Did you know muon's can displace electrons? Or that they can actually take an electron and create an element called muonium, that is effectively really light (1/9th mass) hydrogen, for a fraction of a second? Fuck, man. I hate my job, why can't I do that?
We IT adminstrators could all achieve technical miracles if our enterprise backbone only had to have uptimes in the 2 microsecond range.
"Oh, RSA was brilliant. But they got it wrong. You see, they failed to account for xanxinglydiumapping in 2056 computers. Poor stupid wrong bastards."
You say that now, but just wait until the Googapple Braindroid Psi-Spam Wars of 2073 melt the Moon. Then you'll be all 'well of course they should have protected against inertial vs gravitational mass attacks, every first-year Quantum Relativistic Graphics Acceleration student knows THAT'.
A physicist may say something like "FTL drive is impossible," and he may be thinking, at least until someone discovers a way to transform the underlying space-time matrix
If there's an 'at least' attached, then surely 'impossible' is the wrong word for the physicist to use? Or does science define 'impossible' to mean 'almost certainly possible, we just don't know how'?
There's a big difference between 'nobody could ever do that in a billion years' and 'we can't do that here today'. Especially if you're in fields like SETI where guessing far-future technological capabilities is part of the job.
I want to have my cake and eat it too... a file format that holds all of the meta data, is completely portable, even across platforms and applications, never makes destructive changes to the original data and yet displays the rotated, cropped and edited photo, complete with faces and names. Oh, and let's keep the information about people's identities secure, unless I chose to release it, but make sure that it can tie out to any other face management system. Crap, I think I just specified my way out of any real product.
The privacy requirement, maybe. But the first one...
I've been thinking for a while that one thing that modern computing really needs is some kind of portable functional filesystem - which is to say, a filesystem-like-thing which includes functions/transformations (like scaling/rotation/cropping, or edit history) in the same structure as files. Then (in that mythical perfect world) we could just dump that structure out in some kind of universal printable notation and voila, cross-platform preservation of both your source data and the changes you made to it.
Because if you had functions as well as files, you could also write searches/index or symbolic links as functions, and describe a whole database / dynamic website / social network mashup / anything else in your file manager.
By the way, when I say that 'shuffling stuff around' as in transportation can indeed increase overall system value, I'm also arguing here that 'redistribution of wealth' in the leftist sense can do exactly the same thing, and for the same reason. Some forms of administration and intervention add value; some remove it. Getting good objective measures of whether a given transaction has added or removed actual value is the key - and that means measuring more than money, otherwise you're really just engaged in elaborate self-reference, which can lead to complicated maths but not necessarily useful results.
Hmm. I'd say no - it depends on whether the trade is zero-sum (as in, say, a poker game where the players are not producing anything with their funds, just funnelling money from the losers to the winner) or plus-sum (as in manufacturing or agriculture, where 'money' represents inputs of labour and resources into a system which literally and genuinely produces more stuff out than came in).
If the money (energy/labour/stuff) is being used to make more stuff, then it's clearly investment; if it's shuffling stuff around in such a way as to literally and genuinely add value for all (as in transportation, moving product from a factory to a consumer) then it's more grey, but likely also investment; if it's just shuffling ownership of stuff in a way which priviledges one person but penalises others, in such a way as to actually reduce the overall production/distribution of the system (like, say, taking food from hungry workers and putting it on the tables of the already rich), then it's just gambling or worse, outright slavery/exploitation.
I think our economic system based on exchange value clarifies some values but obscures others. When the product or investment you buy has been shuffled through a maze of outsourcing or investment contracts so that all the externalities and side-effects of its production and distribution aren't fully accounted for in the price... then you really don't know if you're participating in a transaction which makes the whole world better, or just your tiny part of it at the cost of the wider system - or even, if you're not even buying true value for yourself but just the illusion of value. Or, even the illusion of the illusion of value - the dream that you might one day be able to on-sell an instrument for more than you paid for it.
True investment is what genuinely produces wealth - which is hard to define but I'd guess at something like 'permanently increased human wellbeing which also benefits the wider planetary ecology'. But because it's hard to measure actual wealth, we tend to measure temporary and local exchange-value instead - which is about as accurate as high-school yearbook scrawls are an accurate reflection of personal lifelong achievement.
