I think you need to improve your reading comprehension skills.
Here is what I said:
I am saying that this keyboard (as far as I know) doesn't contain any new inventions.
And yes, I am confident in saying "IF any device has no novel inventions in it, and only contains good ergonomic design (which as far as I know includes this device), then it shouldn't be able to be patented."
Note that this is slightly different than saying "I am confident that this device has no new inventions."
If you know of any new inventions in the blackberry keyboard, I'd be happy to hear them. Even if there are some new inventions in blackberry's keyboard, this doesn't change my overall argument, it just means that it no longer applies to this specific keyboard.
Actually I haven't seen it in action. I've never used a blackberry or even seen a person using one up close. I am saying that this keyboard (as far as I know) doesn't contain any new inventions. It's just well designed from an ergonomic standpoint. While this does require effort to do well, I don't think it makes sense to allow patents on good ergonomic design for the same reason we don't allow patents on food recipes or fashion designs, or board game rules.
As someone who pretty much only codes in python lately, I would agree except that I hate the fact that whitespace actually matters in python. I feel that this limits the utility of python while gaining only a modest increase to readability (according to some people).
Spending a bunch of money on R&D does not magically make something non-obvious. I'm not saying a court will necessarily determine that Blackberry's "invention" was obvious (because this seems to happen pretty rarely), but I am saying that I think that the concept is obvious, even if the specific implementation is not.
Yes I think it's important to do research to figure out how big the keys on a keyboard of size X need to be. I also think it's important that a hammer has a handle of the right diameter. If Stanley spends $1 million to determine the perfect handle diameter for a hammer, I still don't think it makes sense to allow Stanley to have a patent for hammers with handles of that diameter.
"give back" is probably not the right phrase. The money started in the private sector. Then it was fraudulently acquired by wall street types. Then it goes to the SEC. The SEC doesn't give anything back, they just want their cut.
I wouldn't have as much of a problem with the SEC spending all this money to protect us, if they actually were protecting us from something that was a higher cost to society than the SEC.
The last time I checked, actual scientific papers about climate model results included error bars. There is no better way to acknowledge inaccuracy of scientific models than providing error bars for the result.
Yes that was true the last time I checked as well.
There's nothing subjective about that. Scientists decide whether to accept given conclusions or not based on confidence test [wikipedia.org]. The hypothesis needs to hold in a test with 95% confidence level in order to be accepted.
How do you think the 95% threshold was chosen? 0.95 is not some kind of universal physical constant. In fact scientists don't always use a confidence interval of 0.95, this is just a common confidence interval. While this number is not arbitrary (i.e. it needs to be somewhat high), it is arbitrary in the sense that there is not much difference between using 0.95, 0.94 or 0.96.
The Anonymous Coward who started this thread of discussion [slashdot.org] was pretty clear about the meaning of his disregard: "As a physicist I do not take modeling of the atmosphere as we understood it now serious."
Saying "I will take X seriously" is not a scientific statement. We all know what a 0.95 confidence interval is. Whether you want to take a 0.95 CI "seriously" is subjective. By setting the threshold to 0.95 you are saying you don't take a 0.94 CI seriously. By setting your threshold to 0.99 you are saying you don't take a 0.98 CI seriously. It doesn't matter who takes what confidence intervals seriously (subjective), as long as we all agree on what the confidence interval is (objective).
If my research has a CI of 0.93 I can publish that and people can take it seriously or not. To some people it may be more convincing than others. The whole point of confidence intervals is to have an objective metric, but people are still free to subjectively decide what confidence interval is convincing to them. Maye 0.95 is enough for a climatologist but not enough for a quantum physicist. It doesn't matter. 0.95 is 0.95 to everybody.
I just want to be clear. Are you really saying that a meteor that kills 80% of the life on earth (i.e. a mass extinction event) is going to bring about change in the climate slower than what we are seeing today from CO2 emissions?
It's not a matter of disregarding the research or treating it as gospel. The models have a certain level of accuracy and precision, and we need to acknowledge that. Whether we feel a relative error of X% or an absolute error of X degrees is high enough to "disregard" research is somewhat subjective. What it even means to "disregard" research is subjective.
