I think the thief maps out to people who would use the IP without paying for it, hmmm?
That's clearly what they want you to think. But consider: why do we care about they thief's ease-of-use? We don't, unless the thief is realy just the customer--remember that the car-lock analogy has only two parties; the car owner and the thief. Unless they are transfering rights to the customer (which I doubt) that mapping doesn't leave room for both a customer and a thief.
A better analogy might include a third party (so that we could distinguish between the users who we want to make things easy for and the thiefs we want to stop) like so:
A rental car company wants to prevent unauthorized drivers from driving the rental cars. This includes not only potential thiefs, but also (say) members of the rentor's family that aren't explicitly listed on the contract. So the key the ignition lock to a simple thumb-print device that only recognized people that are programmed into it by the owner (who is
not the user). It is easy for the rentor to use, and imposible for their friends and families. They can drive it themselves, but they can't lend it.
If this were the analogy they'd used, there would have been a mapping for the thief, but it would include people that the user wanted to give access to. And thus it would be harder to sell to the user.
It's even worse when the deal is structured as a sale rather than a rental. Would you purchace a car that could only be driven by people authorized by the dealership at the time of purchase?
In any case, this second analogy isn't what they used (or at least, it isn't what was stated in the article) and thus my original objection stands.
Whould you mind posting a brief explanation of how you came to the conclusion that I was trying to start a flame war? Or, alternatively, why you modded me flamebait? I can't see offhand how anyone could (or would want to) even disagree with the parent post, let alone feel strongly enough about it to flame me.
An analogy we used often during development was that of car door locks. A determined thief would be able to get into any car door through numerous means. All car door locks really do is prevent your average everyday person from violating your car's security and stealing your sunglasses. But it doesn't get in the way of your use of the car.
I love the analogy he uses, but there's a major flaw in it. On the car-door-lock side you have the owner, the car, the lock, and the thief. On the digital rights management side you have the copyright holder, the document, the DRM, and the consumer. It's easy to see that the car owner maps to the copyright holder, the document maps to the car, and the DRM maps to the lock.
So, who's the thief? When selling this technology to their customers (the copyright holders) the thief doubtlessly maps to the consumers, or at least some subset of them.
But when describing it to consumers, there is a tendency for the consumer to project themselves onto the car-owner (making, I suppose, the copyright holder map to the manufacturer), especially since it is their ease-of-use that's being considered. "After all," most consumers would think "I'm not a thief." This leaves them with the totaly false impression that they are somehow the ones being protected.
So it may not be perfect as an analogy, but it is fantastic> as a sales pitch.
m-w.com gives both definitions...My copy of The M-W Dictionary of English Usage says "this sense has become as firmly fixed in general English as it is in legal English" but does not recommend or recommend against the new use.
Among my other eccentricities (I should start a list in my/. journal), I am a confirmed dictionary snob. As far as I'm concerned, Merriam-Webster is the Wallmart of dictionaries--they can be found everywhere, and are often handy, but the quality of what you get there is not always the best.
Dictionary.com's copy of American Heritage gives both definitions, followed by a usage note that says that the Usage Panel was divided roughly evenly on whether it was appropriate to use "moot" to mean "irrelevant". Several other dictionaries on dictionary.com leave out this disputed definition.
What I found was that only the American Heritage gave both definitions. While 59% of their panel favoured the questionable usage, IIRC it was a panel of (mostly) journalists critiquing a sentence about politics. This is more credible source of linguistic wisdom than sportswriters or computer programers, but only slightly.
But you missed my point. You act as if "off-by-one error" is some part of the english language or some sort of technical description; something to get right or wrong. It is only a figure of speech. Thus, one way of saying it isn't much more valid that any other.
According to my dictionary (Oxford Concise English, 9th edition):
one-offadj & n made or done as the only one; not repeated. n a one-off product, event, etc.
The meaning of the phrase "off by one" follows directly from the meanings of the individual words, as given in the dictionary, but only if they are used in this order. The other five ways of ordering them ("one by off", "off one by", etc.) mean nothing.
The abstract used a compound word as if it meant something that it did not, in a context where the dictionary meaning would have been valid but implausible. I infered that they had intended to use the correct phrase (according to the dictionary) and thus, as you note, had "gotten it wrong." That was my point.
You claim that there is no right or wrong way to use the words, that it is "just a figure of speech".