With iOS, Apple is trying to make a simple, yet powerful device. They are trying to abstract away the concept of files. Any app can let you manage its own data files however the developer wishes.
Ah, nostalgia. I remember the good old days of PalmOS before SD card support was added. No files, just databases.
Give 'em a couple of years and they'll be reinventing FAT, only badly.
Hierarchical filesystems do suck a bit, and file-less data storage is a wonderful dream as long as 1) you never want to support any kind of removable media, 2) you don't want to give any kind of standards-compliant bulk data-transfer facility, 3) you're able to force users to only ever use one apps to manage each kind of data and 4) you're quite happy completely reinventing the wheel, badly and with no semblance of unity, when you realise down the track that having 10,000 documents all in one big scrolling list is a pain to search through and that maybe adding some kind of idea of 'place' (but we won't call it 'directory' or 'folder') could be a big innovation.
Countless atrocities committed in the name of the majority have occurred on the basis of this mode of thinking. The Holocaust comes to mind.
To the contrary: while some anti-Jewish laws were enacted openly, I believe the Final Solution was decided by a very small minority in extremely secret closed meetings. It was certainly not openly discussed and voted on in public or there would not have been such shock and disbelief by the wider world when the camps were liberated after WW2.
So the Holocaust is actually a complete counter-example to your argument. If Wikileaks had existed then, and the secret planning documents had been widely distributed, it might well have been averted entirely.
You presumably live in a dictatorship, so I can see how you might have a different opinion on it. Of course, your opinion on everything is irrelevant, since you live in a dictatorship.
The reality is that so-called Western democracy is in fact criss-crossed by an alternate military-industrial hierarchy which is internally a dictatorship, or lots of little dictatorships. We call them 'CEOs' and 'generals' and they do answer to supposedly 'higher' authorities, but the power generally flows down these systems, not up, and they are each generally proud of 'not being a democracy'.
Theoretically the loop closes somewhere between the marketplace and polling booth - but since, due to commercial secrecy and classification laws, information about how each of these organisations function is not generally available to consumers and voters - and even many shareholders and legislators - I find it hard to see how we can say our society is really a democracy at its heart. It's really just a sort of quasi-democratic web of competing top-down tyrannies.
Which is somewhat better than one big united tyranny - but not by much, and not in the big matters where it really counts: strategic armaments and military policy. Those remain mostly self-governing closed shops. How exactly are you going to argue with the CEO of McDonnell-Douglas or the General in charge of the Single Integrated Operating Plan? Supposedly the Joint Chiefs report to the SecDef and President... but even they can only know what they're told, right?
If a Julian Assange stood for office and got voted in as President, promising to declassify everything... do you really think the powers that be would stand for that, even if 51% of the population voted in favour?
If you believe that yourself, a fellow soldier, American citizen, allied soldiers, allied citizen, or unallied citizen is in danger (In that order) of loosing life limb or eyesight, then deadly force is allowed.
Isn't there a bit of an ethical conflict with that order of priorities?
Ethically, it would seem that, in order to be and remain 'the good guys' in a conflict, a soldier's order of preservation of life should be almost the exact reverse: * local civilians (foreign if you're the invading force, national if you're defending) - women and children first, then able adults * allied citizens * own citizens * allied troops * own country troops * self
Sure, there's a total conflict between self-preservation and protection of others - but that goes with the territory, doesn't it? If you don't make it an ABSOLUTE priority to FIRST protect the people you're supposed to be serving and protecting (the civilians) - and theoretically in order not to be an illegal brute-force occupation you're there to serve and protect the Iraqis, not the Americans - then it seems like you're just a guy with a gun shooting people who aren't his mates. And that seems like the definition of 'aggressor' or nastier words.
Not getting at you personally, but if self-preservation over all while in a foreign country is US military doctrine then how exactly does it differ from any other country's military doctrine? And if the 'good guys'' military doctrine is indistinguishable from their enemies then why should we, as civilians, support 'our troops' over other troops? Just because they're 'ours'? But Nuremberg established that 'just following orders' is not an acceptable excuse for a soldier, so why should 'just supporting the troops' be an acceptable excuse for a civilian?
If the Vietnam civilian toll were in the millions then the US would have to face truly Godwinian comparisons. These were common in the activist culture of the 1960s-70s but it seems to have become unfashionable now.