In a certain sense we shouldn't disregard any research if it is done well. Even if it doesn't contain any actionable information, it may at least save people from repeating the work unnecessarily to obtain data we already had.
Yes humans are "pumping crap into the atmosphere globally", but we didn't start doing it all of a sudden. This has been going on for over a century. A large meteor impact can cause a nuclear winter type effect globally in a much shorter timespan (e.g. months).
Where else will the feather land? In orbit around earth?
Are we counting a patio or a roof or a lake as not "the ground"? I don't think Immerman was claiming that a feather will always land on a specific type of ground (e.g. soil), but rather that it can't stay in the air perpetually.
I think what he is saying is that AGW can't be the climate changing event causing the highest rate of change. One would expect a large meteor strike to be far more rapid a change than one that takes centuries to cause a couple of degrees difference in temperature.
Maybe a large meteor strike took thousands of years to do all of it's damage, but it would presumably change the climate much more quickly than AGW.
A math teacher would lose his job if he taught kids that 2+2=5. This is not because there is a political agenda by the pro 2+2=4 crowd. It's because that if you *do* teach 2+2=5, that your math skills probably suck.
I am not saying you are a shitty scientist if your research shows AGW doesn't exist. It's just that most good research currently doesn't show this. If your research does show that AGW is nonexistent, and it is well done research, maybe you would get fired, but real scientists don't simply discard good science that disagrees with their previous conclusions. If your model makes accurate predictions, then that is the ultimate judge of your work, not your employer. This would be a huge breakthrough, and any legitimate research facility would want to use your work if it was accurate.
Proving someone wrong is not "proving a negative".
If I claim that "all cats are black", all you have to do to prove me wrong is to provide evidence of a cat that is not black.
If someone claims to know what the climate is going to be in the future, then they will get proven wrong if their predictions do not hold up. If their predictions are sufficiently vague, then they don't even need to be proven wrong to be dismissed.
You wouldn't have to show that all the thermometers are wrong. You would just have to accurately predict that the temperature of the planet would eventually go down, exactly when and by how much. If you could accurately predict climate, and your predictions show that it was going down, then you just disproved global warming. Maybe this still counts as climate change because the temperature went up a few degrees and then back down.
All you'd have to show is that the recent increase in temperature was temporary and not indicative of a larger trend.
Also, you don't need to show that "some unseen mechanism is stopping CO2 from warming the atmosphere". You just need to show that the net result of all the factors is going to be a decrease or a stabilization of the temperature (i.e. that it isn't going to continue to rise). A higher CO2 level doesn't cause the planet to warm indefinitely, it raises the temperature at which equilibrium occurs. Other things lower the equilibrium temperature. By accurately predicting climate, you would be showing this mechanism. If it wasn't "unseen", then we'd already know about it. At one time the effect of CO2 was "unseen". Lots of things in science are "unseen", until they are discovered.
And yes I think you could probably win a Nobel prize for this discovery. No I don't think this is likely to happen.
I think your characterization of how things need to work is very narrow.
Predicting weather is different than predicting climate. Even if you take something completely random like rolling a die, I can;t predict what the next roll will be, but I can predict very accurately that if I roll the die millions of times that the expected value of all the rolls will be very close to 3.5.
I am not saying that climate can be predicted very accurately. What I am saying is that we don't necessarily need to predict weather accurately in order to predict climate accurately.
I use to get a channel when I had cable PCN, Pennsylvania News Channel, they would have a 15 minute segment from Penn States weather center, they use computer models, but they also use there own knowledge of weather and often times go with what they believe would happen, and 90% of the time if they went with the computer model it would be wrong.
Computers do what humans tell them to. If you have some special knowledge that's more accurate than computer models, then you could just put that knowledge into the computer model to make it better. The advantage to using computer models is that a computer can do billions of computations a second and a human can't. If humans are right more often than the computer models, it just means that people are terrible at representing their own models within a computer.
