This is an ethnic issue between Russia and North Caucasus
How do you know?
Seriously, given what the Russian intelligence and security services are willing to do, why do you assume this is anything but a little domestic bolstering of the Russian Security State?
It is plausibly due to Islamist/Nationalist idiots who think that blowing people up is remotely likely to be an effective way of solving their problems--because it worked so well for the Basque, and the Irish, and the Palestinians, and...--but it could also be pure provocation on the part of the Russian security apparatus. A lone bomber like this is plausibly within their scope to arrange.
I'm not saying this is necessarily true. I'm just a little disturbed that there seems to be an uncritical acceptance that any idiot blowing themselves up must be a "Muslim Terrorist".
Much less invasive and will ACTUALLY find any bomb residue/traces
Right, because ONLY Terrorists(TM) have any traces of explosives on them, and not any of the mining engineers, chemists, etc, etc, etc, who happen to be passing through the airport!
Seriously: I've worked for a couple of mining and geological exploration companies and to here them tell it all these "anti-terrorist" measures do nothing but make their lives less convenient.
If I were a Terrorist(TM) I'd get a job with a mining company, get a letter from my employer certifying that I handle explosives, and then blow something up. These measures are so easy to circumvent they are hardly worth mentioning.
There is a chance that they stumbled upon something useful without having a clue how it works, therefore unable to produce a good paper on it.
False.
The history of science is full of unexplained phenomenology. Sargent's Rule is one that comes to mind: the observation that beta decay lifetimes scale as the fifth power of the decay energy. Sargent simply noticed this, and published a paper saying, "Hm... this is odd..." That kind of thing is the foundation of science.
If these guys were legit they could easily publish a paper that says, "We do this, this and this. The result is that. We don't know why." Inexplicable results are bread and butter in science. Irreproducible results... not so much.
Although even irreproducible results can find a place: the 17 keV neutrino was ultimately irreprodicible (it not existing and all) but that didn't stop Simpson and Hime from publishing multiple, meticulous papers on it documenting what they had done. Everyone else took them seriously because we couldn't see what they'd done wrong, even though most people found the idea of a neutrino that heavy with that weak a mixing angle implausible.
Science is the discipline of publicly testing ideas by controlled experiment and systematic observation. There is no impediment to "doing science" on these claims unless the write-up is too poor to know what idea to test. Yet they claim reliability in their own results, and commercial shipping of devices in the next year or so, so they either can reliably reproduce--and therefore accurately describe--working devices that others can build and test, or they are not telling the truth about something.
False flag and disinformation campaigns have been a staple of foreign policy for at least as long as recorded history.
Shh... you'll disturb the complacency of the people here who are saying, "Thinking is hard! Let's go shopping!"
I guess it should be no surprise really, that large leaks of complex documents that would be incredibly hard to fake should be met by intellectually slothful people saying, "Well, it isn't mathematically certain so I can ignore it!"
As if anything interesting is mathematically certain, and as if we don't all get along just find every day without anything approching mathematical certainty on everything from what our name is to where we parked the car.
It strikes me as fairly easy to publish propaganda this way.
It strikes me that you and others posting here trying to dismiss all this raw data are just covering your ears and singing "la la la I can't hear you!" as loudly as possible.
Since only an idiot believes that any information is perfect and complete, pointing out that all information--including information from leaks like this--is imperfect and incomplete is the least interesting thing anyone could possibly say.
Everyone knows that any information from any source must be processed intelligently. I guess if one were terminally intellectually lazy it might seem like more information is a bad thing: "All these facts to think about! Argh!"
But to the rest of us, more information is a good thing, and we're all intelligent and worldly enough to realize that no source of information is going to give us the perfect and ideal "Truth", but that's ok, because we're not interested in the "Truth" but merely the truth... the perfectly ordinary kind of truth involved in answering the perfectly ordinary kind of questions we ask and answer every day, like, "Where are my socks?"