But even if the US bombings only caused the deaths of several hundred thousand Vietnamese? That's still something I don't really hear much complaint over. Lots of talk about 'the troops' - and as conscripts they faced a horrible ethical choice between breaking the law of their country or serving in a bad war they were told was necessary (but obviously wasn't since the free world survived the Fall of Saigon) - but what about the deaths of foreign innocents? Shouldn't they count more than national troops in all our moral calculations, or how can we consider ourselves 'good guys'?
Yes, I do get frustrated when people complain the 'the troops came home from Vietnam and were told that the war they served in was neither honorable nor necessary. How dare mere civilians who've never faced bullets say such a horrible thing!'. Well, truth hurts maybe, but that's the case. Vietnam WAS a bad war and 'serving your country' isn't automatically a good thing if your country is acting dishonourably - is it?
I certainly don't see anyone doing anything "WRONG", in regards to the rules of war.
And that to me is the most heartbreaking thing of all. That the "best practice" of warfare is to shrug and say, yeah, a few civilians get slaughtered even now and then, it happens. This is why many of us who opposed the invasion did so: because we could see that even "good guys" do awful things in a war zone, especially in an urban environment, double especially in an urban counterinsurgency, and if there isn't a world-shaking reason to be there, there's several hundred thousand now-dead reasons not to be there.
War: Even when you do it "right", you're doing it wrong.
the other one says it's bad that people are spending more time with a screen and less with printed words
As a side issue, I don't understand how 'screen' leads to 'not words'. What are we doing here, for example, but parsing and constructing English sentences, in words, in 'print'? I read a lot of text online - is there some virtue to dead wood pulp which makes the act of reading text just better there?
(I understand the argument about skimming vs deep engagement, but I got taught to speed-read dead trees in primary school.)
This happens in commercial software development, too. There's this belief (often held all the way up the management chain to the top) that software, even bad software, represents some kind of massive, utterly permanent investment that must never be thrown away and re-written.
Sure, if the software is actually wrong then it needs rewriting. But just being 'ancient' shouldn't make it wrong. If it does, we have a social/cultural problem in the wider IT industry that needs fixing: why should software go 'out of date' when there are no physical parts to wear out, and the business problem it's solving hasn't fundamentally changed? Why do we expect our software environments to just naturally break? Why do we accept gratuitious change for change's sake, rather than 'do it right, set it in stone, never change it and move on to the next problem to solve?'
And then we should ask: if that 'ancient' software system actually is wrong, then why did we allow wrong software to be written in the first place? How come it tested as okay and got deployed? That would mean that our testing procedures are incapable of telling a wrong solution from a right solution, wouldn't it?
And unless we've fixed those procedures - not just 'changed' them, but can guarantee that they're correct - that means that the new shiny system we're putting in to replace that 'ancient' one most likely is also wrong, and is doing things wrong even as we're trusting it.
That's not good enough. Surely we should stop doing things wrong in the first place, rather than just deploying an endless succession of differently-wrong answers?
Do the names Dean Radin, Hal Puthoff, J. B. Rhine, or Frederick Meyers ring any bells? They ought to. These people have done extensive documented research. And yet somehow the myth remains that ESP 'does not exist'.
It's weird, it's difficult (but not impossible) to replicate, it does not obey the inverse square law, it blithely disregards time and causality, and we don't have a model of it. But it's real.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you know muon's can displace electrons? Or that they can actually take an electron and create an element called muonium, that is effectively really light (1/9th mass) hydrogen, for a fraction of a second? Fuck, man. I hate my job, why can't I do that?
We IT adminstrators could all achieve technical miracles if our enterprise backbone only had to have uptimes in the 2 microsecond range.
"Oh, RSA was brilliant. But they got it wrong. You see, they failed to account for xanxinglydiumapping in 2056 computers. Poor stupid wrong bastards."
You say that now, but just wait until the Googapple Braindroid Psi-Spam Wars of 2073 melt the Moon. Then you'll be all 'well of course they should have protected against inertial vs gravitational mass attacks, every first-year Quantum Relativistic Graphics Acceleration student knows THAT'.
A physicist may say something like "FTL drive is impossible," and he may be thinking, at least until someone discovers a way to transform the underlying space-time matrix
If there's an 'at least' attached, then surely 'impossible' is the wrong word for the physicist to use? Or does science define 'impossible' to mean 'almost certainly possible, we just don't know how'?
