The original, original article's (scientific paper) author reminded a Reuter's interviewer that there as a good chance that this won't pan out for humans. There have been plenty of previous "fat factors" that only worked on rodents and didn't transfer to primates.
The genomes of rats, mice and humans have a lot of key differences in the basic metabolic pathways. That recent study explains a lot about why rat and mouse studies can be so wrong about human responses to drugs and things.
It could be that Microsoft realized that just because they're the biggest ape on the block that it doesn't necessarily mean they are infinitely powerful or infinitely successful because of it.
Add to this that there's a chance of a moderate-to-severe cash crunch for Microsoft sometime between now and when Longhorn finally (if ever) does come out, current cash on-hand notwithstanding. There's also some of uncertainty about whether demand will be there when it does finally arrive.
Being nice is certainly, well, "nice", but I guess I'd not go down that path, even for an SO - yes, she has her own computer. It's easier to avoid the "boundaries" issues for both parties - that last thing I'd want (especial likely with Win98) is to have my own work damaged, destroyed or delayed by something the others had downloaded and run/installed on that one computer. It's just not a reliable option IMO, unless there were some seriously extenuating circumstances.
> Please mod parent (-5, Totally irrelevant plus
> testosterone filled):-)
Why do you assume testosterone must be involved in such an "arrangement" - either hetero or not?? I know plenty of female geeks would negotiate such.:-):-)
Under what obligation are you expected to share a PC with them (unless they're of the appropriate sex and you're getting laid)? Why can they afford tuition but not a PC? Why aren't they paying you for "IT support" which could probably add up to the purchase price of separate computers anyway. Dump the freeloaders and make them buy their own computers. Sheesh, talk about self-inflicted masochism.
This sounds like great a geat service (I'd pay for it) but do they provide AC plug-in so I don't have to run off battery (with the inevitable "battery low" warnings only a few hours in)? My new Pentium 4 laptop is such a pig on power that just when I'd get on a roll online, I'd end up needing to shut down already.
The funny thing is you can tell what matters for facial recognition by just asking or being an artist. Anyone who's done drawn or painted portraiture knows that it's the eyes, then mouth, and then nose that defines a recognizable face. The "proof" of concept is how you can draw a face with as few as 4 or 5 curved lines and the face is utterly recognizable. This is akin to Douglas Hofstadter's article "Letter Spirit" in "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies" which talks about what gives an image of a letter 'a', it all it's possible fonts and glyphs, its recognizable "letter-a-ness" or letter spirit as an 'a'.
Most of the "insights" about facial recognition in the article would probably elicit a collective "well, duh, that's been known for hundreds of years" from artists (it does from me). BTW I identified all four faces correctly from the side-bar - being an artist let's you actually "see" the world rather "project" the world.
I get the impression that this is sort of a "if your only tool is a hammer, every problem is a nail" situation, where the hammer is technology, to the exclusion of considering other options like simply getting the $3500 and getting a rugged, public-tested solution.
This is a potentially high-traffic, high-abuse type of display (just visit a museum with that already uses that $3500 audio system (I've seen them before) and observe how school children (ab)use them!:-o. I'm sure the "total cost of ownership" of the $3500 solution will be lower than anything cobbled togethered - how soon will you need to make a repair? How much will the capital and labor costs (even donated) be to do repairs? Will the lower investment solution be a waste anyway if no one can used it when it breaks even other day/week?
Any legitimate museum I've seen, even those running on a "shoe string" budget, has a donor's list that could be approached ("help us with this expense and we'll put up a plaque with your name as donor next to it"). If doing this is out of the comfort zone for those running the museum, the museum is already doomed anyway.
The counties who are suing the state over the eVote ban may be run by fundamentally ignorant people, or unethical people if this really is a about Diebold partisanship, but at least some of these suits are due to the ongoing California budget crisis. No Arnie hasn't really solved anything; he's mostly pushed the inevitable pain onto local budgets who are too disorganized and red-inked to do much about it other than lash out irrationally.