All "computer models" are created by people and simply calculated on a computer. When you give the anecdotal evidence that people do a better job than computers. All you are saying is that some people do a better job than other people. This has nothing to do with the fact that computers are doing the calculations.
Why do people just jump at computers never being wrong, or the fact that despite science being around for thousands of years man has yet to fully understand how the planet works? Again programmed by man, and of course man is never wrong...
Computers are very rarely wrong (an example of this would be the floating point error in early pentium chips). They calculate what they are told to calculate. If a computer produces a wrong result it is because a human made a mistake. A computer is a tool. No one ever says "Why do people always us hammers to drive nails? My uncle can hit a nail into a piece of wood with his hand better than with a hammer.", because it's nonsensical. Either your uncle has a very shitty hammer, or he is using it wrong.
Computers are *the* tool to use for computing results from mathematical models. Yes humans make mistakes. They make far less mistakes using computers than doing arithmetic manually.
Saying that climate is chaotic and hard to predict shouldn't be controversial. It's pretty conceited to suggest that anyone who doesn;t agree with you needs to "read some of the research" and "come back with an informed opinion", when it appears that they themselves lack the informed opinion they require of others.
Becoming informed is more than just reading X scientific journals espousing a certain conclusion, and changing your mind to that conclusion.
If your sister has some valuable insight due to her experience in climate research then I would welcome her input. This really doesn't lend any merit to your opinion, which is basically anecdotal evidence of how your sister won an argument than some other person we don't know.
I'm going to take a guess and say your undergrad at best
I don't necessarily believe the OP is a physicist, but traditionally you are not allowed to call yourself a physicist if you are an undergrad physics major. Plus this kind of comment just makes you look like a dick.
And no, climate is not completely unpredictable, but compared to the accuracy and precision of predictions typically made in physics, climate models are several orders of magnitude worse.
If I wanted to be a dick here I would end my post with some kind of remark like "sorry, but thanks for playing". This kind of bullshit just detracts from the discourse.
How do you know it's not "Every time you believe something a little more, you also say it" (i.e. that the causal relationship is the other way around), or that there is some completely different 3rd cause that is causing you to both say racist things and believe them?
Please provide some kind of evidence for this claim that being black helped Obama. You keep saying this as if it needs no explanation.
And saying "Being black helped Obama because if he was white he wouldn't have won" is not an explanation or evidence, it is simply restating your assertion a different way.
Also, if we are "fond of blacks" why didn't any other blacks become president until now? Is this "fondness for blacks" a new thing?
I think racist comments certainly have a negative effect. I also think angry mobs that make examples out of unlucky people also have a negative effect.
Maybe Justine got what she deserved, and maybe some extra. When is the angry mob going to get what they deserve?
And odds are that once you start throwing around slurs you'll ever-so-slowly start believing them, at least a little. That's just how the human mind appears to work.
common sense != science
Unless you have done some kind of credible scientific study, or can cite one showing that saying racial slurs causes you to believe them, this is simply conjecture.
It may seem plausible to some people. That doesn't mean it's objectively true.
Another (simpler) hypothesis is simply that saying racial slurs is simply an indicator of racism rather than a cause of it.
Correlation is easy. You have to do a lot of work to show causation
If you want to fight against cultural biases then fine, but you need to find some way to do that other than telling people to quit speaking words you don't like to hear.
Telling people to quit speaking words they don't like, is also speech that falls under the first amendment and the general principle of free speech.
Using any kind of coercion to prohibit speech (between individuals or through the government) is anti-free speech, but merely using speech suggesting people should shut up is not anti-free speech, but just more free speech.
There is a difference between being a contributing factor to a an outcome, and being culpable or blameworthy for that outcome.
If a drunk driver runs a red light and crashes his car into your car, and both of you die, there are many contributing factors to this outcome. Some contributing factors might be that the driver was drunk, that his father abused him when he was young (contributing to his alcoholism in adulthood), etc. You driving home at that exact time was also a contributing factor. If you weren't there then the accident might not have happened, or happened differently.
That doesn't mean that all these contributing factors are partly responsible for the outcome.
