So, environmental responsibility doesn't matter at all? It's not just dollars, you know.
But those dollars are an important part of environmental responsibility. I think one of the great tragedies of the modern era is the considerable economic ignorance of people in the environmental movement.
This is exactly what I find to be dishonest about the way you talk, right here: "there just isn't a good case". Obviously there's a good case. It could save lives. Not just "could", but "almost certainly would". If it's too expensive to justify that should be a painful unfortunate reality, and not something to be dismissed as though there's just no argument to be had.
"Saving lives" is not automatically a "good case". You have to consider the costs as well. For example, massive expenditures can cost lives (via declining quality of life and less resources for emergency preparedness and infrastructure building) as well as save them.
The whole second stage is from ATK, made using the same factories where they usually build ICBMs.
That's private right there. I sense you started with that because you thought otherwise. Even being as dependent on public funding as ATK is, it is still a private company.
The rest is correct, though I understand the private company Aerojet made the engines for the first stage using a 70s Soviet design.
No, government does. Sometimes that imperfectly reflects the will of the society (such as it is) and sometimes it grossly runs counter to the will of society. And government even has the power to influence the will of society (sometimes at the point of a gun!) to reflect the desires of government.
To view law as separate from society shows that one has a disregard for the law of society,
Not at all. It's merely a correct observation. There are huge conflicts of interest between society, government, and the members that make up society and government. This conflict shows most clearly in the laws that are broken on a widespread and routine basis, such as (in the US) drug possession (both illegal drugs and drugs obtained without a prescription), speed laws, illegal downloads of protected media, tax evasion, etc.
For example, according to this poll, almost half of adults polled in the US (48%) have used marijuana. While it's possible that some have only used marijuana outside of the US, it's likely that virtually all of these people committed a federal felony of possession of a controlled substance. When violation of law is that extreme and pervasive, you don't have the laws reflecting the will of society.
Therefore, you do not want to be apart of society, and will be punished accordingly when caught.
This is how it is, if you dont like it... move.
Does not follow. Aside from illogical assumptions that mean nothing ("do not want to be apart of society"), where am I going to move? I think I'd rather just fix my society.
So one line of thinking acknowledges society, the other acknowledges personal freedom.
That's a typical false dilemma. One can have a way of thinking that acknowledges both society and personal freedom. I also see that you confuse government and law with society. They aren't equivalent. I don't confuse a law or a bureaucratic decision with society.
For example, Dirac predicted the existence of anti-matter from a model of the electron with interactions with photons. For the model to work mathematically, he had to have a second particle, the positron which had opposite properties of the electron.
Then there's the search for missing planets. Neptune was found by noticing that Uranus didn't follow the orbit as predicted by the mathematical model of the then known Solar System.
Radioactive dating wouldn't be possible without a model of how decay works. That in turn has generated new insights.
Unfortunately, I am not the only one in this country... so I must yield to societies decision.
What's the reason? Society can and does make bad decisions all the time which aren't respected by the members of that society. There's plenty of law is that is more honored in the breach (and sometimes more honorable to do so - such as US abolitionists refusing to turn in runaway slaves in the mid 19th century).
although it seems pretty plain his crazy brother was the one who set everything up.
The "home grown" brother who entered the US at 16? And I'm sure it's all due to the US not the strife and tyranny (or for that matter, training) in Chechnya. This argument just doesn't work.
98%+ of all domestic deaths are caused by a gun in the house, not by external gun
To give some context for how dumb this remark is, in 2000 in the US, accidental firearms discharge killed 776 people. Falls killed over 13k people. Drowning in a bathtub killed 341.
It's also worth noting that the presence of so many guns in homes discourages the kind of activities that would result in external gun deaths. After all, the usual goal for breaking into homes isn't to get shot. I guess an analogy would be accidental deaths in the military. It's not a good thing for your military to be suffering more deaths from enemy action than from accidents and friendly fire because it means you're in a serious fight.
Emergency crews, firefighters, and police, the bulk of the official response to disaster and such, for example, rely on radio not on cell phones.