Re:Cone of Advertising, cone of secret Teleprompti
on
Directed Sound
·
· Score: 1
Another interesting idea: Quiet/Loud nightclubs and bars. I don't patronize these places much any more, partly because the loudness of these places, partly due to the music I'd rather hear isn't played, partly because of my hearing (or loss thereof), and mostly because *I have to* converse socially to make spending the time worthwhile, which you can't do when it's that loud.
I had previously brainstormed about how a club experience would be better for me: the big one is if you could have a "cone of silence": listen to the music you like, if you like, without any.
I kind of imagine the party rooms from "Our Man Flint" on Galaxy Island where you move past the curtain to an ajoining room and it's instantly silent or a different genre of music (Ah, but you are a pleasure unit, dear:-);-) ).
You could do it with everyone having an iPod/MP3 player and earbuds but then you could not converse. Another way to do that is to use those "sound parabolas" you see at some music stores (e.g. Fry's has them in the music CD section). Another way would be to use this ultrasonic directed sound technology.
That's nice, but now take that to another level: what if you used phased-array technology and beamed hundreds of different ultrasonic signals to specific locations keyed off a person's location in the room (RFID, etc), where the sound follows them around as they walk. Only when you get in proximity to the person to you finally hear their "musical universe". Imagine a club that was simultaneously Deep House, IDM, Ambient, Jazz, Blues, Rock, etc. - that would be a trip. You could make it a club feature to allow each patron to build their own playlist.
Just a crazy idea. However consider this prior art if anyone is thinking of patenting it.:-)
> I thought science was the one area where there should be no borders.
> Why is it so disturbing that other countries are doing well in scientifical-type stuff?
It matters because we are still a world of nation-states, which means that our legal, political and economic well-being as individuals is more dependent on the economic measures of success at a nation-state level (e.g. GDP) than any thing else. In the 20th century is science and technology that have been the prime movers of nation-state economic growth. Ergo, maintaining the status quo for everything else is dependent on maintaining the status quo in science and technology.
The moment we make the transition to either 1) corporate-states (with the dissolution of nation-states), or 2) one world state. In either case then nation-states won't matter, and we can ignore how we keep up in science as a nation-state. However, only with the latter state system will your vision of scientific egalitarianism be a remote possibility; the corporation-state world will be worse for scientific egalitarianism. Unfortunately we are moving more toward the latter , if anything.
Others have responded but here's another (I say this as someone with an MBA, 25 years of being a "good corporate soldier", and founder of two companies).
Corporations are composed of people but so is a rioting mob. You can not extend the behavior of individuals to predict the behavior of a corporation.
Corporations in the US have the rights of individuals but they few of the checks and balances that mere mortal citizens face.
Corporations can be immortal
Corporations can be reincarnated
Corporations magnify the ethics (or lack thereof) of their executives
Corporations demagnify the ethics (or lack thereof) of their employees - roughly in proportion to their distance from the top in the org chart
Corporations insulate (by the legal definition of a corporation) their executives (and owners) from the moral and ethical societal constraints they face as mere, individual mortals
Corporations, like all groups of people, are prone to "group-think" which can result in ideas and behavior among its individuals that would be utter inconceivable outside of the group
The point made (parent thread) about CASPIAN is right on: if you are leading you never acknowledge the competition as it only gives them power they otherwise lack; when they are already on par or beating you, you mention them. The fact than CASPIAN is mentioned at all, and particularly in disparaging, ad hominae attacks already means that the issues raised legitimate and important enough that they no only can't be simply ignored. It also suggests that the pro-RFID has only self-serving economic arguments against them with no constructive strategy to address the real issues. They've failed to properly do a "stakeholder analysis".
I strongly believe that RFID can be a really good thing for all involved but only if the privacy issues are dealt with structurally and architecturally through standards definitions and legal protections.
To: All Employees
Subject: New Chocolate Security Policy
It has come to our attention that chocolate has been found to be a new type of computer security threat. In the interest of assuring proper computer security and protection of company assets chocolate will be banned from corporate facilities and corporate-sponsored events. Employees are expected to report immediately to corporate security any incidents of suspicious offers, bribes or exchanges involving chocolate by other employees, competitors or members of the public. This policy is in effect immediately.