There's a big difference between 'nobody could ever do that in a billion years' and 'we can't do that here today'. Especially if you're in fields like SETI where guessing far-future technological capabilities is part of the job.
Also: unleavened loaves and scones, typically cooked on an open fire
Damper, inertial, pan-baked.
Why control interface needs superheated plasma conduits?
To thin down the number of ensigns, obviously. It's the most efficient form of "final exam".
Hm, maybe you're onto something - that could, maybe, account for exploding control panels...
Nah, they just wrote the ControlPanel widget in C++ and still haven't got all the buffer overruns out.
I want to have my cake and eat it too... a file format that holds all of the meta data, is completely portable, even across platforms and applications, never makes destructive changes to the original data and yet displays the rotated, cropped and edited photo, complete with faces and names. Oh, and let's keep the information about people's identities secure, unless I chose to release it, but make sure that it can tie out to any other face management system. Crap, I think I just specified my way out of any real product.
The privacy requirement, maybe. But the first one...
I've been thinking for a while that one thing that modern computing really needs is some kind of portable functional filesystem - which is to say, a filesystem-like-thing which includes functions/transformations (like scaling/rotation/cropping, or edit history) in the same structure as files. Then (in that mythical perfect world) we could just dump that structure out in some kind of universal printable notation and voila, cross-platform preservation of both your source data and the changes you made to it.
Because if you had functions as well as files, you could also write searches/index or symbolic links as functions, and describe a whole database / dynamic website / social network mashup / anything else in your file manager.
And that would be awesome, I think.
By the way, when I say that 'shuffling stuff around' as in transportation can indeed increase overall system value, I'm also arguing here that 'redistribution of wealth' in the leftist sense can do exactly the same thing, and for the same reason. Some forms of administration and intervention add value; some remove it. Getting good objective measures of whether a given transaction has added or removed actual value is the key - and that means measuring more than money, otherwise you're really just engaged in elaborate self-reference, which can lead to complicated maths but not necessarily useful results.
But is not all investment gambling?
Hmm. I'd say no - it depends on whether the trade is zero-sum (as in, say, a poker game where the players are not producing anything with their funds, just funnelling money from the losers to the winner) or plus-sum (as in manufacturing or agriculture, where 'money' represents inputs of labour and resources into a system which literally and genuinely produces more stuff out than came in).
If the money (energy/labour/stuff) is being used to make more stuff, then it's clearly investment; if it's shuffling stuff around in such a way as to literally and genuinely add value for all (as in transportation, moving product from a factory to a consumer) then it's more grey, but likely also investment; if it's just shuffling ownership of stuff in a way which priviledges one person but penalises others, in such a way as to actually reduce the overall production/distribution of the system (like, say, taking food from hungry workers and putting it on the tables of the already rich), then it's just gambling or worse, outright slavery/exploitation.
I think our economic system based on exchange value clarifies some values but obscures others. When the product or investment you buy has been shuffled through a maze of outsourcing or investment contracts so that all the externalities and side-effects of its production and distribution aren't fully accounted for in the price... then you really don't know if you're participating in a transaction which makes the whole world better, or just your tiny part of it at the cost of the wider system - or even, if you're not even buying true value for yourself but just the illusion of value. Or, even the illusion of the illusion of value - the dream that you might one day be able to on-sell an instrument for more than you paid for it.
True investment is what genuinely produces wealth - which is hard to define but I'd guess at something like 'permanently increased human wellbeing which also benefits the wider planetary ecology'. But because it's hard to measure actual wealth, we tend to measure temporary and local exchange-value instead - which is about as accurate as high-school yearbook scrawls are an accurate reflection of personal lifelong achievement.
It's a bot.
I wonder if wallstreet will take Blizzard's approach.
Bah, take EVE Online's approach. Let anarchy roam free but quietly back whoever looks like the winner.
Files? What are files?
With iOS, Apple is trying to make a simple, yet powerful device. They are trying to abstract away the concept of files. Any app can let you manage its own data files however the developer wishes.
Ah, nostalgia. I remember the good old days of PalmOS before SD card support was added. No files, just databases.
Give 'em a couple of years and they'll be reinventing FAT, only badly.
