I don't see that this is necessarily discrimination. I would think that if they wanted to fail on Wine, and they had a way of knowing it was Wine (they do, the registry key) it would be trivial to fail in all cases.
However, they don't. They only fail when Wine is emulating earlier versions of Windows, which might be a problem with Wine's emulation. Barring further evidence, I would look at the Wine check as a means to count Wine users, not to block them.
Science has shown that brain cells of certain animals (including humans, I believe) are sensitive to light. The thought that neurons, evolved for a different purpose, might by accident become photosensitive, is not too far-fetched, particularly considering the close relationship between light and electricity.
From there to specialization, and the formation of lenses to make them more acute, is just a matter of gradual steps. Hence one might well say 1 (neurons) + 1 (specialization) = 2 (eyes), without starting at a highly improbable 2.
Your last sentence really seems like you describing yourself. It certainly doesn't describe me. If you are "living a lie", that's for you to realize, it's doesn't affect me one way or the other.
Good point. Why do scientists get so worked up when other people act in ways we consider stupid?
Try this on for size: Scientists don't dream of telling people what church they can worship at, or what prayers they may say. If people choose not to reap the fruits of scientific progress, more power to them (I will grant that Christian Scientists who want to let their kids die are an exception here).
But Christians, based on a belief that God despises certain things, tell gay people they can't marry, scientists that they don't get to work with embryos, and teens that they can't watch porn.
Scientists point to the global warming problem, which will bring untold harm on our descendants if left unchecked. But since it's possible that the increase in temperature is just a fluke (just like it's possible that God arranged for animals to appear in the order they did), the leader of the free world decides it's better to give polluters free rein and bring in some more revenue.
I wouldn't mind if there were a colony on the Moon I could go off to, and leave Christians and their lackeys to make the world into whatever they want. But I'm stuck here, so I try to help people realize that viewpoints like yours are so much fruitless BS.
And don't worry; I don't lose sleep worrying if there's a lake of fire waiting for me at the bitter end.
Science is about more than the "possibility" of things. Scientists don't deny that any explanation that fits the facts could be true. They try to find an explanation that fits the facts and is most useful in planning for the future.
If you state that there is a God who set up everything so that we'd find the world the way it is, nobody can refute you. But your statement becomes meaningless to scientists, as science seeks to predict based on the past. As such, science isn't a search for absolute "truth," it's a search for rules that, backed up by past experience, predict future developments. That is not to say that we predict the future completely; probability still plays a role. However, we can characterize future developments in a way that is useful to people.
If you choose to argue about the nature of Absolute Truth, you have an uphill battle, as Buddhists, Taoists, Shintoists, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, etc. each lay similar claims, and there is no way to argue about whether God created Heaven and Earth, whether the universe is an expression of Buddha-mind, whether it is a flow of Ch'i, whether all atoms are their own tiny gods, whether it is made and broken by the wheel of Karma, whether Allah called it into being, or what. Have fun.
If you choose the scientific path instead, then you have to get off your high horse and start trying to make predictions with us scientists. We've been embracing systematic, predictable systems of development throughout our training; you'd get pretty humble pretty quick.
The purpose of a science book is to teach people the skills of prediction based on experience. Hence the teaching of evolution, a predictive theory based on past experience, is quite reasonable. Teaching that God made everything the way it is, so He could break it just as easily, doesn't help anyone, it just makes Christians feel good.
The OED defines "evidence" as "Grounds for belief; testimony or facts tending to prove or disprove any conclusion." They tend to prove it; however close the statement may come to being true, it will never be undeniable.
Evidence in the archaeological record, coupled with modern experimentation and observation, indicate that evolution is a good explanation, and quite probably occurred. That is not to say that it undeniably did.
I never mentioned causation, on the other hand. Let's swat down that straw man right now.
If a basketball had cells with genes similar to mine, and I saw basketballs being born and passing on their genes, I would be inclined to believe there was a common ancestor. You're singling out a particular aspect of the issue and examining it in a vacuum - fun in debates, fatal in scientific endeavor.
Creation has massive bodies of evidence in its favor, wether [sic] you are aware of them or not.
I call bullshit. Every 'intelligent design' discussion I've ever seen has said "Oh, here's a problem with evolution, there must be a God!" Even were we to suppose that evolution wasn't responsible for whatever phenomenon the theists seized on, automatically assuming intelligent design is invalid.