On that basis, the effect of this kind of large leak is to make it harder for intelligence services and others to fake reality, and easier for people to identify failures of news services in their coverage of things like the mess in the Middle East.
Tell that to the dead and consider the cost to the "victor". Wars can have first and second losers, and that's all.
England and it's allies "won" WWII... at the cost of British economic supremacy. The United States "won" WWII... at the cost of discarding forever its tradiational isolationist policies, putting it on a slippery slope to empire that is still costing American lives today, to say nothing of progressively bankrupting the American state.
Anyone who thinks wars can be "won" hasn't been paying attention to anything but military-industrial propoganda.
I, for one, believe that the protection of our precious children from this terrible gateway drug requires firm action:
If you look at the early hysteria around rock'n'roll this is pretty much what some people wanted back then. They thought rock music would lead to young people losing respect for the old, an explosion of sexual freedom, and stuff like that.
You can't WIN a concert, and that's the most important thing in life, right? Winning at any cost?
I have a psycho ex-g/f who once claimed to have "won" a conversation. There is nothing that a sufficiently insane person can't turn into a competition.
Which isn't even a knew idea, and which doesn't require any knowledge of physics to sort out.
The Gnostics argued based on the fundamental shortcomings of human life that our world must have been created by a second-rate sort of god that they called the demiurge. They then postulated a ladder of gods that they could help you climb for only a small fee following a "free" psychological assessment...
And science doesn't, because science says what is, not what should be.
Science doesn't say anything at all. Science is the discipline of publicly testing ideas by systematic observation and controlled experiment. It is not content or even method, but discipline.
Religion is also a discipline: that of believing what is written in scriptures.
The two are necessarily in conflict, because regardless of the question, the discipline of science says we should test the answer.
For example, many scriptures say humans should seek sexual abstinence to achieve a state of grace or happiness. Scientists quite rightly ask what the opperational meaning of "a state of grace" is, and taking the perfectly ordinary view of happiness are able to show that such self-denial does not in general lead to it.
There is no question religions purport to answer that the discipline of science cannot be used to test that answer. In nearly every case where this has been done, from "spare the rod, spoil the child" to "women are our fields, we may go into them as we will" the answers of religion have been found wanting.
Actually, an omnipotent being could make A == ~A, so could have created a universe that does not maximize the potential for life while still maximizing potential for life.
A being that is limited to the laws of logic is limited, and therefore not omnipotent.
An omnipotent being is not limited to the laws of logic, and therefore incomprehensible.
But you only need to ask "Why" once, and ultimately you know, that you just don't know. You don't know if there is some omni-potent being who decided exactly how the universe would operate. You don't know if there is anything after all this. Personally I like to think there is, as I find it a bit comforting to know that there'd be something at the end, or else why bother at all. At least, that's my philosophy.
I don't even know what "why" means in this context, nor why your inability to answer what appears to me to be an incoherent question suggests that anything interesting is beyond the scope of science, which is the disipline of publicly testing ideas by systematic observation and controlled experiment.
As to the question, "else why bother at all?" there are so many answers is beggars the imagination. Life is incredible. Finite, but incredible, full of wonder, beauty, tragedy, pathos, adventure and fun. If you don't find that enough for going on with, you're doing it wrong.
If there's something more when that's all done, I'm for it. But I certainly don't need it to make this amazing ride worthwhile.
Nothing really happens until the people are in the streets revolting and destroying property.
Right, and then "what really happens" is property gets destroyed, and violent pricks get childish gratification from smashing stuff, just like the losers whose "diversity of tactics" have ruined the WTO protests.
When the organs of the state want to discredit a protest movement they salt it with provocateurs who engage in violence.
Which is exactly what losers who think they are part of the movement do, if the sane people involved let them.
Could it be that "dark matter" is simply "empty space" that is naturally "curved"?