While you may have been a contributing cause, what you did (driving home at the wrong time) was not blameworthy.
The alcoholics father certainly contributed to his son's personality. But is the father blameworthy for the car accident? What about his father (the grandfather)? or his father (the great grandfather)?
The reason the father is not culpable is because it is not reasonable to expect that his bad parenting will naturally cause an innocent person to be killed in a car accident by his son while he is drunk driving.
It is also not reasonable to expect that a botched siege by the federal government would naturally lead to someone deciding to blow a building full of innocent people that had nothing to do with that siege. That is not a reasonable thing to do as a result of how Waco was handled.
If the Oklahoma city bombing never occurred would anyone think: "Hmm that's weird, I would have expected some kind of domestic terrorist act as a result of how Waco went down". Even though Waco was a a large contributing factor, the Oklahoma city bombing was not something that should have been expected as a natural result of Waco.
Did you just say that that if any government employee's actions leads to the unjust death of another human being, then that whole government is now responsible for murder and everyone in that government should receive the death penalty?
Well I guess you didn't say that. I made it up. But a conversation can get out of hand pretty quickly if people don't make an effort to read what people actually say.
I can't understand why anyone would believe a single word spoken by the the Executive branch, the NSA -- any of them. They're just a bunch self-serving liars who murder people. Why would you believe them at all??
Obviously because I don't believe the US government is "just a bunch of self-serving liars who murder people".
Maybe you don't think the us government is any better than Al-Qaeda or the Nazis or the Spanish Inquisition, or whatever is the most evil organization in human history, and that has led you to this conclusion. I just don't agree with this premise.
I think our government has both good and bad aspects to it. (i.e. it's not perfect). I don't think the people at the top are ruthless killers who enjoy seeing dead children. I think there are *some* bad people in the government who profit at the expense of other, and there are also incompetent people who cause bad things to happen unintentionally, but there are also people who are doing a good job.
Some people like to see everything in black and white, but when things aren't black and white, that kind of thinking doesn't really lead to anything useful.
Slashdot Mirror
I am saying that this keyboard (as far as I know) doesn't contain any new inventions.
And yes, I am confident in saying "IF any device has no novel inventions in it, and only contains good ergonomic design (which as far as I know includes this device), then it shouldn't be able to be patented."
Note that this is slightly different than saying "I am confident that this device has no new inventions."
If you know of any new inventions in the blackberry keyboard, I'd be happy to hear them. Even if there are some new inventions in blackberry's keyboard, this doesn't change my overall argument, it just means that it no longer applies to this specific keyboard.
Actually I haven't seen it in action. I've never used a blackberry or even seen a person using one up close. I am saying that this keyboard (as far as I know) doesn't contain any new inventions. It's just well designed from an ergonomic standpoint. While this does require effort to do well, I don't think it makes sense to allow patents on good ergonomic design for the same reason we don't allow patents on food recipes or fashion designs, or board game rules.
As someone who pretty much only codes in python lately, I would agree except that I hate the fact that whitespace actually matters in python. I feel that this limits the utility of python while gaining only a modest increase to readability (according to some people).
Spending a bunch of money on R&D does not magically make something non-obvious. I'm not saying a court will necessarily determine that Blackberry's "invention" was obvious (because this seems to happen pretty rarely), but I am saying that I think that the concept is obvious, even if the specific implementation is not.
Yes I think it's important to do research to figure out how big the keys on a keyboard of size X need to be. I also think it's important that a hammer has a handle of the right diameter. If Stanley spends $1 million to determine the perfect handle diameter for a hammer, I still don't think it makes sense to allow Stanley to have a patent for hammers with handles of that diameter.
"give back" is probably not the right phrase. The money started in the private sector. Then it was fraudulently acquired by wall street types. Then it goes to the SEC. The SEC doesn't give anything back, they just want their cut.
I wouldn't have as much of a problem with the SEC spending all this money to protect us, if they actually were protecting us from something that was a higher cost to society than the SEC.