Right, so you're claiming that telephones are unimportant during an emergency.
No, I merely noted that actual emergency workers don't rely on them. And given that the cell network currently can go down during a large scale emergency (not just any emergency), cell phones can't be currently an important part of large scale emergency response.
Let us recall that my reply was to your previous and very different characterization of my statements as "nobody needs a telephone during an emergency". You might need all sorts of things that aren't there in an emergency. For example, if you're seriously injured you need to be in an emergency room not underneath a pile of rubble.
These things are rare. We don't have to speculate, we just look at the occurrence of actual large scale emergencies that overwhelm the local cell network infrastructure.
How rare? I ask because I'm pretty sure you're just making this up. And what about other unrelated things that happen during an emergency? Someone bombs Boston, and what about a robbery that happens at the same time? Any one scenario is rare, but when you add up all the various possible rare scanarios, are they really so unrealistic?
Well, that's not a very honest answer. Where's this data that supports or undermines my point? I'm the only one doing work here.
This story indicates that "unusual events" happen a few times a year (including holidays like New Year's Eve). I don't know how many emergencies make that up, but some of them would be normal holidays.
and yet, we might have to shut that network down when it's most needed.
Wait, so are you admitting here that cell phone infrastructure is needed during emergencies?
No, I wasn't. It was a precondition of your argument. If we depend on cell phones to report problems during large scale emergencies (as you desire), then we need to consider reasonable scenarios where we have to turn off that network precisely at the time we most need it. If we don't, then it doesn't matter if we turn off the network.
Personally, I'm dissatisfied by your "honesty" in this discussion. My statements are misconstrued (your shifting equating of my observation that emergency response doesn't depend on cell phones with at least two different statements or my "admission" above about cell phone infrastructure just above); you demand hard numbers from me while simultaneously providing no support for your own side aside from a few contrived emergency scenarios and irrelevant analogies; repeatedly asking "But then are we really ok with that?" (when that has been answered a number of times to the affirmative, which I gather we somehow didn't "really" mean); and of course, there's the annoyingly dismissive and erroneous "The whole post sounds like you're searching for reasons for me to be wrong without having a real argument."
The bottom line is that cell phone networks are already expensive. Everything I've read implies that expanding them to handle rare emergency loads costs a lot and there just isn't a good case for spending that kind of money. That's the best I can say.
How much money should we spend on education? Well, if our society invests $1 in tax money in a kid, and we get $2 back in social benefits, we should invest as much money as we can with those returns. Any business would. If we went back to the levels of investment in public education we had in the 1960s and 1970s, I think we'd have the same high rates of economic development we had in that time.
What makes you think the US spends less per child on education now than then? The US is still one of the leaders in per capita spending. As I understand it, if we went back to the spending of the 60s, we would be spending somewhat less at the K-12 level and about a factor of 3 or 4 less at the college level.
I think what's happening here is that we aren't getting that $2 of return on $1 of educational spending. And I'm deeply cynical of any society-wide effort such as public education that glibly transfers blame to "parents" when it fails.
You claim you never said, "nobody needs a telephone during an emergency." and yet you quote yourself saying, "We don't rely on the cell phone network in an emergency."
And I was right. Those two statements have very different meanings. Emergency crews, firefighters, and police, the bulk of the official response to disaster and such, for example, rely on radio not on cell phones. I already addressed most of your issues in my previous post, but I'll highlight a few things.
It's one example of how a cell phone might help you in an emergency. That situation might be rare, but if you start aggregating all of the possible rare emergency situations where a cell phone might be helpful, I think you'll find that it's probably not such a rare thing. Plus, it's not much more contrived to say, "maybe you'd be injured by conscious and emergency services wouldn't know where to look for you," than to say, "well maybe emergency services would find you if you banged on something." They're trained to listen for noise, not because they'll necessarily be able to find anyone making noise, but because *they have nothing else to go on*.
These things are rare. We don't have to speculate, we just look at the occurrence of actual large scale emergencies that overwhelm the local cell network infrastructure.