Hierarchical filesystems do suck a bit, and file-less data storage is a wonderful dream as long as 1) you never want to support any kind of removable media, 2) you don't want to give any kind of standards-compliant bulk data-transfer facility, 3) you're able to force users to only ever use one apps to manage each kind of data and 4) you're quite happy completely reinventing the wheel, badly and with no semblance of unity, when you realise down the track that having 10,000 documents all in one big scrolling list is a pain to search through and that maybe adding some kind of idea of 'place' (but we won't call it 'directory' or 'folder') could be a big innovation.
you can't write everything off as a tragic mistake; it was tragic official policy.
Best one-line summary of this entire issue. Thank you.
Countless atrocities committed in the name of the majority have occurred on the basis of this mode of thinking. The Holocaust comes to mind.
To the contrary: while some anti-Jewish laws were enacted openly, I believe the Final Solution was decided by a very small minority in extremely secret closed meetings. It was certainly not openly discussed and voted on in public or there would not have been such shock and disbelief by the wider world when the camps were liberated after WW2.
So the Holocaust is actually a complete counter-example to your argument. If Wikileaks had existed then, and the secret planning documents had been widely distributed, it might well have been averted entirely.
You presumably live in a dictatorship, so I can see how you might have a different opinion on it. Of course, your opinion on everything is irrelevant, since you live in a dictatorship.
The reality is that so-called Western democracy is in fact criss-crossed by an alternate military-industrial hierarchy which is internally a dictatorship, or lots of little dictatorships. We call them 'CEOs' and 'generals' and they do answer to supposedly 'higher' authorities, but the power generally flows down these systems, not up, and they are each generally proud of 'not being a democracy'.
Theoretically the loop closes somewhere between the marketplace and polling booth - but since, due to commercial secrecy and classification laws, information about how each of these organisations function is not generally available to consumers and voters - and even many shareholders and legislators - I find it hard to see how we can say our society is really a democracy at its heart. It's really just a sort of quasi-democratic web of competing top-down tyrannies.
Which is somewhat better than one big united tyranny - but not by much, and not in the big matters where it really counts: strategic armaments and military policy. Those remain mostly self-governing closed shops. How exactly are you going to argue with the CEO of McDonnell-Douglas or the General in charge of the Single Integrated Operating Plan? Supposedly the Joint Chiefs report to the SecDef and President... but even they can only know what they're told, right?
If a Julian Assange stood for office and got voted in as President, promising to declassify everything... do you really think the powers that be would stand for that, even if 51% of the population voted in favour?
If you believe that yourself, a fellow soldier, American citizen, allied soldiers, allied citizen, or unallied citizen is in danger (In that order) of loosing life limb or eyesight, then deadly force is allowed.
Isn't there a bit of an ethical conflict with that order of priorities?
Ethically, it would seem that, in order to be and remain 'the good guys' in a conflict, a soldier's order of preservation of life should be almost the exact reverse:
* local civilians (foreign if you're the invading force, national if you're defending) - women and children first, then able adults
* allied citizens
* own citizens
* allied troops
* own country troops
* self
Sure, there's a total conflict between self-preservation and protection of others - but that goes with the territory, doesn't it? If you don't make it an ABSOLUTE priority to FIRST protect the people you're supposed to be serving and protecting (the civilians) - and theoretically in order not to be an illegal brute-force occupation you're there to serve and protect the Iraqis, not the Americans - then it seems like you're just a guy with a gun shooting people who aren't his mates. And that seems like the definition of 'aggressor' or nastier words.
Not getting at you personally, but if self-preservation over all while in a foreign country is US military doctrine then how exactly does it differ from any other country's military doctrine? And if the 'good guys'' military doctrine is indistinguishable from their enemies then why should we, as civilians, support 'our troops' over other troops? Just because they're 'ours'? But Nuremberg established that 'just following orders' is not an acceptable excuse for a soldier, so why should 'just supporting the troops' be an acceptable excuse for a civilian?
And the 8 million civilians killed in Vietnam alone were all legitimate targets because you liberate a country by doing a holocaust.
I'd love to have confirmation of that 8 million figure. Wikipedia suggests that's an order of magnitude too high to be credible but admits the true civilian body count is unknown.
If the Vietnam civilian toll were in the millions then the US would have to face truly Godwinian comparisons. These were common in the activist culture of the 1960s-70s but it seems to have become unfashionable now.