The last time I checked, actual scientific papers about climate model results included error bars. There is no better way to acknowledge inaccuracy of scientific models than providing error bars for the result.
Yes that was true the last time I checked as well.
There's nothing subjective about that. Scientists decide whether to accept given conclusions or not based on confidence test [wikipedia.org]. The hypothesis needs to hold in a test with 95% confidence level in order to be accepted.
How do you think the 95% threshold was chosen? 0.95 is not some kind of universal physical constant. In fact scientists don't always use a confidence interval of 0.95, this is just a common confidence interval. While this number is not arbitrary (i.e. it needs to be somewhat high), it is arbitrary in the sense that there is not much difference between using 0.95, 0.94 or 0.96.
The Anonymous Coward who started this thread of discussion [slashdot.org] was pretty clear about the meaning of his disregard: "As a physicist I do not take modeling of the atmosphere as we understood it now serious."
Saying "I will take X seriously" is not a scientific statement. We all know what a 0.95 confidence interval is. Whether you want to take a 0.95 CI "seriously" is subjective. By setting the threshold to 0.95 you are saying you don't take a 0.94 CI seriously. By setting your threshold to 0.99 you are saying you don't take a 0.98 CI seriously. It doesn't matter who takes what confidence intervals seriously (subjective), as long as we all agree on what the confidence interval is (objective).
If my research has a CI of 0.93 I can publish that and people can take it seriously or not. To some people it may be more convincing than others. The whole point of confidence intervals is to have an objective metric, but people are still free to subjectively decide what confidence interval is convincing to them. Maye 0.95 is enough for a climatologist but not enough for a quantum physicist. It doesn't matter. 0.95 is 0.95 to everybody.
I just want to be clear. Are you really saying that a meteor that kills 80% of the life on earth (i.e. a mass extinction event) is going to bring about change in the climate slower than what we are seeing today from CO2 emissions?
It's not a matter of disregarding the research or treating it as gospel. The models have a certain level of accuracy and precision, and we need to acknowledge that. Whether we feel a relative error of X% or an absolute error of X degrees is high enough to "disregard" research is somewhat subjective. What it even means to "disregard" research is subjective.
In a certain sense we shouldn't disregard any research if it is done well. Even if it doesn't contain any actionable information, it may at least save people from repeating the work unnecessarily to obtain data we already had.
Yes humans are "pumping crap into the atmosphere globally", but we didn't start doing it all of a sudden. This has been going on for over a century. A large meteor impact can cause a nuclear winter type effect globally in a much shorter timespan (e.g. months).
Where else will the feather land? In orbit around earth?
Are we counting a patio or a roof or a lake as not "the ground"? I don't think Immerman was claiming that a feather will always land on a specific type of ground (e.g. soil), but rather that it can't stay in the air perpetually.
I think what he is saying is that AGW can't be the climate changing event causing the highest rate of change. One would expect a large meteor strike to be far more rapid a change than one that takes centuries to cause a couple of degrees difference in temperature.
Maybe a large meteor strike took thousands of years to do all of it's damage, but it would presumably change the climate much more quickly than AGW.
No, he'd lose his job if the science was bad.
A math teacher would lose his job if he taught kids that 2+2=5. This is not because there is a political agenda by the pro 2+2=4 crowd. It's because that if you *do* teach 2+2=5, that your math skills probably suck.
I am not saying you are a shitty scientist if your research shows AGW doesn't exist. It's just that most good research currently doesn't show this. If your research does show that AGW is nonexistent, and it is well done research, maybe you would get fired, but real scientists don't simply discard good science that disagrees with their previous conclusions. If your model makes accurate predictions, then that is the ultimate judge of your work, not your employer. This would be a huge breakthrough, and any legitimate research facility would want to use your work if it was accurate.
Proving someone wrong is not "proving a negative".
If I claim that "all cats are black", all you have to do to prove me wrong is to provide evidence of a cat that is not black.
If someone claims to know what the climate is going to be in the future, then they will get proven wrong if their predictions do not hold up. If their predictions are sufficiently vague, then they don't even need to be proven wrong to be dismissed.