As to your claims of a straw man on my part, I was addressing the general issue being discussed here, which is "Does 'intelligent design' deserve equal treatment with Evolution?" And until 'intelligent design' advocates get a lot better at giving positive evidence, intelligent design will continue to be far-fetched.
As to your "factual" objections I won't restate Scientific American's elegant refutation of most of them here; here's a link instead.
As to the special properties of certain atoms, molecules, and universal constants that permit life as we know it to exist, that argument is cyclical. We're here, so life exists; hence there must be some way for it to exist. Perhaps one day we'll find out how the universal constants got that way, until then you can merrily claim that a God did it for all I care.
Finally, as to the Ten Plagues, the only evidence of them I could turn up after some Googling are the "Admonitions of Ipuwer," which describe political turmoil in Egypt and a foreign invasion. The colorful language used in the papyrus does suggest rivers of blood, apparently, but then again wars are pretty bloody.
You equate "evolution" with "anticipatory change," revealing a lack of understanding of the principles of evolution as laid out by Charles Darwin. The principles are random mutations and gradual spread of beneficial mutations due to the increased viability of individuals possessing them.
There is only an annecdotal [sic] collection of hypotheses with an attendant philosophical belief.
In some places in the world, religious people are respected for their wisdom, because their philosophy makes them happy in this world. Are you so dissatisfied with your own religion that you have to resort to loud, desperate, and myopic assertions that everyone else is living a lie?
As a scientist, I do too. But everything's possible; the goal of science is to determine what, given the evidence we have, has the greatest likelihood of being true.
Read this for information on carbon-dating. Carbon absorption due to atmospheric phenomena is a problem, so there is some variability; however, reasonably accurate estimates can still be made. Carbon-dating is still valid, since radioactive decay has been observed in nature many times.
"Expirical observation," etc. show nothing of the sort. Our genes are messy and inefficient, with many areas being simply rubble from the process of transposition and adjustment that produced our current genome. Archaeologists have unearthed skeletons of animals whose similarities are strong evidence for evolutionary progression.
I'm not saying theory is fact. I'm saying theory is something that can be tested. Evolution is continually tested in the fields of endeavor that I described.
"Documentation and duplication" are, admittedly, hard over geological time. The evidence of evolution is still there, and many genetic phenomena we observe (humans' genetic similarity to monkeys, etc.) suggest that this theory is correct.
Evolution has massive bodies of evidence in its favor, and has shown itself to be resilient in the face of newly discovered facts. Although I will grant you that it is not the provable truth, it is nevertheless an eminently viable scientific theory.
Equating proponents of evolution with a group of dogmatists who hold to a far-fetched idea in the face of (1) the absence of positive evidence of the truth of their particular worldview, and (2) the ongoing resolution of issues they raised to discredit their competition is "intellectual dishonesty."
Perhaps not in every discussion. But in this case we're talking about placing "intelligent design" on a par with evolution for the purposes of science. Hence this terminology does apply.
Creationism is a theory that is unprovable except by the appearance of a "supreme being," which is documented only by ancient and contradictory sources. It is speculation.
Evolution is testable. Carbon-dating, empirical observation, archaeology, and genetics all indicate that evolution has taken place from more primitive forms of life to those seen today. It is a theory.
The term theory has been coopted by religious fundamentalists, and twisted it to mean something it's not. Good science is based on weeding viable theories from speculation.
Absolutely. Dressing up subject material in "bling" doesn't make it any more palatable. The way to make science more accessible is to teach an enjoyment for learning how the world works at an early age.
Kids know that science is not entertainment, and trying to dress it up as such tells them that you don't think science itself is worthwhile. Enthusiasm for the subject on the part of the teacher is worth more than a world of interpretive dances and rap tunes.
Answer: value to you != value to others. Just because you spend a week making something does not mean you have the right to extract value from it.
That's the fundamental argument here: there's a culture of believing that simply because an author or musician sits down and writes / records something, they automatically gain the right to sue everyone that reproduces it.
There's a simple philosophical difference here: are you willing to have your rights systematically restricted and traded, or not?
But your argument relates to my "painting" passage. I was simply calling a painting physical property. In the context of that passage, a painting is no more than a piece of paper and some chemicals spread over its surface, regardless of the means used to transfer them.
Such a piece of paper is worth whatever you can get for it. If Van Gogh spent a minute on a pencil sketch, that would fetch more than a painting you or I spent a year on.