These disasters include a considerable subset which damages or destroys the cell phone network.
First, that seems like a big assumption with no evidence behind it.
The world has had earthquakes, tsunami, landslides, riots, explosions and fires, and power outages and such. These routinely take out cell network infrastructure. So the disasters may be rare, but the conditional probability of cell network damage given a disaster big enough to generate overwhelming call volume is not.
That's a totally different issue. Regardless of whether the cell phone network can handle capacity during an emergency, they could still shut down networks if they suspect it's going to be triggered by a cell phone. It's not really what we're talking about here.
As I already answered, "Yet another risk which I didn't address". It's a "totally different issue" which happens to be relevant precisely because of the current context, a bombing attack in a high population area. Here, you advocate substantially beefing up a cell phone network to handle emergencies such as these and yet, we might have to shut that network down when it's most needed.
I wonder why people think that throwing money at buzzwords and fads of the day is useful. Research is just like any other investment. You have to know what you're doing and you have to make some sort of cost/benefit analysis just like anything else that you want to be useful. It doesn't have to be "absolutely guaranteed" to make a profit, but there should be a good possibility of getting a sufficiently positive return on investment in some sense.
Damn China, it acts like mid-20th century America. Any good libertarian or fiscal conservative can tell you how badly this country turned out after they wasted all that government money.
So can oh, "good liberals" and a lot of other people. They have other excuses for why things didn't work, such as the greedy corporations having their way, but the bad did follow the "forward projects".
I don't buy that. Sure, the PC market is losing sales now to tablets and such, but I think you're ignoring that there's a lot of stuff the PC is superior at. Here's just I do that's better on the PC:
anything that can be done better with a keyboard and mouse - most data entry, game playing where speed is a factor, entering in URLs and file names, posting to Slashdot, etc. The touch screen keyboard is painful to use and you don't have access to hotkeys and keyboard macros.
More powerful apps. Programming, spreadsheets and numerical computing, business apps, distributed services, etc.
More power - faster CPU, CD/DVD writable drives, can drive inputs to speakers, can leave the PC running for weeks in a corner, etc.
Sure, a lot of these things are niche applications, but there's a lot of niches and some of those niches are very large as well. As I see it, tablets and smartphones are just lightweight computing devices that fit specialized needs. That works better for a lot of people which is why we're seeing a shift to these devices. But they aren't "most" needs by any stretch.
By July 1980 the remark was being ascribed to the prominent statesman Winston Churchill. A journal based in London called "Mine and Quarry" of the Minerals Engineering Society reported on a speech given by a U.S. Governor at the "International Coal Show" in Chicago:
In his keynote address Governor James R. Thompson of Illinois quoted with evident approval Sir Winston Churchill as saying, "You can depend upon the Americans to do the right thing. But only after they have exhausted every other possibility."
Of course not. 4chan might decide you're dark skinned and subject you to their full sanction - circling someone who kinda looks like you on a picture. I believe that's called "vigilantism" and we are sorely afraid of it.
No, I'm saying they COULD have opposed tyranny sufficiently vigorously, but they didn't. I'm saying, as Thomas Jefferson said: "a republic, if you can keep it".
They could have stopped it, but they didn't. Why? Occam's razor suggest to stick with a simple explanation. That is, they were "ok" with what their government was doing.
Or they couldn't have stopped it and didn't. Why? Because they weren't a majority of voters at the time. Occam's razor cuts in more ways than one.
However, let's be clear about it. Let's not say, "Well, emergencies never really happen and nobody needs a telephone during an emergency." That's dishonest.
I note that wasn't what was said. If we're going to be "clear" about this, here's what was originally said:
Anytime you have a large population in a small area all wanting to make calls, the system will be overloaded. Capacity is built for normal use (which is probably 95 or 99% of normal call volume). When there are spikes in demand exceeding this volume, the network will not work as well (or even fail). Also if the network is physically damaged (such as Hurricane Sandy) it won't carry even normal call volumes. How is this not common sesne ?