We appreciated your help in making Initech a safer place to work.
Provisional Security Manager
William 'Bill' Lumbergh
Given that Apple can't make enough iPod to meet demand, it isn't sales they need.
To boot, the sales Real must have claimed were necessarily all Pro Forma so the value was probably dubious.
The only real argument would have been a counter-balance-of-power against Microsoft, but there are so many reasons why that would be too little benefit to justify the development/integration effort.
It was a seriously weak hand played by a company in a seriously weak position - not surprising Apple begged off.
When I worked for HP we had similar offers from potential partners. What most of the prosepctive partners never got was that HP's brand value was so strong and so much bigger than them that without a major kick in sales for HP, almost any other scenario (especially bad partnerships) would only damage the HP brand and would be giving the partner an enormous free ride by being able to use the HP name in their marketing with little in it for HP. Very very few deals were ever accepted - the partner application forms were frightenly intrusive (but had to be given the above), which probably acted like a good filter.
Apple is in a similar position compared to potential partners - especially Real.
I had a CPA do my taxes - it took just under 2 hours from the moment I walked in the door to the moment she filed electronically. And she charged me a few hundred for it (I have a business and lots of extra stuff complicate things - I counted 20+ forms generated in addition to the 1040 & 540). I also had all my paperwork in order when I went in.
I think she was using TurboTax (or something that was Windows-based) but at least I (and all her customers) didn't buy or need to use TurboTax directly. Thus we did not support/aid/abet the Windows platform with a Windows software purchase. Sure she's using Windows, but every customer she has dilutes the value and market for TurboTax sales and indirectly Windows. That should satisfy any Linux political agenda anyone might have, and eliminate the need to boot up Windows.
Self-sufficiency is not always desirable, necessary or cost-effective.
Unfortunately this is one of those questions like you get on sci.electronics.* which doesn't include the basics like how much power is required; at what voltage and current levels, AC or DC, what frequency, can "it" run unconnected (e.g. on battery) and if so for how long (application-wise, not technology-wise), etc. etc.
Barring nice engineer-friendly technical specs, at least outline more specifically what you're trying to do, at least in vague terms, would be more helpful. Starting out by saying it's a product idea (rather than just some hobby thing) was probably mistake if you're paranoid about competitors.
Without some minimal specifications of this sort, absolutely any answer you get will either be hopelessly vague, utterly useless or simply a troll.
Multiple north poles could have the same orientation, sort of like with a Laplace transform where multiple poles or zeroes can be at the same frequency.
This argument is nothing more than the same old and discredited "Security-through-Obscurity" argument wrapped (bizarrely) in the flag of Usability. Talk about Orwellian! We must keep it hard to use (and prone to errors even among system admins) in order to keep it secure!? Next: we need to destroy the village to save it; kill the villagers to save them!
From what I've read on the web and seen on a PBS Nova program about the subject: during a flip the Earth's internal dynamo goes from ordered to chaotic. The movements is not just is a straight bee-line to the opposite side. The North pole, for example, has been drifting even of the last 30 years toward the south east. The field strength declines substantially and the magnetic fields change from bipolar (two poles: north and south) to multipolar ("poles" coming out of any which direction - the "Southern Anomaly" in the south Atlantic is apparently believed by some to be the onset of a tripolar field). When the actually collapse is imminent, these poles start moving quickly, as much as degrees of latitude or longitude per day or week.
Marin County (north of San Francisco - the other side of the Golden Gate bridge, for those not familiar) has been considering Desalination recently too. Currently they get all their water from either 5 rain-fed lakes (which have been the primary source of water for ~100 years) or the Russian River in Sonona County. The strong anti-growth movement in Marin over the last 20 years has ballooned suburban sprawl in Sonona County with SF commuter homes. Sonoma county's own water needs thus preclude Marin getting more water from the Russian in the future. During the late 1970s drought a water pipe was installed on the Richmond-San Rafael bridge to bring in water from Contra Costa county in the east. That pipe was finally removed in the 1990s when they started to retrofit the bridge (which has been literally falling apart).