I understand your point, but I dispute it. Thinking that because something is "only a figure of speech" it doesn't matter how you say it can, in many cases, lead people to miss your point. I can even think of a few figures of speech that, were you to alter them slightly, could get you slapped if you are lucky and kicked in the groin if you are not.
dman123: Please stop arguing every one! Its a mute point.;-)
*laugh* Cute.
"Moot point" is another phrase that often irks me, since so many people use it as if it meant "irrelevant" instead of (correctly) using it to mean "arguable either way."
That's all true, but people still say "one-off error" to mean "off-by-one error".
I don't doubt this. Last time I heard, people were still saying "infer" when they meant "imply," they were still using "you're" and "your" as if they were interchangeable, they were still confounding RAM and hard drive space, and so on. People do all kinds of silly things.
But using words as if they mean something that they really don't just makes you hard to understand.
One-off: Something done intentionally but with no intention of repeating; a custom product, sample, or prototype.
Off-by-one error: An error in enumeration, such as starting or ending a count at the wrong value (e.g. 0 vs. 1), counting the starting/ending value in a cycle twice or not at all (e.g. in counting a group of people which includes yourself), counting delimiters as opposed to the items delimited (e.g. the "fence post" problem), or any analogous error.
These are rather different! When I read the abstract my first thought was "how can they determine that?"
but taking the moral high-ground can be fairly costly and not always easy to do.
True. But it's often cheaper & easier in the long run than living with the knowledge that you should have done something and didn't.
I'm not saying that quiting is the right thing to do; I'm saying that he should do what ever he desides to be "the right thing," be it ever so hard or costly, with out regard to cost or consequence.
OpenOffice is unusable: as anyone subscribed to debian-openoffice@lists.debian.org knows, people have been trying to get it to build for well over a year, with no success (let alone being able to make a debian package out ot if).
OpenOffice is the biggest "open source" scam that Sun has pulled to date. I would be tempted to put it in the same fiasco category as Netscape when the unbuildable source was first released to the public, but I just can't believe that Sun dosen't know any better, or that they wouldn't allocate developer resources to making it work.
The location from which a sound is originating is determined in part by pinna cues. The pinna is the visible fleshy outer part of the ear. Higher frequencies may reflect off the pinna before entering the ear canal. This colors the sound, giving clues to its origin.
The relationship between frequency and directionality is much more general. It applies to light, sound, and even in quantum mechanics. A low frequency wave in general is much less localized than a high frequency wave, because it is "larger". So while the shape of the ear may affect the perception of directionality of sound (I don't know, but I suspect you are correct) this would be just another example of the more general effect.
with an internal abstraction layer that just happens to match the new-OS API, and with a minimum of timing or hardware dependencies, porting might not be too bad. However, few old games were designed that way, and it's not just because the authors were sloppy (though that's often a factor). At the time many of these games were written, these issues were not well understood, and they're only well understood now precisely because so many missteps were made. Maybe "everyone knows that" now, just like everyone knows that CFCs are bad, but there was a time not so very long ago when pretty much nobody knew these things.
The biggest factor, IMHO, wasn't that the issues weren't well understood, or that we were sloppy. Everyone knew how things "ought to be done" even back in the dark ages. Heck, we even had indoor plumbing. The main reason early games were so often hardware dependent is that abstraction layers cost clock cycles. Remember that the processors for early video games were about three orders of magnitude slower than what we have now.
People used all sorts of tricks to squeeze performance out of the systems they had, and some of them were pretty darned ugly. Rather than calling a subroutine (the cost being stack operations--this was long before cache worries), move it inline. Rather than paying loop overhead, unroll the inner loop. Now you're tight on space, so do something clever (read: "kludgy") with code that isn't as time critical to save space. Lather, rinse, repeat. We knew some of the tricks were ugly at the time, but they got the job done where something clean wouldn't.
Remember: for any given clean, structured program, there will be a hack that does the same thing and is faster, smaller (or both) and much harder to understand.
Higher frequencies have shorter wavelengths (if the wave propogates at a given velocity, that means it covers a computable distance in a given amount of time. If the frequency is higher (more cycles per unit of time) the waves will be shorter (more cycles per unit of distance), thus higher frequency = shorter wavelength).
Higher frequencies are also higher energies. To cycle at a higher frequency, whatever carries your wave has to move faster, which means more energy.