You can still have your "free speech" within the limits of "not yelling fire in a crowded theatre" or plagerizing others "free speech".
Speech that is restricted is not free.
Perhaps it is unjustified to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theatre; the danger to people's lives may justify that restriction. So the government, to protect the lives of its citizens, restricts my free speech.
What's different about copyright is that it gives anybody a blank check to restrict speech and the press, effectively commoditizing a basic right. The US Constitution recognized that this had very limited use, qualifying it by stating that a limited copyright should only be used to "promote science and useful Arts."
The Constitutional Convention should have realized that if you allow even the most limited restrictions on a right, that right will be further infringed as long as there are moneyed interests lobbying for such infringement.
Hence, at the behest of IP clearinghouses like Disney, copyright is neither limited (the Supreme Court has held that repeated extension of copyright does not violate the "limited" clause) nor limited to science and useful arts (novels, movies, and songs are now covered).
Your "specific expression" logic is vague. Do you mean I can't take a book that contains a piece of text from a bookstore without paying? That's covered by common law. But I can neither rewrite that book nor make a movie or radio-play out of it without running into copyright issues. "Specific expressions" are clearly a lot less specific than you seem to think.
Property is what you can lose. If you create a sculpture, you can lose it; if you paint a painting, you can lose it. "Intellectual Property," on the other hand, is the "right" to tell other people they may not produce certain things.
The market sets a value on that which is scarce - i.e. what a person cannot have if someone else has it. "Intellectual property" has a value only because governments are letting people and companies buy and sell the right to restrict what people say and do.
This is unconscionable. I don't care how much people earn by doing it, it's still wrong. Restricting people's rights to life and liberty held up the American South's cotton economy until the mid-1800s. Restricting people's right to free speech and movement held up the Soviet Russian economy.
I don't care how much "time and effort" somebody puts in to get the right to muzzle me. I still won't be muzzled. Anyone who thinks gagging the public is "fair compensation" for a creative act doesn't deserve to have free speech.
The people who got drafted to go fight in Russia or France aren't people I'd be proud of killing. We're not talking about Himmler's Totenkopfeinheiten here; these are humans, many of whom would probably much rather be safe at home than in some foreign country getting shot at.
I would be more inclined to draw the moral line at the shooting of defenseless people, if I were going to draw one.
I disagree. I think that, properly implemented, this card could provide new and useful functionality:
it could provide accelerated implementations of functions that are specific to open systems (X11 acceleration, full integration with Xrender, etc).,
it could provide sophisticated multi-client functionality, for example handling clipping rectangles in hardware in cooperation with the window manager, and
it could provide a complete, hardware-level programmable interface for coders, in the style of the PlayStation2's Vector Units.
I'm not trying to "swoon" Rob. I was merely illustrating the fact that there are a ton of kernels out there. I'll grant that Plan 9 does implement a new userland, but would also say that it is probably not the one that's going to be driving OS research in the future.
The reason is that Plan 9's strength (from what I've seen) is presentation of data on a finite, fixed-size collection of known computers. The resources of these computers are made virtually indistinguishable in a very elegant manner.
The cluster, however, doesn't seem to be the foundation of the user computing experience nowdays. (Granted, research labs and company server farms use them, but they are not the driving force of user-space innovation, generally preferring highy specialized management tools.) For the average user, the great computing resources are:
their personal, usually single-processor, workstation,
the Internet, an amorphous mass of processors offering widely varying services and capabilities, and possibly
portable devices of various sorts.
What I'm interested in is how Rob thinks the userland will shift to adjust to these realities.
Say Saddam had bought a mobile radar truck. He could be using it to monitor his airspace... or he could be planning to use it as a generator to power a plutonium refining machine. (After all, trucks contain diesel engines, which are used in generators! Never mind that the engine is entirely unsuitable as a power plant.)
The latter explanation is ridiculous, regardless of how malicious Saddam is. Seriously postulating it is stupid. Saying "Saddam is purchasing equipment used to make nuclear weapons" with this as a primary basis, and using that statement as justification for an invasion of Iraq, is lying.
Right now, there are a large number of research kernels. Plan 9, Inferno, AtheOS, Syllable, K42, Mach, L4, etc. all have their own ideas about the future of the kernel. But they all end up implementing a POSIX interface because the UNIX userland is the default.