You wouldn't have to show that all the thermometers are wrong. You would just have to accurately predict that the temperature of the planet would eventually go down, exactly when and by how much. If you could accurately predict climate, and your predictions show that it was going down, then you just disproved global warming. Maybe this still counts as climate change because the temperature went up a few degrees and then back down.
All you'd have to show is that the recent increase in temperature was temporary and not indicative of a larger trend.
Also, you don't need to show that "some unseen mechanism is stopping CO2 from warming the atmosphere". You just need to show that the net result of all the factors is going to be a decrease or a stabilization of the temperature (i.e. that it isn't going to continue to rise). A higher CO2 level doesn't cause the planet to warm indefinitely, it raises the temperature at which equilibrium occurs. Other things lower the equilibrium temperature. By accurately predicting climate, you would be showing this mechanism. If it wasn't "unseen", then we'd already know about it. At one time the effect of CO2 was "unseen". Lots of things in science are "unseen", until they are discovered.
And yes I think you could probably win a Nobel prize for this discovery. No I don't think this is likely to happen.
I think your characterization of how things need to work is very narrow.
Predicting weather is different than predicting climate. Even if you take something completely random like rolling a die, I can;t predict what the next roll will be, but I can predict very accurately that if I roll the die millions of times that the expected value of all the rolls will be very close to 3.5.
I am not saying that climate can be predicted very accurately. What I am saying is that we don't necessarily need to predict weather accurately in order to predict climate accurately.
I use to get a channel when I had cable PCN, Pennsylvania News Channel, they would have a 15 minute segment from Penn States weather center, they use computer models, but they also use there own knowledge of weather and often times go with what they believe would happen, and 90% of the time if they went with the computer model it would be wrong.
Computers do what humans tell them to. If you have some special knowledge that's more accurate than computer models, then you could just put that knowledge into the computer model to make it better. The advantage to using computer models is that a computer can do billions of computations a second and a human can't. If humans are right more often than the computer models, it just means that people are terrible at representing their own models within a computer.
All "computer models" are created by people and simply calculated on a computer. When you give the anecdotal evidence that people do a better job than computers. All you are saying is that some people do a better job than other people. This has nothing to do with the fact that computers are doing the calculations.
Why do people just jump at computers never being wrong, or the fact that despite science being around for thousands of years man has yet to fully understand how the planet works? Again programmed by man, and of course man is never wrong...
Computers are very rarely wrong (an example of this would be the floating point error in early pentium chips). They calculate what they are told to calculate. If a computer produces a wrong result it is because a human made a mistake. A computer is a tool. No one ever says "Why do people always us hammers to drive nails? My uncle can hit a nail into a piece of wood with his hand better than with a hammer.", because it's nonsensical. Either your uncle has a very shitty hammer, or he is using it wrong.
Computers are *the* tool to use for computing results from mathematical models. Yes humans make mistakes. They make far less mistakes using computers than doing arithmetic manually.
Saying that climate is chaotic and hard to predict shouldn't be controversial. It's pretty conceited to suggest that anyone who doesn;t agree with you needs to "read some of the research" and "come back with an informed opinion", when it appears that they themselves lack the informed opinion they require of others.
Becoming informed is more than just reading X scientific journals espousing a certain conclusion, and changing your mind to that conclusion.
If your sister has some valuable insight due to her experience in climate research then I would welcome her input. This really doesn't lend any merit to your opinion, which is basically anecdotal evidence of how your sister won an argument than some other person we don't know.
I'm going to take a guess and say your undergrad at best
I don't necessarily believe the OP is a physicist, but traditionally you are not allowed to call yourself a physicist if you are an undergrad physics major. Plus this kind of comment just makes you look like a dick.
And no, climate is not completely unpredictable, but compared to the accuracy and precision of predictions typically made in physics, climate models are several orders of magnitude worse.
If I wanted to be a dick here I would end my post with some kind of remark like "sorry, but thanks for playing". This kind of bullshit just detracts from the discourse.