So now your question becomes: why are higher frequencies / shorter wavelengths / higher energies more directional. There are all sorts of ways of looking at this. For example, ask yourself which is more directional, a low energy falling-leaf or a high energy cannon-ball? Or think about a person on foot vs. a city bus; the person, being smaller, doesn't "defract" around things like parks, while the larger bus does. Or think about throwing a cotton ball vs. throwing a marble. The cotton ball is larger and lower energy while the marble is smaller and higher energy.
Thinking like this should at least give you a feel for the effect (which is, after all, a rule of thumb rather than an absolute law). None of them is quite the whole story, but they should help you visualize what's generally going on.
Since two people missed my point, I must not have been clear enough. The person I was responding to said "dumping a huge number of *supposedly* sterile males really helps out the population" and this was the point I was disputing when I said "you don't need most males...[therefore]...adding a bunch more excess males shouldn't change anything."
My point is that, if the released males turn out not to be sterile, it shouldn't significantly help (or hurt) the next generation fly population.
The whole situation with the Medfly is that they can only mate once, though dumping a huge number of *supposedly* sterile males really helps out the population in this case.
This doesn't sound plausible. The whole point of the male strategy is that you don't need most males (before anyone goes off on a political tangent here, it's a simple matter of ratios and definitions; "sperm" is what we call the smaller, more plentiful gamites, and "egg" is what we call the larger, rarer ones. By definition there are almost always more sperm than the egg-market needs, and males are thus (genetically) expendable. This has nothing to do with politics.) so adding a bunch more excess males shouldn't change anything. The only case I can see that it would matter is if they had them almost wiped out, so that individuals of either gender were unlikely to find mates.
I'm a CS student graduating soon, why is there such a hard time making bosses see the beauty and less hassle of these projects linux/apache/etc compare to the MSWin/IIS choice...I mean, who with the smallest notion on what is good would put up a fight to choose IIS over apache!? Will I have the same wonderful challange?
Before you graduate, be sure to catch up on the industry literature for valuble insights into how the real world works.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. Pay special attention to what happens to Asok, and lean how to duck.
HA HA HA!!! You total and absolute idiot, a hoax which confirms your idiotic belief that the world is flat "raises your estimation of their credibility"? HA HA HA!!!!!
Yes, though your post does nothing to raise my estimation of either the sagacity or tact of Anonymous Cowards.
To recap:
I do not know that the petition was a hoax. That claim has been made, based on the fact that it contained various questionable names. As several people have pointed out, it is absurd to assume the questionable names were added by the petition's authors; they were obviously added by critics wishing to discredit the petition, and have subseequently been removed.
This no more makes it certain that it is a hoax than the objections raised by some of the IPCC authors to that report's contents (which, they asserted at the time, were forced on them by the lead authors for political reasons) make that report a hoax. Such accusations can (and have been) made by both sides. That's part of what makes it a controversy.
In any case, questions of science can not be resolved by pettition. In this case, we may even be past the point where data will help, since the sides seem to be polarized beyond even agreement on terms.
For example, over what time period are we talking? It is quite posible to have a warming trend on one scale and a cooling trend on another (think about a fall morning; between, say, dawn and noon, the temperature is likely rising, but that doesn't mean winter has been cancled). Are we talking about the upper atmosphere, the lower, or maybe the sea surface? If we are talking about the earth as a whole it is clearly cooling, since the bulk of the heat is in the molten iron core. But I doubt most people mean (or even consider) that.
All of this, without even touching on questions like "are people causing this?" or "is one side or the other using the issue as a cloak for some political agenda?" or "what should/can we do about it?". It is a complex issue, or at least seems so to an "absolute idiot" such as myself.
It was the hope that Discovery was doing more than presenting just the standard knee-jerk "the sky is falling" line that raised my estimation of their credibility. (As a side note, the best way for someone to max out their credibility on the MQR standard is to publish a well thought out, tightly reasoned refutation of a position I--perhaps tacitly--hold. Simply agreeing with me doesn't help me much, since there's little to be learned from people who agree with everything you say. People who can offer cogent objections to your positions are priceless.)
-- MarkusQ
P.S. Laughing in all-caps isn't generally considered a "cogent objection".