But even if the US bombings only caused the deaths of several hundred thousand Vietnamese? That's still something I don't really hear much complaint over. Lots of talk about 'the troops' - and as conscripts they faced a horrible ethical choice between breaking the law of their country or serving in a bad war they were told was necessary (but obviously wasn't since the free world survived the Fall of Saigon) - but what about the deaths of foreign innocents? Shouldn't they count more than national troops in all our moral calculations, or how can we consider ourselves 'good guys'?
Yes, I do get frustrated when people complain the 'the troops came home from Vietnam and were told that the war they served in was neither honorable nor necessary. How dare mere civilians who've never faced bullets say such a horrible thing!'. Well, truth hurts maybe, but that's the case. Vietnam WAS a bad war and 'serving your country' isn't automatically a good thing if your country is acting dishonourably - is it?
I certainly don't see anyone doing anything "WRONG", in regards to the rules of war.
And that to me is the most heartbreaking thing of all. That the "best practice" of warfare is to shrug and say, yeah, a few civilians get slaughtered even now and then, it happens. This is why many of us who opposed the invasion did so: because we could see that even "good guys" do awful things in a war zone, especially in an urban environment, double especially in an urban counterinsurgency, and if there isn't a world-shaking reason to be there, there's several hundred thousand now-dead reasons not to be there.
War: Even when you do it "right", you're doing it wrong.
the other one says it's bad that people are spending more time with a screen and less with printed words
As a side issue, I don't understand how 'screen' leads to 'not words'. What are we doing here, for example, but parsing and constructing English sentences, in words, in 'print'? I read a lot of text online - is there some virtue to dead wood pulp which makes the act of reading text just better there?
(I understand the argument about skimming vs deep engagement, but I got taught to speed-read dead trees in primary school.)
Sarah Palin's socialist Alaska
Um. Okay. /me recalibrates poster's inferred political stance from 'Far Right Libertarian' to 'My satire detector is now a smoking ruin'.
Right, the minute the Cloud starts showing signs of sentience, we pump all of 4chan into it.
Mind you there's a 50/50 shot that that's exactly what leads to Skynet vowing to exterminate us.
... and every PXT a goatse.
Now that would be a catastrophe.
This happens in commercial software development, too. There's this belief (often held all the way up the management chain to the top) that software, even bad software, represents some kind of massive, utterly permanent investment that must never be thrown away and re-written.
Sure, if the software is actually wrong then it needs rewriting. But just being 'ancient' shouldn't make it wrong. If it does, we have a social/cultural problem in the wider IT industry that needs fixing: why should software go 'out of date' when there are no physical parts to wear out, and the business problem it's solving hasn't fundamentally changed? Why do we expect our software environments to just naturally break? Why do we accept gratuitious change for change's sake, rather than 'do it right, set it in stone, never change it and move on to the next problem to solve?'
And then we should ask: if that 'ancient' software system actually is wrong, then why did we allow wrong software to be written in the first place? How come it tested as okay and got deployed? That would mean that our testing procedures are incapable of telling a wrong solution from a right solution, wouldn't it?
And unless we've fixed those procedures - not just 'changed' them, but can guarantee that they're correct - that means that the new shiny system we're putting in to replace that 'ancient' one most likely is also wrong, and is doing things wrong even as we're trusting it.
That's not good enough. Surely we should stop doing things wrong in the first place, rather than just deploying an endless succession of differently-wrong answers?
1) Expiration at death -> Murder to put something into the public domain where EVERYBODY has access to it.
That sounds like a great plot for a new Agatha Christie.
"And so mes amis.... the leetle grey cells tell me that the writer was murdered by the entire Internet!. "
Apologies for the typo: Frederic Myers, not Meyers.
I make me angry to have supernatural entities like ESPers in Star Trek, or in Silverberg books, but I have learned to live with it.
The reason why ESP finds its way into science fiction is that it is science. There's been 150 years of research into anomalous cognition, and insoluble problems remain with the purely materialistic viewpoint of mind.
Do the names Dean Radin, Hal Puthoff, J. B. Rhine, or Frederick Meyers ring any bells? They ought to. These people have done extensive documented research. And yet somehow the myth remains that ESP 'does not exist'.
It's weird, it's difficult (but not impossible) to replicate, it does not obey the inverse square law, it blithely disregards time and causality, and we don't have a model of it. But it's real.