This kind of "extending operational lifetime" is a long-lived and ubiqituous part of the "space engineering" culture.
It partly starts from conservative design practices: most of the time you don't have the option to go back and fix mistakes (Hubble is utterly anomalous in this respect). Reprogrammability is also a key element of enable remote reliability.
These conservative design practices almost automatically mean there's some usable, extendable margin on operation. Thus "pulling extended life out of a hat" is not as difficult as one might imagine, though the specifics of how it is achieved is generally not know at launch - unexpected things ultimately fail in flight and you figure out the workaround only when they happen - this Mars mission is a typically example.
Add to this the sociological and political needs to display "excellence, brilliance and inscrutable indispensability" and you have the climate for creating this as a fundamental cultural trait.
I used to be involved in space-related organizations for non-NASA programs. The same "miracles" always happened there too.:-)
Chaos is a middle-ground between purely ordered and purely random. There is structure in chaotic systems, it's only that on short orders of time it appears random to human neural signal processing - this is largely a limitation of the human capacity to perceive rather than a characteristic of the system observed.
One form of the Lanchester equations uses 3 populations: conventional army, guerilla army and civilians. There is a conversion term between the guerilla army and the civilian population. In other words - civilans remain neutral but take loses and can be converted to guerillas.
Turns out those conversions have a devastating effect on the conventional force, because you get more conversions as civilian losses occur so civilians casulties must be strictly avoided, yet the targets, guerillas, are "masked" by the civilian population, thereby reducing the force multipliers of the conventional force. The nullification of force multipliers is faster than pure guerilla with no conversion. The odds for the conventional force "winning" grow very dim.
But similarly you could add a conversion term to the conventional forces to convert to guerilla forces, which pretty much dooms the conventional force.
Yes, Your rule is sort of a statement of Lanchester's conventional-conventional warfare power law equation.
However, the more nuanced rule system is Lanchester's Equations for conventional-guerilla combat. With guerilla combat you can effectively neutralize the force multiplier advantage of larger force and technology. In many ways being more powerful makes you weaker.
This is why Al Qaida operates as it does. What good was the superior fire power of our military. What good would an ABM system be. How does more uniformed police or army help with bombs placed on bullet train tracks in Spain. Zippo. Conventional force only works when you have a fixed based and fixed targets to aim at. You need enemy territory and you need visible combatants. The only two strategies that are effective against this are: switching to guerilla-guerilla combat, and locking down everything so no one can be hidden. Sound familiar? You could argue that the latter actually serves al Qaida's purposes - the ultimate guerilla warfare hack: have your enemy plunge his own knife into his own chest.
This is also part of Saddam's calculus: faced with the conventional-conventional power-law advantage, a US invasion is an obvious Win-Lose game scenario. If you are going to lose anyway, better to play the odds on a possible Lose-Win through guerilla combat that actually has a prayer to win or, worst-case, make it a Lose-Lose scenario, which is better than letting the opponent have the satisfaction of his Win-Lose over you. Does this sound familiar? When honor is involved, entire populations are expendable. Look at the 600 troops lost in Iraq: "Must stay the course. It would be cowardly" - just the honor argument, not a rational argument, which would be based on sunk costs and forward-looking-only cost-benefit.
The utter stupidity and parochialism of the Bush adminstration was that this obvious game scenario never occurred to them. Of course, they're utterly stuck in a Real Politik world model anyway - in that model guerillas have no independent existence or motivation; they are only vassals of superpower whims.
Slashdot Mirror
As long as we aren't making presumptions about the arrangement, I'm OK with that. :-)
The genomes of rats, mice and humans have a lot of key differences in the basic metabolic pathways. That recent study explains a lot about why rat and mouse studies can be so wrong about human responses to drugs and things.
Add to this that there's a chance of a moderate-to-severe cash crunch for Microsoft sometime between now and when Longhorn finally (if ever) does come out, current cash on-hand notwithstanding. There's also some of uncertainty about whether demand will be there when it does finally arrive.