The kernel space needs to be invigorated using a new userland that demands new and innovative functionality from the underlying system. Suppose you were to design a user environment for the next 30 years. What would the central abstractions be? What sort of applications would it support?
No. George Bush claimed in his State of the Union address of the 28th, that Saddam was trying to buy tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.
These tubes were made of the wrong kind of aluminum for uranium enrichment. They were too long and too narrow to be suitable. This was in the IAEA report the Bush administration, and the entire UN Security Council, had seen. It was not speculation, it was based on real tubes seized in Jordan. The administration, with Bush as its mouthpiece, lied.
In his speech to the Security Council which underscored the need for war, Colin Powell told the Council that the tolerances for the tubes were better than for any rocket even the US uses. He had, actually, been informed that the tubes were manufactured to comparable tolerances as US rocket tubes. The administration, with Colin Powell as its mouthpiece, lied.
Seems like much ado about nothing, right? But this is the cornerstone of the Administration's belief that Saddam was trying to acquire nuclear weapons. These tubes were the only hard evidence they had going for them.
They weren't just willfully gullible in taking biased reports from a no-name in the CIA which contradicted evidence from DoE experts (a crime of which Kerry and Edwards are also guilty), but they willfully lied. This is now clear.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see that this is necessarily discrimination. I would think that if they wanted to fail on Wine, and they had a way of knowing it was Wine (they do, the registry key) it would be trivial to fail in all cases.
However, they don't. They only fail when Wine is emulating earlier versions of Windows, which might be a problem with Wine's emulation. Barring further evidence, I would look at the Wine check as a means to count Wine users, not to block them.
Additionally, they manage to blow what would easily fit on 1 page to 4. This story was not worth posting on Slashdot.
From there to specialization, and the formation of lenses to make them more acute, is just a matter of gradual steps. Hence one might well say 1 (neurons) + 1 (specialization) = 2 (eyes), without starting at a highly improbable 2.
Try this on for size: Scientists don't dream of telling people what church they can worship at, or what prayers they may say. If people choose not to reap the fruits of scientific progress, more power to them (I will grant that Christian Scientists who want to let their kids die are an exception here).
But Christians, based on a belief that God despises certain things, tell gay people they can't marry, scientists that they don't get to work with embryos, and teens that they can't watch porn.
Scientists point to the global warming problem, which will bring untold harm on our descendants if left unchecked. But since it's possible that the increase in temperature is just a fluke (just like it's possible that God arranged for animals to appear in the order they did), the leader of the free world decides it's better to give polluters free rein and bring in some more revenue.
I wouldn't mind if there were a colony on the Moon I could go off to, and leave Christians and their lackeys to make the world into whatever they want. But I'm stuck here, so I try to help people realize that viewpoints like yours are so much fruitless BS.
And don't worry; I don't lose sleep worrying if there's a lake of fire waiting for me at the bitter end.
Science is about more than the "possibility" of things. Scientists don't deny that any explanation that fits the facts could be true. They try to find an explanation that fits the facts and is most useful in planning for the future.
If you state that there is a God who set up everything so that we'd find the world the way it is, nobody can refute you. But your statement becomes meaningless to scientists, as science seeks to predict based on the past. As such, science isn't a search for absolute "truth," it's a search for rules that, backed up by past experience, predict future developments. That is not to say that we predict the future completely; probability still plays a role. However, we can characterize future developments in a way that is useful to people.
If you choose to argue about the nature of Absolute Truth, you have an uphill battle, as Buddhists, Taoists, Shintoists, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, etc. each lay similar claims, and there is no way to argue about whether God created Heaven and Earth, whether the universe is an expression of Buddha-mind, whether it is a flow of Ch'i, whether all atoms are their own tiny gods, whether it is made and broken by the wheel of Karma, whether Allah called it into being, or what. Have fun.
If you choose the scientific path instead, then you have to get off your high horse and start trying to make predictions with us scientists. We've been embracing systematic, predictable systems of development throughout our training; you'd get pretty humble pretty quick.
The purpose of a science book is to teach people the skills of prediction based on experience. Hence the teaching of evolution, a predictive theory based on past experience, is quite reasonable. Teaching that God made everything the way it is, so He could break it just as easily, doesn't help anyone, it just makes Christians feel good.
Evidence in the archaeological record, coupled with modern experimentation and observation, indicate that evolution is a good explanation, and quite probably occurred. That is not to say that it undeniably did.
I never mentioned causation, on the other hand. Let's swat down that straw man right now.