Sure, and this idea either has testable consquences, in which case I'm sure someone is working on testing them, or it doesn't, in which case it isn't interesting.
What you're proposing would appear in current theories as a parameterized cosmological constant. Of course, a scientist would then ask, "Why does the cosmological constant have that parameterization?"
The problem with that is that all else being equal, such distortions would tend to level themselves out. We don't assume flatness, it comes out of Einstein's equations as the lowest energy solution in the absence of matter. So when we see deviations from flatness, we think, "matter". And there is quite a lot of astronomical information now that suggests dark matter behaves in most respects like matter.
So, why assume a parameterized cosmological constant when it is known to be a poor fit to data we already have?
Only ignorant idiots laugh at aether theories. It was a perfectly reasonable theoretical artifact given what was known at the time, and scientists did science: they publicly tested the idea that the universe was permeated with a fluid-like substrate responsible for mechanical transmission of light by publishing the results of controlled experiments and systematic observations.
The idea failed the tests, as so many do.
What's funny about that, excatly? Unless you're the sort of mean-spirited, small-minded asshat who laughs at people for being wrong.
I'm just saying that if it's legal, then I don't blame a company for doing such things.
Did you know it's actually legal to, I don't know... goof off on/. during the workday [*]? If employees took the attitude of their bosses, companies would go broke in short order. So it your position isn't even logically consistent: it depends on there being one set of rules for some human beings and a different set of rules for others who are beings of exactly the same kind.
[*] Hey, don't look at me... I've got two compiles and a firmware update running...
To do as well as you can in any system, you need to make the most of every resource you have and stretch the rules as far as possible.
You would not like to walk down the street in a society where everyone behaved that way.
If it isn't right for everyone to do it, it isn't right for anyone to do it, because we are all beings of the same kind.
Arguably, there is a stable solution to the social game that involves treating people the way they treat others, and I see no reason not to treat all corporate executives as dishonest scum who should be looted at every opportunity, based on exactly the reasoning you just gave.
After all, if I can bend the rules without getting caught--the bet execs are making every day--then there's nothing wrong with my doing so. It's a business decision, and I'm in the business of maximizing my own benefit, just like they are. There's nothing wrong with that, is there?
You left out the caterers, the company that ferried employees back and forth, the security firm and the janatorial contractor.
You're not really a very good BP shill, are you? I hope they aren't paying you much, if the best you can do to deflect the significant portion of responsibility that rests with them for choosing such a lousy bunch of contractors and pushing them to complete a dangerous well on an unrealistic schedule, is to point out that there are others who must take their own portion of the blame, leaving BP with less than all, but still a huge amount.
Sad --- Remorseless denial of guilt in the face of overwhelming evidence
Or: "Hey look, lying is profitable! But my god don't tell our employees or customers, because we depend on thier honesty for our business to succeed!"
There is a moral theory that says you ought to make your behaviour the rule--that action is ethical if you could will that everyone behaved that way. This is based on quite reasonable notions of identity: if all humans are of the same kind, then it is reasonable that they should behave in the same way, so what is ethical for one ought to be ethical for all.
There are issues of abstraction with this--a sufficiently stupid person could pick an inappropriate level of abstraction to produce predictably idiotic results, which anyone with a brain can trivially identify as idiotic--but it's worth considering seriously.
Turning this theory on its head, there is an argument that we ought to treat other people the way they treat other people. In the case of corporate officers who get rich by exploiting the agency issues inherent in modern governance strucutures, this would lead to the conclusion that we have a moral obligation to loot and lie to the bastards at every opportunity, all for the sake of our own enrichment at their expense.
After all: they have established the principle that this is the right way to treat people. They can't have it both ways. If people are the kinds of thing that it is right to lie to for your own profit, then it is right to lie to corporate officers and their lackies for your own profit and advantage.
Then again, there are people in the world who treat others as ends, not means. Those people have established the principle that people are the kinds of things you treat with decency and dignity, and as such ought to be treated that way themselves.
