, 1801.
Unless it's put into dry lay-up, which requires inspection before being lit off, a naval steam plant can usually be restarted in only an hour or two if necessary, although if given time most shipmasters will prefer to light off boilers a day or so in advance of departure to minimize the stress on the boilers and the turbines. The primary obstruction to getting a marine steam plant lit off faster is the problem of delivering hot steam to a cold turbine; modern boilers are flash designs and can deliver steam quite quickly after being lit off, but feeding high-pressure steam to a cold turbine can wreck the turbine; steam is delivered slowly to warm the turbine to operating temperature before it is brought to power.
Many volcanoes will blow out chunks of pumice in the course of an eruption. Because it's essentially foamed rock -- filled with bubbles from gas that expanded in the lava as it erupted and cooled -- it's less dense than water, and will float. However, because the island is new, their charts will have been unreliable as to the depth of water around the new island, and given that new lava flows can be sharp, I'm not surprised that they sheered off rather than approaching closer. With the sun going down, and the layer of pumice on the water preventing them from using water color as a guage for depth (which is moderately unreliable, depending on the bottom characteristics), and the almost certain lack of a sounding lead or depth sonar, I can entirely understand their hesitancy about taking the chance of running aground and ripping their hull just for a closer look.
Consider that even science-fiction writers have had at best a mediocre track record at predicting the advance of technology. For example, look at Robert Heinlein's work; before he wrote characters that were full AIs, he had written stories where interstellar spacecraft were navigated by taking star sights manually, converting the sight data into binary via lookup tables in a book, the way books of logarithms used to be used, then the data was entered, via toggle switches, into a computer that occupied most of a room, the results read off in binary from indicator lights and converted, using the lookup tables again, back to decimal numbers that were then used to adjust the ship's course. Writers have been just as egregious in underestimating technological progress as they have been in underestimating the difficulty of particular aspects of it.
Additionally, the term 'regulated', which for most people -- and, it seems, all of the gun-control advocates -- means 'restricted/controlled by law', it actually has another meaning that, while restricted in use, is still extant. 'Regulation' is a term for the process of adjusting the sights on a firearm so that where you aim is where the weapon will shoot. From American Handgunner, March-April 2003:
The choice of fixed or adjustable sights is a of compromise. Fixed sights are simple and tough, since there is little that can go wrong. Once sighted in they are unlikely to go out of adjustment. The disadvantage is they are more difficult to regulate and they commit the shooter to a specific load.
A 'well-regulated' firearm is one that has had its sights adjusted so that, when you pull the trigger, you'll hit where the sights are aimed. The same usage would also imply that a 'well-regulated' militia is one that can hit what they're aiming at. While it may be a stretch to make that extension, it is also true that, if the 2nd Amendment merely protects a state's authority to raise and maintain militias, the phrase 'the people' would not have been necessary in the wording, and it would have stated more clearly that the right was reserved to the states, as similarly stated elsewhere. And we have the judicial decision in United States v. Verdugo-Uriquez, 110 S.Ct. 1056, 108 L.Ed. 2d 222, 232-33 (1990) that, while focussing on the Fourth Amendment, cites the First and Second as well in concluding that the phrase "right of the people" is a term of art used throughout the Bill of Rights to designate rights pertaining to individual citizens (in contrast to the states).
One of the things that has prevented the adoption of many of the newer innovations in currency design for US paper currency is the 'crumple test', where a bill is rolled tightly, then inserted into a cylinder and crushed with a ramrod, then removed, rolled the other way, and crushed again. This process is repeated a total of 16 times; the note must remain recognizable. Prospective currency changes also go through a number of other durability tests -- being washed with eight cotton towels, being soaked in a variety of chemicals (such as bleach, sulfuric acid, and gasoline), 'rub tests' with a two-pound weight with a pad after bills are soaked in the chemicals, and others. So far, only relatively minor innovations, like the color-changing ink, have survived the durability tests -- for example, image holograms, IIRC, fail the crumple test badly.
Isn't it interesting that the one apparent danger (out of billions) about which Bush scares us is the one that, to remedy, involves taking away our rights and liberties?
We had to destroy your freedom in order to save it.
There are four boxes available to citizens to protect their liberty -- the soap box, the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box, which should be employed in that order.