If a basketball had cells with genes similar to mine, and I saw basketballs being born and passing on their genes, I would be inclined to believe there was a common ancestor. You're singling out a particular aspect of the issue and examining it in a vacuum - fun in debates, fatal in scientific endeavor.
I call bullshit. Every 'intelligent design' discussion I've ever seen has said "Oh, here's a problem with evolution, there must be a God!" Even were we to suppose that evolution wasn't responsible for whatever phenomenon the theists seized on, automatically assuming intelligent design is invalid.As to your claims of a straw man on my part, I was addressing the general issue being discussed here, which is "Does 'intelligent design' deserve equal treatment with Evolution?" And until 'intelligent design' advocates get a lot better at giving positive evidence, intelligent design will continue to be far-fetched.
As to the special properties of certain atoms, molecules, and universal constants that permit life as we know it to exist, that argument is cyclical. We're here, so life exists; hence there must be some way for it to exist. Perhaps one day we'll find out how the universal constants got that way, until then you can merrily claim that a God did it for all I care.
Finally, as to the Ten Plagues, the only evidence of them I could turn up after some Googling are the "Admonitions of Ipuwer," which describe political turmoil in Egypt and a foreign invasion. The colorful language used in the papyrus does suggest rivers of blood, apparently, but then again wars are pretty bloody.
You equate "evolution" with "anticipatory change," revealing a lack of understanding of the principles of evolution as laid out by Charles Darwin. The principles are random mutations and gradual spread of beneficial mutations due to the increased viability of individuals possessing them.
In some places in the world, religious people are respected for their wisdom, because their philosophy makes them happy in this world. Are you so dissatisfied with your own religion that you have to resort to loud, desperate, and myopic assertions that everyone else is living a lie?As a scientist, I do too. But everything's possible; the goal of science is to determine what, given the evidence we have, has the greatest likelihood of being true.
"Expirical observation," etc. show nothing of the sort. Our genes are messy and inefficient, with many areas being simply rubble from the process of transposition and adjustment that produced our current genome. Archaeologists have unearthed skeletons of animals whose similarities are strong evidence for evolutionary progression.
"Documentation and duplication" are, admittedly, hard over geological time. The evidence of evolution is still there, and many genetic phenomena we observe (humans' genetic similarity to monkeys, etc.) suggest that this theory is correct.
Evolution has massive bodies of evidence in its favor, and has shown itself to be resilient in the face of newly discovered facts. Although I will grant you that it is not the provable truth, it is nevertheless an eminently viable scientific theory.
Equating proponents of evolution with a group of dogmatists who hold to a far-fetched idea in the face of (1) the absence of positive evidence of the truth of their particular worldview, and (2) the ongoing resolution of issues they raised to discredit their competition is "intellectual dishonesty."
Perhaps not in every discussion. But in this case we're talking about placing "intelligent design" on a par with evolution for the purposes of science. Hence this terminology does apply.
Creationism is a theory that is unprovable except by the appearance of a "supreme being," which is documented only by ancient and contradictory sources. It is speculation.
Evolution is testable. Carbon-dating, empirical observation, archaeology, and genetics all indicate that evolution has taken place from more primitive forms of life to those seen today. It is a theory.
The term theory has been coopted by religious fundamentalists, and twisted it to mean something it's not. Good science is based on weeding viable theories from speculation.
One thing my 7th-grade physics teacher taught us was how an atomic bomb works. Most of the class was riveted.
Kids know that science is not entertainment, and trying to dress it up as such tells them that you don't think science itself is worthwhile. Enthusiasm for the subject on the part of the teacher is worth more than a world of interpretive dances and rap tunes.
I like a good riddle...
Answer: value to you != value to others. Just because you spend a week making something does not mean you have the right to extract value from it.
That's the fundamental argument here: there's a culture of believing that simply because an author or musician sits down and writes / records something, they automatically gain the right to sue everyone that reproduces it.
There's a simple philosophical difference here: are you willing to have your rights systematically restricted and traded, or not?
But your argument relates to my "painting" passage. I was simply calling a painting physical property. In the context of that passage, a painting is no more than a piece of paper and some chemicals spread over its surface, regardless of the means used to transfer them.
Such a piece of paper is worth whatever you can get for it. If Van Gogh spent a minute on a pencil sketch, that would fetch more than a painting you or I spent a year on.