His case is pretty open and shut when you get down to it.
Then why aren't they getting down to it?
On the one hand this thread is full people who say this case is "complex" and "non-standard" and therefore the lengthy pre-trial detention under punitive conditions is perfectly reasonable, and then we have people like you saying the case is basically open and shut.
So which is it?
Is Manning so obviously guilty it's ok to torture him in pre-trial confinement? Or are the legal complexities so great and the issues at hand so subtle and the evidence so marginal that prosecutors need a year or three to make their case against him so it's completely natural that he be kept in conditions of closely-surveiled solitary confinement?
I'm not totally sure how that last part works, but I'm assuming people will have some thin tissue of made-up claims to try to justify it.
It is abundantly clear that the people who are defending the conditions of Manning's confinement have made up their minds regarding his guilt and his treatment, and are now making up their facts to justify their beliefs.
Rand would have said that there is only one way to conceptualize reality ONLY IF we already know everything in a single heirarchy of knowledge.
She actually advocated for the notion of a single acceptable conceptual hierarchy in any given context of knowledge: that's what "contextual absolutism" means. So your claim that I don't understand what she said is untenable.
Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that there would be a single acceptable hierarchy even if we knew everything. With respect to my example of classical (Hamiltonian) physics vs Newtonian physics, we do know everything that matters, and we are left with at least two perfectly good ways of conceptualizing the phenomena.
Rand's claim to their being a uniquely good conceptual hierarchy in any given context of knowledge is simply wrong, and certainly unneccessary for a rational, objective, scientific understanding of reality. To say otherwise is to deny the perfectly ordinary fact that we have cases in the sciences where we have multiple hierarchies that make differing ontological claims ("motion is caused by forces", "motion is caused by action-minimzation") that are formally (mathematically) identical but radically different concepts.
As I live my life in accordance with objectivity, reason and facts, I reject Rand's view as incompatible with reality.
With auto in C++0x, most STL operations are much more concise.
This is by far my favourite new C++ feature. I swap back and forth between Python and C++ a lot, and increaingly I'm aware of how many god-damned times I'm telling the C++ compiler something it already has all the information it needs to figure out: the type of variable I'm initializing.
"auto" effectively makes C++ type declarations for almost all local variable obsolete, whcih is wonderful. It will make code a bit hardewr to read--you'll have to know what types are being returned--but if you're caring about that you should know that anyway, not being reminded multiple times by the poor perons who wrote the code in the first place.
Admittedly this is a matter of degree, but to suggest that religions react to every challenge with "blasphemy!" and "you heathen!" is a gross mischaracterization.
But to say that all religions everywhere react to challenges of their fundamental or core doctrine with "blasphemy" and "you heathen" is perfectly correct, although your implication that these are always angry words rather than sad, good-humoured, or loaded with some other emotion is of course an irrelevant straw-person.
But even the most enlightened religious person I have ever talked to has had a core of immovable belief that is resistant to any argument or evidence. That's what makes it a religion: not the content of the belief, but the mode in which it is held.
I guess it isn't important that many of the important philosophers in the canon were also mathematicians (many of documented ability, influence, and renown).
This is like saying that "Many of the runners in the race were also on crutches." That is: math is a crutch that allows people who are relatively poor at reasoning to do remarkable things. If you've ever read Hawking or Penrose on philosophical issues you'll realize just how poor at reasoning they are (Hawking is nominally a physicist, but so close to a mathematician as to make no differnence.)
I've got a lot of bad things to say about philosophers, but I do respect their ability to reason without the use of mathematics. Unfortunately, they too often eshew math entirely, as do mathematicians when reasoning about philosophical topics, and both groups rarely reason numerically, which is a big problem (most math is about formal reasoning, not numerical or quantiative reasoning.)
Slashdot Mirror
This is an ethnic issue between Russia and North Caucasus
How do you know?