Until recently, SETI@home was given about 25 Mbps, and the remaining 45 Mbps was shared by the rest of campus. But starting last month (January 2002) the bandwidth used by the rest of campus increased in an unexpected and unexplained way. During peak periods the demand now exceeds 70 Mbps. If SETI@home continued to use 25 Mbps, the performance of all other outgoing traffic would suffer.
So it sounds like all they need to do is ban students from running Windows XP ("Do you want to download a patch? How 'bout a passport account? You know you want one. All your friends are getting them. And I've got another security update for you...what'd you say? Come on, give it a try. The first one's free you know..." etc. etc. That's probably 80% of the bandwidth right there.)
-- MarkusQ
P.S. Note for the humour impaired...oh, what's the use.
In other words, regardless of the correctness of their assumptions, the environmentalists are pursuing a "least-bad" approach - it is not likely that following environmentally careful practices will cause some great harm. If we maintain a healthy skepticism, then we should be able to maintain a cautious interaction with our ecology / resources.
Whatever you do, don't judge the rationality of a way of thinking on the basis of a bunch of irrational slogan-slingers... in any debate.
I agree, with the caveat that anyone who shouts something of the form "the sky is following, no time to question, everyone must do as I say or we are doomed!" instantly triggers my skepticism. In that case, I take "better safe than sorry" to mean "distrust them and doubt their position intently."
Slashdot Mirror
That's clearly what they want you to think. But consider: why do we care about they thief's ease-of-use? We don't, unless the thief is realy just the customer--remember that the car-lock analogy has only two parties; the car owner and the thief. Unless they are transfering rights to the customer (which I doubt) that mapping doesn't leave room for both a customer and a thief.
A better analogy might include a third party (so that we could distinguish between the users who we want to make things easy for and the thiefs we want to stop) like so:
If this were the analogy they'd used, there would have been a mapping for the thief, but it would include people that the user wanted to give access to. And thus it would be harder to sell to the user.It's even worse when the deal is structured as a sale rather than a rental. Would you purchace a car that could only be driven by people authorized by the dealership at the time of purchase?
In any case, this second analogy isn't what they used (or at least, it isn't what was stated in the article) and thus my original objection stands.
-- MarkusQ
To whoever modded the parent post "-1 flamebait":
I love the analogy he uses, but there's a major flaw in it. On the car-door-lock side you have the owner, the car, the lock, and the thief. On the digital rights management side you have the copyright holder, the document, the DRM, and the consumer. It's easy to see that the car owner maps to the copyright holder, the document maps to the car, and the DRM maps to the lock.
So, who's the thief? When selling this technology to their customers (the copyright holders) the thief doubtlessly maps to the consumers, or at least some subset of them.
But when describing it to consumers, there is a tendency for the consumer to project themselves onto the car-owner (making, I suppose, the copyright holder map to the manufacturer), especially since it is their ease-of-use that's being considered. "After all," most consumers would think "I'm not a thief." This leaves them with the totaly false impression that they are somehow the ones being protected.
So it may not be perfect as an analogy, but it is fantastic> as a sales pitch.
-- MarkusQ
Among my other eccentricities (I should start a list in my /. journal), I am a confirmed dictionary snob. As far as I'm concerned, Merriam-Webster is the Wallmart of dictionaries--they can be found everywhere, and are often handy, but the quality of what you get there is not always the best.
Dictionary.com's copy of American Heritage gives both definitions, followed by a usage note that says that the Usage Panel was divided roughly evenly on whether it was appropriate to use "moot" to mean "irrelevant". Several other dictionaries on dictionary.com leave out this disputed definition.
What I found was that only the American Heritage gave both definitions. While 59% of their panel favoured the questionable usage, IIRC it was a panel of (mostly) journalists critiquing a sentence about politics. This is more credible source of linguistic wisdom than sportswriters or computer programers, but only slightly.
According to the OED, the point isn't even moot.
--MarkusQ
According to my dictionary (Oxford Concise English, 9th edition):
The abstract used a compound word as if it meant something that it did not, in a context where the dictionary meaning would have been valid but implausible. I infered that they had intended to use the correct phrase (according to the dictionary) and thus, as you note, had "gotten it wrong." That was my point.You claim that there is no right or wrong way to use the words, that it is "just a figure of speech".
I understand your point, but I dispute it. Thinking that because something is "only a figure of speech" it doesn't matter how you say it can, in many cases, lead people to miss your point. I can even think of a few figures of speech that, were you to alter them slightly, could get you slapped if you are lucky and kicked in the groin if you are not.