There are situations where a brute-force solution is more practical than an elegantly-crafted solution. However, from what I've seen, software development has been a steady parade of "brute force uber alles" decisions, resulting in hardware requirements continually ratcheting higher and higher in order to run the code as fast as the previous version, because someone decided that it was an earth-shatteringly necessary program enhancement that the drop-down lists animated their expansion when you clicked on them instead of just BITBLTing the entire drop-down area onto the screen at once. As the virtual memory space available to programs has grown, the amount of care that programmers take to write efficient code seems to have gone down. Faster machines conceal sloppy, less-efficient code, and more memory conceals bloated, space-wasting code; whether this is a case of not being taught to write tight code, or accumulated sloppiness from not having to write tight code, I don't know.
At a previous job, I remember looking at one source file from a program that a contractor was developing for us; in each of two dozen functions in the file, they had the same data structure defined local to that function -- a 1000-element array of a structure with about a dozen numeric fields and four 256-character text fields. None of the functions in the file used the text fields in the structure; the structure had been copied from another file where a function did use the text fields, even though the functions didn't actually pass that structure between them; the data was read out of a database in each function. Even more entertaining was the fact that the first time we tested their code on real data, the function that did use the text fields in the structure cheerfully filled the staticly-size 1000-element array with the 2315 rows of data from our database, stomped all over itself because they hadn't put in any bounds checking, and crashed. My code, in a separate program that referenced the same data, used a linked-list module I'd written so that I didn't have to worry about whether I'd made the arrays big enough, and only allocated storage that was actually needed for the database content. I found out later that, after we'd turned the locally-developed code over to the contractor for maintenance support, that they went through and rewrote all my code to use fixed-length arrays, and had an ongoing failure problem due to the real-world data being bigger than the arrays they'd hard-coded into the software, making them go back and rebuild their code each time they got a crash report from the users. Made me wonder how they managed to stay in business with programmers like that.
This is Slashdot; I was really expecting (hope springs infernal) an article, however shoddy and silly, about how somebody put an LED and lens into a ring to make it give off Green Lantern's light.
A number of years ago, a costumer friend of mine made a Lens for a Gray Lensman costume -- bezel crammed full of electronics and LEDs to so that it would light up and ripple colors across its face. It generated a fair amount of heat and was uncomfortable to wear for any length of time when lit up.
You know why you can't figure out how to calculate that? Because it's impossible. Nothing has inherent value. All value is decided by the buyer and seller.
Certainly there is a 'true value' for everything; it's the cost to produce it, both in actual outlay for supplies and in production time -- but measuring the value of production time can be slippery. This value is useful, however, only for the producer determining how many to make; the subsequent market value may bear no relationship to the true value. Take, say, one of van Rijn's paintings; his production costs were probably no more than a couple ounces of silver for materials and a few weeks of his time -- and now it would be 'worth' millions of dollars. Or look at most of what is produced as crafts for sale; I've seen products that sold for prices that, given the production time, equated to no more than $1.00 per hour as a wage, far below the 'minimum wage' set by law. Once something is put out for sale, though, you're correct; the only objective value is determined by whether a buyer will pay the price the seller sets for the object.
You'd never get a tax on livestock because of their greenhouse gas emissions passed in Texas; I'd bet that the legislature would construe that as 'defamation of beef', which Texas has laws against...
The automakers should countersue the California Legislature on the grounds that the emission of carbon dioxide, a known greenhouse gas, by the California state government constitutes the same harm to the resources, infrastructure and environmental health, demanding that the members of the California government cease respiration immediately as mitigation of this harm.
As for your freedoms... well freedom isn't free and these are the sacrifices that must be made to keep everyone safe.
How much safer have you demonstrably been since the institution of the TSA and its screening programs? The British caught a couple of dozen would-be suicide bombers; how many millions of dollars have the US and Britain thrown into airline security, and how many identifiable terrorists were caught as a result of this increased security? The primary result I've seen from all of the increased security is that the American citizenry has been conditioned to accept that the government can sacrifice any of our liberties as long as it waves the flags of "national security and "the war on terror".
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, Historical review of the constitution and government of Pennsylvania, from its origin; so far as regards the several points of controversy, which have, from time to time, arisen between the several governors of that province, and their several assemblies, 1759, p.289
We got around to the subject of war again and I said that, contrary to his attitude, I did not think that the common people are very thankful for leaders who bring them war and destruction.