Seriously, given what the Russian intelligence and security services are willing to do, why do you assume this is anything but a little domestic bolstering of the Russian Security State?
It is plausibly due to Islamist/Nationalist idiots who think that blowing people up is remotely likely to be an effective way of solving their problems--because it worked so well for the Basque, and the Irish, and the Palestinians, and...--but it could also be pure provocation on the part of the Russian security apparatus. A lone bomber like this is plausibly within their scope to arrange.
I'm not saying this is necessarily true. I'm just a little disturbed that there seems to be an uncritical acceptance that any idiot blowing themselves up must be a "Muslim Terrorist".
Much less invasive and will ACTUALLY find any bomb residue/traces
Right, because ONLY Terrorists(TM) have any traces of explosives on them, and not any of the mining engineers, chemists, etc, etc, etc, who happen to be passing through the airport!
Seriously: I've worked for a couple of mining and geological exploration companies and to here them tell it all these "anti-terrorist" measures do nothing but make their lives less convenient.
If I were a Terrorist(TM) I'd get a job with a mining company, get a letter from my employer certifying that I handle explosives, and then blow something up. These measures are so easy to circumvent they are hardly worth mentioning.
There is a chance that they stumbled upon something useful without having a clue how it works, therefore unable to produce a good paper on it.
False.
The history of science is full of unexplained phenomenology. Sargent's Rule is one that comes to mind: the observation that beta decay lifetimes scale as the fifth power of the decay energy. Sargent simply noticed this, and published a paper saying, "Hm... this is odd..." That kind of thing is the foundation of science.
If these guys were legit they could easily publish a paper that says, "We do this, this and this. The result is that. We don't know why." Inexplicable results are bread and butter in science. Irreproducible results... not so much.
Although even irreproducible results can find a place: the 17 keV neutrino was ultimately irreprodicible (it not existing and all) but that didn't stop Simpson and Hime from publishing multiple, meticulous papers on it documenting what they had done. Everyone else took them seriously because we couldn't see what they'd done wrong, even though most people found the idea of a neutrino that heavy with that weak a mixing angle implausible.
Science is the discipline of publicly testing ideas by controlled experiment and systematic observation. There is no impediment to "doing science" on these claims unless the write-up is too poor to know what idea to test. Yet they claim reliability in their own results, and commercial shipping of devices in the next year or so, so they either can reliably reproduce--and therefore accurately describe--working devices that others can build and test, or they are not telling the truth about something.
False flag and disinformation campaigns have been a staple of foreign policy for at least as long as recorded history.
Shh... you'll disturb the complacency of the people here who are saying, "Thinking is hard! Let's go shopping!"
I guess it should be no surprise really, that large leaks of complex documents that would be incredibly hard to fake should be met by intellectually slothful people saying, "Well, it isn't mathematically certain so I can ignore it!"
As if anything interesting is mathematically certain, and as if we don't all get along just find every day without anything approching mathematical certainty on everything from what our name is to where we parked the car.
It strikes me as fairly easy to publish propaganda this way.
It strikes me that you and others posting here trying to dismiss all this raw data are just covering your ears and singing "la la la I can't hear you!" as loudly as possible.
Since only an idiot believes that any information is perfect and complete, pointing out that all information--including information from leaks like this--is imperfect and incomplete is the least interesting thing anyone could possibly say.
Everyone knows that any information from any source must be processed intelligently. I guess if one were terminally intellectually lazy it might seem like more information is a bad thing: "All these facts to think about! Argh!"
But to the rest of us, more information is a good thing, and we're all intelligent and worldly enough to realize that no source of information is going to give us the perfect and ideal "Truth", but that's ok, because we're not interested in the "Truth" but merely the truth... the perfectly ordinary kind of truth involved in answering the perfectly ordinary kind of questions we ask and answer every day, like, "Where are my socks?"
On that basis, the effect of this kind of large leak is to make it harder for intelligence services and others to fake reality, and easier for people to identify failures of news services in their coverage of things like the mess in the Middle East.