Why do you assume testosterone must be involved in such an "arrangement" - either hetero or not?? I know plenty of female geeks would negotiate such. :-) :-)
Under what obligation are you expected to share a PC with them (unless they're of the appropriate sex and you're getting laid)? Why can they afford tuition but not a PC? Why aren't they paying you for "IT support" which could probably add up to the purchase price of separate computers anyway. Dump the freeloaders and make them buy their own computers. Sheesh, talk about self-inflicted masochism.
This sounds like great a geat service (I'd pay for it) but do they provide AC plug-in so I don't have to run off battery (with the inevitable "battery low" warnings only a few hours in)? My new Pentium 4 laptop is such a pig on power that just when I'd get on a roll online, I'd end up needing to shut down already.
Most of the "insights" about facial recognition in the article would probably elicit a collective "well, duh, that's been known for hundreds of years" from artists (it does from me). BTW I identified all four faces correctly from the side-bar - being an artist let's you actually "see" the world rather "project" the world.
JG
I get the impression that this is sort of a "if your only tool is a hammer, every problem is a nail" situation, where the hammer is technology, to the exclusion of considering other options like simply getting the $3500 and getting a rugged, public-tested solution.
This is a potentially high-traffic, high-abuse type of display (just visit a museum with that already uses that $3500 audio system (I've seen them before) and observe how school children (ab)use them! :-o. I'm sure the "total cost of ownership" of the $3500 solution will be lower than anything cobbled togethered - how soon will you need to make a repair? How much will the capital and labor costs (even donated) be to do repairs? Will the lower investment solution be a waste anyway if no one can used it when it breaks even other day/week?
Any legitimate museum I've seen, even those running on a "shoe string" budget, has a donor's list that could be approached ("help us with this expense and we'll put up a plaque with your name as donor next to it"). If doing this is out of the comfort zone for those running the museum, the museum is already doomed anyway.
JG
The counties who are suing the state over the eVote ban may be run by fundamentally ignorant people, or unethical people if this really is a about Diebold partisanship, but at least some of these suits are due to the ongoing California budget crisis. No Arnie hasn't really solved anything; he's mostly pushed the inevitable pain onto local budgets who are too disorganized and red-inked to do much about it other than lash out irrationally.
I had previously brainstormed about how a club experience would be better for me: the big one is if you could have a "cone of silence": listen to the music you like, if you like, without any.
I kind of imagine the party rooms from "Our Man Flint" on Galaxy Island where you move past the curtain to an ajoining room and it's instantly silent or a different genre of music (Ah, but you are a pleasure unit, dear :-) ;-) ).
You could do it with everyone having an iPod/MP3 player and earbuds but then you could not converse. Another way to do that is to use those "sound parabolas" you see at some music stores (e.g. Fry's has them in the music CD section). Another way would be to use this ultrasonic directed sound technology.
That's nice, but now take that to another level: what if you used phased-array technology and beamed hundreds of different ultrasonic signals to specific locations keyed off a person's location in the room (RFID, etc), where the sound follows them around as they walk. Only when you get in proximity to the person to you finally hear their "musical universe". Imagine a club that was simultaneously Deep House, IDM, Ambient, Jazz, Blues, Rock, etc. - that would be a trip. You could make it a club feature to allow each patron to build their own playlist.
Just a crazy idea. However consider this prior art if anyone is thinking of patenting it. :-)
> Why is it so disturbing that other countries are doing well in scientifical-type stuff?
It matters because we are still a world of nation-states, which means that our legal, political and economic well-being as individuals is more dependent on the economic measures of success at a nation-state level (e.g. GDP) than any thing else. In the 20th century is science and technology that have been the prime movers of nation-state economic growth. Ergo, maintaining the status quo for everything else is dependent on maintaining the status quo in science and technology.
The moment we make the transition to either 1) corporate-states (with the dissolution of nation-states), or 2) one world state. In either case then nation-states won't matter, and we can ignore how we keep up in science as a nation-state. However, only with the latter state system will your vision of scientific egalitarianism be a remote possibility; the corporation-state world will be worse for scientific egalitarianism. Unfortunately we are moving more toward the latter , if anything.