"Why, of course, the people don't want war," Goering shrugged. "Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship."
"There is one difference," I pointed out. "In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars."
"Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
-- Gustave Gilbert, an interview with Hermann Goering on the evening of 18 April 1946, published in Nuremberg Diaries.
That's stupid. Why is it their purpose to harass you? What do they stand to gain? The only thing they'll get from this is bad PR. And how does that help them?
Because as long as the TSA continues to search John Q. Public "with significance", it perpetuates the perception that it's needed to deter terrorists; if there were to be no terrrorist incidents despite the TSA not stomping all over people's privacy, then people might get the impression that all of the other invasive measures that Shrub claims are "absolutely necessary" to prevent terrorism in our country are equally unnecessary; his agenda requires that he perpetuate the state of fear in order to allow him to continue to implement the policies that God has chosen him to carry out.
Slashdot Mirror
Other than more steps to the end product, it doesn't wind up being much more complex, unless you want to get into some really extreme down-in-the-weeds engine modelling. You define an engine torque curve, and a transmission with a set of gears, and tires with particular traction characteristics, and a coefficient of friction from air drag, and you can iteratively simulate feeding more gas to the engine until you're flat out and can't go any faster.
I'm not a geologist, but the fact that the crater is described as being oblate -- 30x40 miles -- puts it out of the vast majority of impact craters, which are circular; it takes an impact at a very low angle (under 10) to get significant distortion of the crater. Interestingly, if you look at the map of the crater location and compare it to a map of the previous eruptions of the supervolcano hot spot now under Yellowstone (larger image here), you could also draw the conclusion that it was the crater from an eruption of the hotspot around 18-20 million years ago. The violence of a supervolcano eruption compared to a normal eruption could account for the presence of shatter cones. Comparing this site to the other known calderas from that hot spot.
How are you going to be able to run surveillance backward from a car bomb detonating to the origin point of the bombers -- or forward, following them to where they're hiding -- without a pervasive net of surveillance? And once you have the capacity to do this in a hostile environment, where you can assume that the opposing forces will place a priority on disabling the surveillance system, it's no stretch at all, given the track record of the Heimatsicherheitsdienst, to see the government deploying these systems in the US for our 'protection', where the populace would have much less incentive to disable surveillance (after all, if you don't have anything to hide, why would you object to someone watching you?) -- particularly since this link in TFA, where it's specifically stated "The primary application is for homeland security"; you might want to try reading more deeply than just a light scan of the first few paragraphs. The potential of this technology reminds me strongly of David Drake's dystopian story collection Lacey and His Friends, written back in the '70s.
Anyone that has used Windows with an NT base like 2k/XP/Vista knows that 99% of the time you can still 'Close and sometimes Minimize/Move' a crashed application; and in Vista it is 100% of the time on all of the above.
If I had a nickel for every time that I've had a .pdf file opening in my browser on my Win2K system at work, then had Acrobat Reader go off into hyperspace and lock my browser, I would be able to retire. Sometimes I can minimize the window, but if I try to close the browser, I always get the 'program not responding' pop-up window; the only way I can get control of my browser back is to forcex the Acrobat process, and about half the time that doesn't work and I'll have to forced the browser.
They'd better not upgrade to Vista, or they'll start getting popups like "You are experiencing a missile attack. Cancel or Allow?"
What would be interesting data, and which would address more clearly display the actual state of affairs, is how many of these 'uncertified' applications were actually submitted for certification, whether Microsoft or the 'independent lab' (whoever actually receives the payment for certification testing) has declined to accept any requests for certification, and which, if any, software that failed its first test has had to go through more than one retest after modification, and whether the testing report consisted of anything more than a simple listing of the features that don't work (or don't work the way Microsoft feels that a "Vista-certified application" should).
...and the 'independent lab' reports any particularly innovative or useful features back to Microsoft for them to "reverse engineer" and incorporate into their own products to preserve their competitive advantage?
Always assume that a verbal contract is only as binding as the tape it's recorded on...
I understand there is already an object-oriented version of COBOL extant, which, according to the existing naming convention for the OO version of an existing language, was called ADD_ONE_TO_COBOL_GIVING_COBOL.