Wars can be won, and enemies can be stamped out.
Tell that to the dead and consider the cost to the "victor". Wars can have first and second losers, and that's all.
England and it's allies "won" WWII... at the cost of British economic supremacy. The United States "won" WWII... at the cost of discarding forever its tradiational isolationist policies, putting it on a slippery slope to empire that is still costing American lives today, to say nothing of progressively bankrupting the American state.
Anyone who thinks wars can be "won" hasn't been paying attention to anything but military-industrial propoganda.
Where do you draw the line?
I draw the line at people asking "where do you draw the line?"
I, for one, believe that the protection of our precious children from this terrible gateway drug requires firm action:
If you look at the early hysteria around rock'n'roll this is pretty much what some people wanted back then. They thought rock music would lead to young people losing respect for the old, an explosion of sexual freedom, and stuff like that.
Fortunately, they were right!
You can't WIN a concert, and that's the most important thing in life, right? Winning at any cost?
I have a psycho ex-g/f who once claimed to have "won" a conversation. There is nothing that a sufficiently insane person can't turn into a competition.
Which isn't even a knew idea, and which doesn't require any knowledge of physics to sort out.
The Gnostics argued based on the fundamental shortcomings of human life that our world must have been created by a second-rate sort of god that they called the demiurge. They then postulated a ladder of gods that they could help you climb for only a small fee following a "free" psychological assessment...
And science doesn't, because science says what is, not what should be.
Science doesn't say anything at all. Science is the discipline of publicly testing ideas by systematic observation and controlled experiment. It is not content or even method, but discipline.
Religion is also a discipline: that of believing what is written in scriptures.
The two are necessarily in conflict, because regardless of the question, the discipline of science says we should test the answer.
For example, many scriptures say humans should seek sexual abstinence to achieve a state of grace or happiness. Scientists quite rightly ask what the opperational meaning of "a state of grace" is, and taking the perfectly ordinary view of happiness are able to show that such self-denial does not in general lead to it.
There is no question religions purport to answer that the discipline of science cannot be used to test that answer. In nearly every case where this has been done, from "spare the rod, spoil the child" to "women are our fields, we may go into them as we will" the answers of religion have been found wanting.
Actually, an omnipotent being could make A == ~A, so could have created a universe that does not maximize the potential for life while still maximizing potential for life.
A being that is limited to the laws of logic is limited, and therefore not omnipotent.
An omnipotent being is not limited to the laws of logic, and therefore incomprehensible.
But you only need to ask "Why" once, and ultimately you know, that you just don't know. You don't know if there is some omni-potent being who decided exactly how the universe would operate. You don't know if there is anything after all this. Personally I like to think there is, as I find it a bit comforting to know that there'd be something at the end, or else why bother at all. At least, that's my philosophy.
I don't even know what "why" means in this context, nor why your inability to answer what appears to me to be an incoherent question suggests that anything interesting is beyond the scope of science, which is the disipline of publicly testing ideas by systematic observation and controlled experiment.
As to the question, "else why bother at all?" there are so many answers is beggars the imagination. Life is incredible. Finite, but incredible, full of wonder, beauty, tragedy, pathos, adventure and fun. If you don't find that enough for going on with, you're doing it wrong.
If there's something more when that's all done, I'm for it. But I certainly don't need it to make this amazing ride worthwhile.
Nothing really happens until the people are in the streets revolting and destroying property.
Right, and then "what really happens" is property gets destroyed, and violent pricks get childish gratification from smashing stuff, just like the losers whose "diversity of tactics" have ruined the WTO protests.
When the organs of the state want to discredit a protest movement they salt it with provocateurs who engage in violence.
Which is exactly what losers who think they are part of the movement do, if the sane people involved let them.
Could it be that "dark matter" is simply "empty space" that is naturally "curved"?