To that, you wrote:
Maybe we say, "We're ok with the cell phone network going out during an emergency, since those emergencies will be rare and the cost of making the network robust and redundant enough to handle the additional volume isn't worth being able to use your cell phone in an emergency." But then are we really ok with that? If we have a bombing in a major city and people can't really report what's going on because our telecommunications can't handle the strain, is that really alright?
And I wrote in turn:
Why do you think the answer would be anything other than "yes, it's ok"? We don't rely on the cell phone network in an emergency. Nor do we want to pay a lot extra just so that we can phone home from more emergencies. There's a huge cost here associated with this additional capacity (especially given the variety of disasters which can take out cell network capacity).
So to be clear, no one made the assertion you mention above.
But don't try to argue, "Well going 25 mph is just as safe and car crashes never really happen anyway."
As I recall the analogous case in question was a building collapsing on you in a large scale disaster. In that case, having the ability to make an immediate call worked only if a) you were conscious at the time and yet bleeding to death, and b) the overwhelmed emergency services could somehow get to you quickly and dig you out before you bled to death (so you couldn't be bleeding to death too quickly, but not too slow either), but yet c) would not have heard you in sufficient time through rival means of communication such as banging on stuff and yelling (after all, the first place they'll look for trapped people is in the rubble of collapsed buildings and the first thing they'll do when they get there is listen for trapped people). That's a very contrived situation.
No. I can't see that analogy. I think it's more like saying that putting a lot of money into beefing up a cell phone network still has the major problem that there are a variety of disasters that could take down the cell network anyway.
Right, hence the analogy. "There's no point in mitigating some risks because there will still be other risks." It's a bad argument. Risks are additive, and so having multiple different kinds of risks makes it even more important to mitigate risk where possible.
The point here is look at the context. You sorta advocated building up the cell phone network to handle the massive increase in call volume from a large scale disaster. These disasters include a considerable subset which damages or destroys the cell phone network. The risk hasn't changed, but there is a correlation between disaster and impairment of the cell network.
If you want the capacity of your overbuilt network to function in these cases, then you need to overbuild in other ways in order to insure the network still will likely function at the capacity you want.
Yet another risk which I didn't address is what happens when someone sets off bombs via cell phone triggers. Now, you might have to make a hard choice between keeping the cell phone network (
Sucks to be you then. I still don't get why these contrived scenarios are supposed to justify spending a lot of money beefing up cell phone coverage. It is rare for an activity to be completely absent of benefit for anyone.
So we shouldn't care if our cell phone network will fail in emergencies for one reason because it might possibly fail for other reasons? That's not very sensible. It's like saying, "Why should I wear my seatbelt when my car doesn't even have airbags?"
No. I can't see that analogy. I think it's more like saying that putting a lot of money into beefing up a cell phone network still has the major problem that there are a variety of disasters that could take down the cell network anyway. You then have to spend even more money to achieve some degree of certainty that your cell network will be present and able to support a flood of emergency calls. I doubt even in a city wide emergency that you'd save enough lives to justify the cost.
It is simply better to just have a much cheaper cell network that handles routine usage and instead, make sure your large scale emergency response efforts don't depend on cell phones.
Yep. The other AC replier nailed the core problem: don't meet the conditional, then the conclusion doesn't follow. And the talk of "quantum fluctuation" is a natural way to have local (but from our limited point of view, universal) fluctuations that appear to violate thermodynamics, but only because they occur in a larger infinite space.
We can't rule out such things because we don't know enough to do so.
Which part of that statement are you having apparent difficulty with?
The part where this FBI statement is somehow relevant to the discussion at hand.
not post them on the internet to encourage vigilantism.
How does that encourage vigilantism? It's not like this is the first time that people have looked at pictures of a significant crime scene. This sort of thing has gone on for a while. And it hasn't led to a bunch of problems.
Slashdot Mirror
So, environmental responsibility doesn't matter at all? It's not just dollars, you know.