"I sincerely wish we could see our government so secured as to depend less on the character of the person in whose hands it is
trusted. Bad men will sometimes get in and with such an immense patronage may make great progress in corrupting the public mind and principles. This is a subject with which wisdom and patriotism should be occupied." -- Thomas Jefferson to Moses Robinson, 1801.
Unless it's put into dry lay-up, which requires inspection before being lit off, a naval steam plant can usually be restarted in only an hour or two if necessary, although if given time most shipmasters will prefer to light off boilers a day or so in advance of departure to minimize the stress on the boilers and the turbines. The primary obstruction to getting a marine steam plant lit off faster is the problem of delivering hot steam to a cold turbine; modern boilers are flash designs and can deliver steam quite quickly after being lit off, but feeding high-pressure steam to a cold turbine can wreck the turbine; steam is delivered slowly to warm the turbine to operating temperature before it is brought to power.
No, no... Ronco lost out on the contract to build the rovers; those will be in the next ones, which were subcontracted to Popeil.
Many volcanoes will blow out chunks of pumice in the course of an eruption. Because it's essentially foamed rock -- filled with bubbles from gas that expanded in the lava as it erupted and cooled -- it's less dense than water, and will float. However, because the island is new, their charts will have been unreliable as to the depth of water around the new island, and given that new lava flows can be sharp, I'm not surprised that they sheered off rather than approaching closer. With the sun going down, and the layer of pumice on the water preventing them from using water color as a guage for depth (which is moderately unreliable, depending on the bottom characteristics), and the almost certain lack of a sounding lead or depth sonar, I can entirely understand their hesitancy about taking the chance of running aground and ripping their hull just for a closer look.
Consider that even science-fiction writers have had at best a mediocre track record at predicting the advance of technology. For example, look at Robert Heinlein's work; before he wrote characters that were full AIs, he had written stories where interstellar spacecraft were navigated by taking star sights manually, converting the sight data into binary via lookup tables in a book, the way books of logarithms used to be used, then the data was entered, via toggle switches, into a computer that occupied most of a room, the results read off in binary from indicator lights and converted, using the lookup tables again, back to decimal numbers that were then used to adjust the ship's course. Writers have been just as egregious in underestimating technological progress as they have been in underestimating the difficulty of particular aspects of it.
Additionally, the term 'regulated', which for most people -- and, it seems, all of the gun-control advocates -- means 'restricted/controlled by law', it actually has another meaning that, while restricted in use, is still extant. 'Regulation' is a term for the process of adjusting the sights on a firearm so that where you aim is where the weapon will shoot. From American Handgunner, March-April 2003:
A 'well-regulated' firearm is one that has had its sights adjusted so that, when you pull the trigger, you'll hit where the sights are aimed. The same usage would also imply that a 'well-regulated' militia is one that can hit what they're aiming at. While it may be a stretch to make that extension, it is also true that, if the 2nd Amendment merely protects a state's authority to raise and maintain militias, the phrase 'the people' would not have been necessary in the wording, and it would have stated more clearly that the right was reserved to the states, as similarly stated elsewhere. And we have the judicial decision in United States v. Verdugo-Uriquez, 110 S.Ct. 1056, 108 L.Ed. 2d 222, 232-33 (1990) that, while focussing on the Fourth Amendment, cites the First and Second as well in concluding that the phrase "right of the people" is a term of art used throughout the Bill of Rights to designate rights pertaining to individual citizens (in contrast to the states).
One of the things that has prevented the adoption of many of the newer innovations in currency design for US paper currency is the 'crumple test', where a bill is rolled tightly, then inserted into a cylinder and crushed with a ramrod, then removed, rolled the other way, and crushed again. This process is repeated a total of 16 times; the note must remain recognizable. Prospective currency changes also go through a number of other durability tests -- being washed with eight cotton towels, being soaked in a variety of chemicals (such as bleach, sulfuric acid, and gasoline), 'rub tests' with a two-pound weight with a pad after bills are soaked in the chemicals, and others. So far, only relatively minor innovations, like the color-changing ink, have survived the durability tests -- for example, image holograms, IIRC, fail the crumple test badly.
We had to destroy your freedom in order to save it.
There are four boxes available to citizens to protect their liberty -- the soap box, the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box, which should be employed in that order.