Sure, and this idea either has testable consquences, in which case I'm sure someone is working on testing them, or it doesn't, in which case it isn't interesting.
What you're proposing would appear in current theories as a parameterized cosmological constant. Of course, a scientist would then ask, "Why does the cosmological constant have that parameterization?"
The problem with that is that all else being equal, such distortions would tend to level themselves out. We don't assume flatness, it comes out of Einstein's equations as the lowest energy solution in the absence of matter. So when we see deviations from flatness, we think, "matter". And there is quite a lot of astronomical information now that suggests dark matter behaves in most respects like matter.
So, why assume a parameterized cosmological constant when it is known to be a poor fit to data we already have?
laughed at like the Luminiferous aether is now.
Only ignorant idiots laugh at aether theories. It was a perfectly reasonable theoretical artifact given what was known at the time, and scientists did science: they publicly tested the idea that the universe was permeated with a fluid-like substrate responsible for mechanical transmission of light by publishing the results of controlled experiments and systematic observations.
The idea failed the tests, as so many do.
What's funny about that, excatly? Unless you're the sort of mean-spirited, small-minded asshat who laughs at people for being wrong.
I'm just saying that if it's legal, then I don't blame a company for doing such things.
Did you know it's actually legal to, I don't know... goof off on /. during the workday [*]? If employees took the attitude of their bosses, companies would go broke in short order. So it your position isn't even logically consistent: it depends on there being one set of rules for some human beings and a different set of rules for others who are beings of exactly the same kind.
[*] Hey, don't look at me... I've got two compiles and a firmware update running...
To do as well as you can in any system, you need to make the most of every resource you have and stretch the rules as far as possible.
You would not like to walk down the street in a society where everyone behaved that way.
If it isn't right for everyone to do it, it isn't right for anyone to do it, because we are all beings of the same kind.
Arguably, there is a stable solution to the social game that involves treating people the way they treat others, and I see no reason not to treat all corporate executives as dishonest scum who should be looted at every opportunity, based on exactly the reasoning you just gave.
After all, if I can bend the rules without getting caught--the bet execs are making every day--then there's nothing wrong with my doing so. It's a business decision, and I'm in the business of maximizing my own benefit, just like they are. There's nothing wrong with that, is there?
You left out the caterers, the company that ferried employees back and forth, the security firm and the janatorial contractor.
You're not really a very good BP shill, are you? I hope they aren't paying you much, if the best you can do to deflect the significant portion of responsibility that rests with them for choosing such a lousy bunch of contractors and pushing them to complete a dangerous well on an unrealistic schedule, is to point out that there are others who must take their own portion of the blame, leaving BP with less than all, but still a huge amount.
Sad --- Remorseless denial of guilt in the face of overwhelming evidence
Or: "Hey look, lying is profitable! But my god don't tell our employees or customers, because we depend on thier honesty for our business to succeed!"
There is a moral theory that says you ought to make your behaviour the rule--that action is ethical if you could will that everyone behaved that way. This is based on quite reasonable notions of identity: if all humans are of the same kind, then it is reasonable that they should behave in the same way, so what is ethical for one ought to be ethical for all.
There are issues of abstraction with this--a sufficiently stupid person could pick an inappropriate level of abstraction to produce predictably idiotic results, which anyone with a brain can trivially identify as idiotic--but it's worth considering seriously.
Turning this theory on its head, there is an argument that we ought to treat other people the way they treat other people. In the case of corporate officers who get rich by exploiting the agency issues inherent in modern governance strucutures, this would lead to the conclusion that we have a moral obligation to loot and lie to the bastards at every opportunity, all for the sake of our own enrichment at their expense.
After all: they have established the principle that this is the right way to treat people. They can't have it both ways. If people are the kinds of thing that it is right to lie to for your own profit, then it is right to lie to corporate officers and their lackies for your own profit and advantage.