The point made (parent thread) about CASPIAN is right on: if you are leading you never acknowledge the competition as it only gives them power they otherwise lack; when they are already on par or beating you, you mention them. The fact than CASPIAN is mentioned at all, and particularly in disparaging, ad hominae attacks already means that the issues raised legitimate and important enough that they no only can't be simply ignored. It also suggests that the pro-RFID has only self-serving economic arguments against them with no constructive strategy to address the real issues. They've failed to properly do a "stakeholder analysis".
I strongly believe that RFID can be a really good thing for all involved but only if the privacy issues are dealt with structurally and architecturally through standards definitions and legal protections.
To: All Employees
Subject: New Chocolate Security Policy
It has come to our attention that chocolate has been found to be a new type of computer security threat. In the interest of assuring proper computer security and protection of company assets chocolate will be banned from corporate facilities and corporate-sponsored events. Employees are expected to report immediately to corporate security any incidents of suspicious offers, bribes or exchanges involving chocolate by other employees, competitors or members of the public. This policy is in effect immediately.
We appreciated your help in making Initech a safer place to work.
Provisional Security Manager
William 'Bill' Lumbergh
To boot, the sales Real must have claimed were necessarily all Pro Forma so the value was probably dubious.
The only real argument would have been a counter-balance-of-power against Microsoft, but there are so many reasons why that would be too little benefit to justify the development/integration effort.
It was a seriously weak hand played by a company in a seriously weak position - not surprising Apple begged off.
When I worked for HP we had similar offers from potential partners. What most of the prosepctive partners never got was that HP's brand value was so strong and so much bigger than them that without a major kick in sales for HP, almost any other scenario (especially bad partnerships) would only damage the HP brand and would be giving the partner an enormous free ride by being able to use the HP name in their marketing with little in it for HP. Very very few deals were ever accepted - the partner application forms were frightenly intrusive (but had to be given the above), which probably acted like a good filter.
Apple is in a similar position compared to potential partners - especially Real.
I think she was using TurboTax (or something that was Windows-based) but at least I (and all her customers) didn't buy or need to use TurboTax directly. Thus we did not support/aid/abet the Windows platform with a Windows software purchase. Sure she's using Windows, but every customer she has dilutes the value and market for TurboTax sales and indirectly Windows. That should satisfy any Linux political agenda anyone might have, and eliminate the need to boot up Windows.
Self-sufficiency is not always desirable, necessary or cost-effective.
Unfortunately this is one of those questions like you get on sci.electronics.* which doesn't include the basics like how much power is required; at what voltage and current levels, AC or DC, what frequency, can "it" run unconnected (e.g. on battery) and if so for how long (application-wise, not technology-wise), etc. etc.
Barring nice engineer-friendly technical specs, at least outline more specifically what you're trying to do, at least in vague terms, would be more helpful. Starting out by saying it's a product idea (rather than just some hobby thing) was probably mistake if you're paranoid about competitors.
Without some minimal specifications of this sort, absolutely any answer you get will either be hopelessly vague, utterly useless or simply a troll.
Multiple north poles could have the same orientation, sort of like with a Laplace transform where multiple poles or zeroes can be at the same frequency.
This argument is nothing more than the same old and discredited "Security-through-Obscurity" argument wrapped (bizarrely) in the flag of Usability. Talk about Orwellian! We must keep it hard to use (and prone to errors even among system admins) in order to keep it secure!? Next: we need to destroy the village to save it; kill the villagers to save them!
From what I've read on the web and seen on a PBS Nova program about the subject: during a flip the Earth's internal dynamo goes from ordered to chaotic. The movements is not just is a straight bee-line to the opposite side. The North pole, for example, has been drifting even of the last 30 years toward the south east. The field strength declines substantially and the magnetic fields change from bipolar (two poles: north and south) to multipolar ("poles" coming out of any which direction - the "Southern Anomaly" in the south Atlantic is apparently believed by some to be the onset of a tripolar field). When the actually collapse is imminent, these poles start moving quickly, as much as degrees of latitude or longitude per day or week.