-- MarkusQ
*laugh* Cute.
"Moot point" is another phrase that often irks me, since so many people use it as if it meant "irrelevant" instead of (correctly) using it to mean "arguable either way."
*sigh*
-- MarkusQ
I don't doubt this. Last time I heard, people were still saying "infer" when they meant "imply," they were still using "you're" and "your" as if they were interchangeable, they were still confounding RAM and hard drive space, and so on. People do all kinds of silly things.
But using words as if they mean something that they really don't just makes you hard to understand.
-- MarkusQ
*laugh* I think if I did that it would set off several other people's alarms. But I suspect you have a point about the caffine.
-- MarkusQ
One-off: Something done intentionally but with no intention of repeating; a custom product, sample, or prototype.
Off-by-one error: An error in enumeration, such as starting or ending a count at the wrong value (e.g. 0 vs. 1), counting the starting/ending value in a cycle twice or not at all (e.g. in counting a group of people which includes yourself), counting delimiters as opposed to the items delimited (e.g. the "fence post" problem), or any analogous error.
These are rather different! When I read the abstract my first thought was "how can they determine that?"
-- MarkusQ
True. But it's often cheaper & easier in the long run than living with the knowledge that you should have done something and didn't.
I'm not saying that quiting is the right thing to do; I'm saying that he should do what ever he desides to be "the right thing," be it ever so hard or costly, with out regard to cost or consequence.
-- MarkusQ
asobala writes: I would be highly suspicious that your lawyer is insufficiently anal when reading contracts if they missed this.
Am Not A Lawyer? :-P
*laugh* I'd mod you up if I had points.
-- MarkusQ
-- MarkusQ
evilpaul13: One competes unfairly, and one wants to deprive you of your Freedom of Choice, which is worse?
Atzanteol: Which is which?
*laugh* So true. It's getting to be like national politics. Or animal farm.
-- MarkusQ
OpenOffice is the biggest "open source" scam that Sun has pulled to date. I would be tempted to put it in the same fiasco category as Netscape when the unbuildable source was first released to the public, but I just can't believe that Sun dosen't know any better, or that they wouldn't allocate developer resources to making it work.
This is flat out FUD.
-- MarkusQ
The relationship between frequency and directionality is much more general. It applies to light, sound, and even in quantum mechanics. A low frequency wave in general is much less localized than a high frequency wave, because it is "larger". So while the shape of the ear may affect the perception of directionality of sound (I don't know, but I suspect you are correct) this would be just another example of the more general effect.
-- MarkusQ
The biggest factor, IMHO, wasn't that the issues weren't well understood, or that we were sloppy. Everyone knew how things "ought to be done" even back in the dark ages. Heck, we even had indoor plumbing. The main reason early games were so often hardware dependent is that abstraction layers cost clock cycles. Remember that the processors for early video games were about three orders of magnitude slower than what we have now.
People used all sorts of tricks to squeeze performance out of the systems they had, and some of them were pretty darned ugly. Rather than calling a subroutine (the cost being stack operations--this was long before cache worries), move it inline. Rather than paying loop overhead, unroll the inner loop. Now you're tight on space, so do something clever (read: "kludgy") with code that isn't as time critical to save space. Lather, rinse, repeat. We knew some of the tricks were ugly at the time, but they got the job done where something clean wouldn't.
Remember: for any given clean, structured program, there will be a hack that does the same thing and is faster, smaller (or both) and much harder to understand.
-- MarkusQ
the higher the frequency the more directional
Why is that? I've always wondered...
Higher frequencies have shorter wavelengths (if the wave propogates at a given velocity, that means it covers a computable distance in a given amount of time. If the frequency is higher (more cycles per unit of time) the waves will be shorter (more cycles per unit of distance), thus higher frequency = shorter wavelength).
Higher frequencies are also higher energies. To cycle at a higher frequency, whatever carries your wave has to move faster, which means more energy.
So now your question becomes: why are higher frequencies / shorter wavelengths / higher energies more directional. There are all sorts of ways of looking at this. For example, ask yourself which is more directional, a low energy falling-leaf or a high energy cannon-ball? Or think about a person on foot vs. a city bus; the person, being smaller, doesn't "defract" around things like parks, while the larger bus does. Or think about throwing a cotton ball vs. throwing a marble. The cotton ball is larger and lower energy while the marble is smaller and higher energy.