There are situations where a brute-force solution is more practical than an elegantly-crafted solution. However, from what I've seen, software development has been a steady parade of "brute force uber alles" decisions, resulting in hardware requirements continually ratcheting higher and higher in order to run the code as fast as the previous version, because someone decided that it was an earth-shatteringly necessary program enhancement that the drop-down lists animated their expansion when you clicked on them instead of just BITBLTing the entire drop-down area onto the screen at once. As the virtual memory space available to programs has grown, the amount of care that programmers take to write efficient code seems to have gone down. Faster machines conceal sloppy, less-efficient code, and more memory conceals bloated, space-wasting code; whether this is a case of not being taught to write tight code, or accumulated sloppiness from not having to write tight code, I don't know.
At a previous job, I remember looking at one source file from a program that a contractor was developing for us; in each of two dozen functions in the file, they had the same data structure defined local to that function -- a 1000-element array of a structure with about a dozen numeric fields and four 256-character text fields. None of the functions in the file used the text fields in the structure; the structure had been copied from another file where a function did use the text fields, even though the functions didn't actually pass that structure between them; the data was read out of a database in each function. Even more entertaining was the fact that the first time we tested their code on real data, the function that did use the text fields in the structure cheerfully filled the staticly-size 1000-element array with the 2315 rows of data from our database, stomped all over itself because they hadn't put in any bounds checking, and crashed. My code, in a separate program that referenced the same data, used a linked-list module I'd written so that I didn't have to worry about whether I'd made the arrays big enough, and only allocated storage that was actually needed for the database content. I found out later that, after we'd turned the locally-developed code over to the contractor for maintenance support, that they went through and rewrote all my code to use fixed-length arrays, and had an ongoing failure problem due to the real-world data being bigger than the arrays they'd hard-coded into the software, making them go back and rebuild their code each time they got a crash report from the users. Made me wonder how they managed to stay in business with programmers like that.
A number of years ago, a costumer friend of mine made a Lens for a Gray Lensman costume -- bezel crammed full of electronics and LEDs to so that it would light up and ripple colors across its face. It generated a fair amount of heat and was uncomfortable to wear for any length of time when lit up.
Certainly there is a 'true value' for everything; it's the cost to produce it, both in actual outlay for supplies and in production time -- but measuring the value of production time can be slippery. This value is useful, however, only for the producer determining how many to make; the subsequent market value may bear no relationship to the true value. Take, say, one of van Rijn's paintings; his production costs were probably no more than a couple ounces of silver for materials and a few weeks of his time -- and now it would be 'worth' millions of dollars. Or look at most of what is produced as crafts for sale; I've seen products that sold for prices that, given the production time, equated to no more than $1.00 per hour as a wage, far below the 'minimum wage' set by law. Once something is put out for sale, though, you're correct; the only objective value is determined by whether a buyer will pay the price the seller sets for the object.
You'd never get a tax on livestock because of their greenhouse gas emissions passed in Texas; I'd bet that the legislature would construe that as 'defamation of beef', which Texas has laws against...
The automakers should countersue the California Legislature on the grounds that the emission of carbon dioxide, a known greenhouse gas, by the California state government constitutes the same harm to the resources, infrastructure and environmental health, demanding that the members of the California government cease respiration immediately as mitigation of this harm.
How much safer have you demonstrably been since the institution of the TSA and its screening programs? The British caught a couple of dozen would-be suicide bombers; how many millions of dollars have the US and Britain thrown into airline security, and how many identifiable terrorists were caught as a result of this increased security? The primary result I've seen from all of the increased security is that the American citizenry has been conditioned to accept that the government can sacrifice any of our liberties as long as it waves the flags of "national security and "the war on terror".
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-- Gustave Gilbert, an interview with Hermann Goering on the evening of 18 April 1946, published in Nuremberg Diaries.-- Benjamin Franklin, Historical review of the constitution and government of Pennsylvania, from its origin; so far as regards the several points of controversy, which have, from time to time, arisen between the several governors of that province, and their several assemblies, 1759, p.289
Because as long as the TSA continues to search John Q. Public "with significance", it perpetuates the perception that it's needed to deter terrorists; if there were to be no terrrorist incidents despite the TSA not stomping all over people's privacy, then people might get the impression that all of the other invasive measures that Shrub claims are "absolutely necessary" to prevent terrorism in our country are equally unnecessary; his agenda requires that he perpetuate the state of fear in order to allow him to continue to implement the policies that God has chosen him to carry out.