Marin County (north of San Francisco - the other side of the Golden Gate bridge, for those not familiar) has been considering Desalination recently too. Currently they get all their water from either 5 rain-fed lakes (which have been the primary source of water for ~100 years) or the Russian River in Sonona County. The strong anti-growth movement in Marin over the last 20 years has ballooned suburban sprawl in Sonona County with SF commuter homes. Sonoma county's own water needs thus preclude Marin getting more water from the Russian in the future. During the late 1970s drought a water pipe was installed on the Richmond-San Rafael bridge to bring in water from Contra Costa county in the east. That pipe was finally removed in the 1990s when they started to retrofit the bridge (which has been literally falling apart).
It partly starts from conservative design practices: most of the time you don't have the option to go back and fix mistakes (Hubble is utterly anomalous in this respect). Reprogrammability is also a key element of enable remote reliability.
These conservative design practices almost automatically mean there's some usable, extendable margin on operation. Thus "pulling extended life out of a hat" is not as difficult as one might imagine, though the specifics of how it is achieved is generally not know at launch - unexpected things ultimately fail in flight and you figure out the workaround only when they happen - this Mars mission is a typically example.
Add to this the sociological and political needs to display "excellence, brilliance and inscrutable indispensability" and you have the climate for creating this as a fundamental cultural trait.
I used to be involved in space-related organizations for non-NASA programs. The same "miracles" always happened there too. :-)
Chaos is a middle-ground between purely ordered and purely random. There is structure in chaotic systems, it's only that on short orders of time it appears random to human neural signal processing - this is largely a limitation of the human capacity to perceive rather than a characteristic of the system observed.
One form of the Lanchester equations uses 3 populations: conventional army, guerilla army and civilians. There is a conversion term between the guerilla army and the civilian population. In other words - civilans remain neutral but take loses and can be converted to guerillas.
Turns out those conversions have a devastating effect on the conventional force, because you get more conversions as civilian losses occur so civilians casulties must be strictly avoided, yet the targets, guerillas, are "masked" by the civilian population, thereby reducing the force multipliers of the conventional force. The nullification of force multipliers is faster than pure guerilla with no conversion. The odds for the conventional force "winning" grow very dim.
But similarly you could add a conversion term to the conventional forces to convert to guerilla forces, which pretty much dooms the conventional force.
However, the more nuanced rule system is Lanchester's Equations for conventional-guerilla combat. With guerilla combat you can effectively neutralize the force multiplier advantage of larger force and technology. In many ways being more powerful makes you weaker.
This is why Al Qaida operates as it does. What good was the superior fire power of our military. What good would an ABM system be. How does more uniformed police or army help with bombs placed on bullet train tracks in Spain. Zippo. Conventional force only works when you have a fixed based and fixed targets to aim at. You need enemy territory and you need visible combatants. The only two strategies that are effective against this are: switching to guerilla-guerilla combat, and locking down everything so no one can be hidden. Sound familiar? You could argue that the latter actually serves al Qaida's purposes - the ultimate guerilla warfare hack: have your enemy plunge his own knife into his own chest.
This is also part of Saddam's calculus: faced with the conventional-conventional power-law advantage, a US invasion is an obvious Win-Lose game scenario. If you are going to lose anyway, better to play the odds on a possible Lose-Win through guerilla combat that actually has a prayer to win or, worst-case, make it a Lose-Lose scenario, which is better than letting the opponent have the satisfaction of his Win-Lose over you. Does this sound familiar? When honor is involved, entire populations are expendable. Look at the 600 troops lost in Iraq: "Must stay the course. It would be cowardly" - just the honor argument, not a rational argument, which would be based on sunk costs and forward-looking-only cost-benefit.
The utter stupidity and parochialism of the Bush adminstration was that this obvious game scenario never occurred to them. Of course, they're utterly stuck in a Real Politik world model anyway - in that model guerillas have no independent existence or motivation; they are only vassals of superpower whims.