Thinking like this should at least give you a feel for the effect (which is, after all, a rule of thumb rather than an absolute law). None of them is quite the whole story, but they should help you visualize what's generally going on.
-- MarkusQ
My point is that, if the released males turn out not to be sterile, it shouldn't significantly help (or hurt) the next generation fly population.
-- MarkusQ
The whole situation with the Medfly is that they can only mate once, though dumping a huge number of *supposedly* sterile males really helps out the population in this case.
This doesn't sound plausible. The whole point of the male strategy is that you don't need most males (before anyone goes off on a political tangent here, it's a simple matter of ratios and definitions; "sperm" is what we call the smaller, more plentiful gamites, and "egg" is what we call the larger, rarer ones. By definition there are almost always more sperm than the egg-market needs, and males are thus (genetically) expendable. This has nothing to do with politics.) so adding a bunch more excess males shouldn't change anything. The only case I can see that it would matter is if they had them almost wiped out, so that individuals of either gender were unlikely to find mates.
-- MarkusQ
I believe I can say without fear of contradiction that irradiating these flies will not cause them to give birth to 2-headed fish.
Now that is something I've never seen before; an on-topic statement that can be posted to /. without fear of contradiction! I am astounded.
-- MarkusQ
Before you graduate, be sure to catch up on the industry literature for valuble insights into how the real world works.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. Pay special attention to what happens to Asok, and lean how to duck.
We wouldn't want copyrights to end at an author's death, because then an industry would spring up for bumping off authors of important works.
It isn't often I encounter someone as or more cynical than myself. I salute you!
-- MarkusQ
Yes, though your post does nothing to raise my estimation of either the sagacity or tact of Anonymous Cowards.
To recap:
I do not know that the petition was a hoax. That claim has been made, based on the fact that it contained various questionable names. As several people have pointed out, it is absurd to assume the questionable names were added by the petition's authors; they were obviously added by critics wishing to discredit the petition, and have subseequently been removed.
This no more makes it certain that it is a hoax than the objections raised by some of the IPCC authors to that report's contents (which, they asserted at the time, were forced on them by the lead authors for political reasons) make that report a hoax. Such accusations can (and have been) made by both sides. That's part of what makes it a controversy.
In any case, questions of science can not be resolved by pettition. In this case, we may even be past the point where data will help, since the sides seem to be polarized beyond even agreement on terms.
For example, over what time period are we talking? It is quite posible to have a warming trend on one scale and a cooling trend on another (think about a fall morning; between, say, dawn and noon, the temperature is likely rising, but that doesn't mean winter has been cancled). Are we talking about the upper atmosphere, the lower, or maybe the sea surface? If we are talking about the earth as a whole it is clearly cooling, since the bulk of the heat is in the molten iron core. But I doubt most people mean (or even consider) that.
All of this, without even touching on questions like "are people causing this?" or "is one side or the other using the issue as a cloak for some political agenda?" or "what should/can we do about it?". It is a complex issue, or at least seems so to an "absolute idiot" such as myself.
It was the hope that Discovery was doing more than presenting just the standard knee-jerk "the sky is falling" line that raised my estimation of their credibility. (As a side note, the best way for someone to max out their credibility on the MQR standard is to publish a well thought out, tightly reasoned refutation of a position I--perhaps tacitly--hold. Simply agreeing with me doesn't help me much, since there's little to be learned from people who agree with everything you say. People who can offer cogent objections to your positions are priceless.)
-- MarkusQ
P.S. Laughing in all-caps isn't generally considered a "cogent objection".
So it sounds like all they need to do is ban students from running Windows XP ("Do you want to download a patch? How 'bout a passport account? You know you want one. All your friends are getting them. And I've got another security update for you...what'd you say? Come on, give it a try. The first one's free you know..." etc. etc. That's probably 80% of the bandwidth right there.)
-- MarkusQ
P.S. Note for the humour impaired...oh, what's the use.
I agree, with the caveat that anyone who shouts something of the form "the sky is following, no time to question, everyone must do as I say or we are doomed!" instantly triggers my skepticism. In that case, I take "better safe than sorry" to mean "distrust them and doubt their position intently."
-- MarkusQ