How do you know it's not "Every time you believe something a little more, you also say it" (i.e. that the causal relationship is the other way around), or that there is some completely different 3rd cause that is causing you to both say racist things and believe them?
Please provide some kind of evidence for this claim that being black helped Obama. You keep saying this as if it needs no explanation.
And saying "Being black helped Obama because if he was white he wouldn't have won" is not an explanation or evidence, it is simply restating your assertion a different way.
Also, if we are "fond of blacks" why didn't any other blacks become president until now? Is this "fondness for blacks" a new thing?
I think racist comments certainly have a negative effect. I also think angry mobs that make examples out of unlucky people also have a negative effect.
Maybe Justine got what she deserved, and maybe some extra. When is the angry mob going to get what they deserve?
And odds are that once you start throwing around slurs you'll ever-so-slowly start believing them, at least a little. That's just how the human mind appears to work.
common sense != science
Unless you have done some kind of credible scientific study, or can cite one showing that saying racial slurs causes you to believe them, this is simply conjecture.
It may seem plausible to some people. That doesn't mean it's objectively true.
Another (simpler) hypothesis is simply that saying racial slurs is simply an indicator of racism rather than a cause of it.
Correlation is easy. You have to do a lot of work to show causation
If you want to fight against cultural biases then fine, but you need to find some way to do that other than telling people to quit speaking words you don't like to hear.
Telling people to quit speaking words they don't like, is also speech that falls under the first amendment and the general principle of free speech.
Using any kind of coercion to prohibit speech (between individuals or through the government) is anti-free speech, but merely using speech suggesting people should shut up is not anti-free speech, but just more free speech.
There is a difference between being a contributing factor to a an outcome, and being culpable or blameworthy for that outcome.
If a drunk driver runs a red light and crashes his car into your car, and both of you die, there are many contributing factors to this outcome. Some contributing factors might be that the driver was drunk, that his father abused him when he was young (contributing to his alcoholism in adulthood), etc. You driving home at that exact time was also a contributing factor. If you weren't there then the accident might not have happened, or happened differently.
That doesn't mean that all these contributing factors are partly responsible for the outcome.
While you may have been a contributing cause, what you did (driving home at the wrong time) was not blameworthy.
The alcoholics father certainly contributed to his son's personality. But is the father blameworthy for the car accident? What about his father (the grandfather)? or his father (the great grandfather)?
The reason the father is not culpable is because it is not reasonable to expect that his bad parenting will naturally cause an innocent person to be killed in a car accident by his son while he is drunk driving.
It is also not reasonable to expect that a botched siege by the federal government would naturally lead to someone deciding to blow a building full of innocent people that had nothing to do with that siege. That is not a reasonable thing to do as a result of how Waco was handled.
If the Oklahoma city bombing never occurred would anyone think: "Hmm that's weird, I would have expected some kind of domestic terrorist act as a result of how Waco went down". Even though Waco was a a large contributing factor, the Oklahoma city bombing was not something that should have been expected as a natural result of Waco.
Did you just say that that if any government employee's actions leads to the unjust death of another human being, then that whole government is now responsible for murder and everyone in that government should receive the death penalty?
Well I guess you didn't say that. I made it up. But a conversation can get out of hand pretty quickly if people don't make an effort to read what people actually say.
I can't understand why anyone would believe a single word spoken by the the Executive branch, the NSA -- any of them. They're just a bunch self-serving liars who murder people. Why would you believe them at all??
Obviously because I don't believe the US government is "just a bunch of self-serving liars who murder people".
Maybe you don't think the us government is any better than Al-Qaeda or the Nazis or the Spanish Inquisition, or whatever is the most evil organization in human history, and that has led you to this conclusion. I just don't agree with this premise.
I think our government has both good and bad aspects to it. (i.e. it's not perfect). I don't think the people at the top are ruthless killers who enjoy seeing dead children. I think there are *some* bad people in the government who profit at the expense of other, and there are also incompetent people who cause bad things to happen unintentionally, but there are also people who are doing a good job.
Some people like to see everything in black and white, but when things aren't black and white, that kind of thinking doesn't really lead to anything useful.