You can still have your "free speech" within the limits of "not yelling fire in a crowded theatre" or plagerizing others "free speech".
Speech that is restricted is not free.
Perhaps it is unjustified to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theatre; the danger to people's lives may justify that restriction. So the government, to protect the lives of its citizens, restricts my free speech.
What's different about copyright is that it gives anybody a blank check to restrict speech and the press, effectively commoditizing a basic right. The US Constitution recognized that this had very limited use, qualifying it by stating that a limited copyright should only be used to "promote science and useful Arts."
The Constitutional Convention should have realized that if you allow even the most limited restrictions on a right, that right will be further infringed as long as there are moneyed interests lobbying for such infringement.
Hence, at the behest of IP clearinghouses like Disney, copyright is neither limited (the Supreme Court has held that repeated extension of copyright does not violate the "limited" clause) nor limited to science and useful arts (novels, movies, and songs are now covered).
Your "specific expression" logic is vague. Do you mean I can't take a book that contains a piece of text from a bookstore without paying? That's covered by common law. But I can neither rewrite that book nor make a movie or radio-play out of it without running into copyright issues. "Specific expressions" are clearly a lot less specific than you seem to think.
Property is what you can lose. If you create a sculpture, you can lose it; if you paint a painting, you can lose it. "Intellectual Property," on the other hand, is the "right" to tell other people they may not produce certain things.
The market sets a value on that which is scarce - i.e. what a person cannot have if someone else has it. "Intellectual property" has a value only because governments are letting people and companies buy and sell the right to restrict what people say and do.
This is unconscionable. I don't care how much people earn by doing it, it's still wrong. Restricting people's rights to life and liberty held up the American South's cotton economy until the mid-1800s. Restricting people's right to free speech and movement held up the Soviet Russian economy.
I don't care how much "time and effort" somebody puts in to get the right to muzzle me. I still won't be muzzled. Anyone who thinks gagging the public is "fair compensation" for a creative act doesn't deserve to have free speech.
I would be more inclined to draw the moral line at the shooting of defenseless people, if I were going to draw one.
Seriously, a couple of pics are no threat to anyone. Thinking otherwise is borderline paranoia.
The reason is that Plan 9's strength (from what I've seen) is presentation of data on a finite, fixed-size collection of known computers. The resources of these computers are made virtually indistinguishable in a very elegant manner.
The cluster, however, doesn't seem to be the foundation of the user computing experience nowdays. (Granted, research labs and company server farms use them, but they are not the driving force of user-space innovation, generally preferring highy specialized management tools.) For the average user, the great computing resources are:
- their personal, usually single-processor, workstation,
- the Internet, an amorphous mass of processors offering widely varying services and capabilities, and possibly
- portable devices of various sorts.
What I'm interested in is how Rob thinks the userland will shift to adjust to these realities.The latter explanation is ridiculous, regardless of how malicious Saddam is. Seriously postulating it is stupid. Saying "Saddam is purchasing equipment used to make nuclear weapons" with this as a primary basis, and using that statement as justification for an invasion of Iraq, is lying.
Right now, there are a large number of research kernels. Plan 9, Inferno, AtheOS, Syllable, K42, Mach, L4, etc. all have their own ideas about the future of the kernel. But they all end up implementing a POSIX interface because the UNIX userland is the default.
The kernel space needs to be invigorated using a new userland that demands new and innovative functionality from the underlying system. Suppose you were to design a user environment for the next 30 years. What would the central abstractions be? What sort of applications would it support?
These tubes were made of the wrong kind of aluminum for uranium enrichment. They were too long and too narrow to be suitable. This was in the IAEA report the Bush administration, and the entire UN Security Council, had seen. It was not speculation, it was based on real tubes seized in Jordan. The administration, with Bush as its mouthpiece, lied.
In his speech to the Security Council which underscored the need for war, Colin Powell told the Council that the tolerances for the tubes were better than for any rocket even the US uses. He had, actually, been informed that the tubes were manufactured to comparable tolerances as US rocket tubes. The administration, with Colin Powell as its mouthpiece, lied.
Seems like much ado about nothing, right? But this is the cornerstone of the Administration's belief that Saddam was trying to acquire nuclear weapons. These tubes were the only hard evidence they had going for them.
They weren't just willfully gullible in taking biased reports from a no-name in the CIA which contradicted evidence from DoE experts (a crime of which Kerry and Edwards are also guilty), but they willfully lied. This is now clear.