Then again, there are people in the world who treat others as ends, not means. Those people have established the principle that people are the kinds of things you treat with decency and dignity, and as such ought to be treated that way themselves.
Do unto others as they do unto others.
His case is pretty open and shut when you get down to it.
Then why aren't they getting down to it?
On the one hand this thread is full people who say this case is "complex" and "non-standard" and therefore the lengthy pre-trial detention under punitive conditions is perfectly reasonable, and then we have people like you saying the case is basically open and shut.
So which is it?
Is Manning so obviously guilty it's ok to torture him in pre-trial confinement? Or are the legal complexities so great and the issues at hand so subtle and the evidence so marginal that prosecutors need a year or three to make their case against him so it's completely natural that he be kept in conditions of closely-surveiled solitary confinement?
I'm not totally sure how that last part works, but I'm assuming people will have some thin tissue of made-up claims to try to justify it.
It is abundantly clear that the people who are defending the conditions of Manning's confinement have made up their minds regarding his guilt and his treatment, and are now making up their facts to justify their beliefs.
Rand would have said that there is only one way to conceptualize reality ONLY IF we already know everything in a single heirarchy of knowledge.
She actually advocated for the notion of a single acceptable conceptual hierarchy in any given context of knowledge: that's what "contextual absolutism" means. So your claim that I don't understand what she said is untenable.
Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that there would be a single acceptable hierarchy even if we knew everything. With respect to my example of classical (Hamiltonian) physics vs Newtonian physics, we do know everything that matters, and we are left with at least two perfectly good ways of conceptualizing the phenomena.
Rand's claim to their being a uniquely good conceptual hierarchy in any given context of knowledge is simply wrong, and certainly unneccessary for a rational, objective, scientific understanding of reality. To say otherwise is to deny the perfectly ordinary fact that we have cases in the sciences where we have multiple hierarchies that make differing ontological claims ("motion is caused by forces", "motion is caused by action-minimzation") that are formally (mathematically) identical but radically different concepts.
As I live my life in accordance with objectivity, reason and facts, I reject Rand's view as incompatible with reality.
With auto in C++0x, most STL operations are much more concise.
This is by far my favourite new C++ feature. I swap back and forth between Python and C++ a lot, and increaingly I'm aware of how many god-damned times I'm telling the C++ compiler something it already has all the information it needs to figure out: the type of variable I'm initializing.
"auto" effectively makes C++ type declarations for almost all local variable obsolete, whcih is wonderful. It will make code a bit hardewr to read--you'll have to know what types are being returned--but if you're caring about that you should know that anyway, not being reminded multiple times by the poor perons who wrote the code in the first place.
Admittedly this is a matter of degree, but to suggest that religions react to every challenge with "blasphemy!" and "you heathen!" is a gross mischaracterization.
But to say that all religions everywhere react to challenges of their fundamental or core doctrine with "blasphemy" and "you heathen" is perfectly correct, although your implication that these are always angry words rather than sad, good-humoured, or loaded with some other emotion is of course an irrelevant straw-person.
But even the most enlightened religious person I have ever talked to has had a core of immovable belief that is resistant to any argument or evidence. That's what makes it a religion: not the content of the belief, but the mode in which it is held.
I guess it isn't important that many of the important philosophers in the canon were also mathematicians (many of documented ability, influence, and renown).
This is like saying that "Many of the runners in the race were also on crutches." That is: math is a crutch that allows people who are relatively poor at reasoning to do remarkable things. If you've ever read Hawking or Penrose on philosophical issues you'll realize just how poor at reasoning they are (Hawking is nominally a physicist, but so close to a mathematician as to make no differnence.)
I've got a lot of bad things to say about philosophers, but I do respect their ability to reason without the use of mathematics. Unfortunately, they too often eshew math entirely, as do mathematicians when reasoning about philosophical topics, and both groups rarely reason numerically, which is a big problem (most math is about formal reasoning, not numerical or quantiative reasoning.)