But those dollars are an important part of environmental responsibility. I think one of the great tragedies of the modern era is the considerable economic ignorance of people in the environmental movement.
This is exactly what I find to be dishonest about the way you talk, right here: "there just isn't a good case". Obviously there's a good case. It could save lives. Not just "could", but "almost certainly would". If it's too expensive to justify that should be a painful unfortunate reality, and not something to be dismissed as though there's just no argument to be had.
"Saving lives" is not automatically a "good case". You have to consider the costs as well. For example, massive expenditures can cost lives (via declining quality of life and less resources for emergency preparedness and infrastructure building) as well as save them.
The whole second stage is from ATK, made using the same factories where they usually build ICBMs.
That's private right there. I sense you started with that because you thought otherwise. Even being as dependent on public funding as ATK is, it is still a private company.
The rest is correct, though I understand the private company Aerojet made the engines for the first stage using a 70s Soviet design.
Society makes the law and enforces the law.
No, government does. Sometimes that imperfectly reflects the will of the society (such as it is) and sometimes it grossly runs counter to the will of society. And government even has the power to influence the will of society (sometimes at the point of a gun!) to reflect the desires of government.
To view law as separate from society shows that one has a disregard for the law of society,
Not at all. It's merely a correct observation. There are huge conflicts of interest between society, government, and the members that make up society and government. This conflict shows most clearly in the laws that are broken on a widespread and routine basis, such as (in the US) drug possession (both illegal drugs and drugs obtained without a prescription), speed laws, illegal downloads of protected media, tax evasion, etc.
For example, according to this poll, almost half of adults polled in the US (48%) have used marijuana. While it's possible that some have only used marijuana outside of the US, it's likely that virtually all of these people committed a federal felony of possession of a controlled substance. When violation of law is that extreme and pervasive, you don't have the laws reflecting the will of society.
Therefore, you do not want to be apart of society, and will be punished accordingly when caught. This is how it is, if you dont like it... move.
Does not follow. Aside from illogical assumptions that mean nothing ("do not want to be apart of society"), where am I going to move? I think I'd rather just fix my society.
So one line of thinking acknowledges society, the other acknowledges personal freedom.
That's a typical false dilemma. One can have a way of thinking that acknowledges both society and personal freedom. I also see that you confuse government and law with society. They aren't equivalent. I don't confuse a law or a bureaucratic decision with society.
Except when the math generates the insights.
For example, Dirac predicted the existence of anti-matter from a model of the electron with interactions with photons. For the model to work mathematically, he had to have a second particle, the positron which had opposite properties of the electron.
Then there's the search for missing planets. Neptune was found by noticing that Uranus didn't follow the orbit as predicted by the mathematical model of the then known Solar System.
Radioactive dating wouldn't be possible without a model of how decay works. That in turn has generated new insights.
MATLAB is inappropriate for any field.
It has niche applications to some small fields like science and engineering, but I wouldn't use it to balance the checkbook.
Well, I've always said that we'd probably live longer if we got rid of all this death.
Unfortunately, I am not the only one in this country... so I must yield to societies decision.
What's the reason? Society can and does make bad decisions all the time which aren't respected by the members of that society. There's plenty of law is that is more honored in the breach (and sometimes more honorable to do so - such as US abolitionists refusing to turn in runaway slaves in the mid 19th century).
I think it's a poor excuse myself.
although it seems pretty plain his crazy brother was the one who set everything up.
The "home grown" brother who entered the US at 16? And I'm sure it's all due to the US not the strife and tyranny (or for that matter, training) in Chechnya. This argument just doesn't work.
98%+ of all domestic deaths are caused by a gun in the house, not by external gun
To give some context for how dumb this remark is, in 2000 in the US, accidental firearms discharge killed 776 people. Falls killed over 13k people. Drowning in a bathtub killed 341.
It's also worth noting that the presence of so many guns in homes discourages the kind of activities that would result in external gun deaths. After all, the usual goal for breaking into homes isn't to get shot. I guess an analogy would be accidental deaths in the military. It's not a good thing for your military to be suffering more deaths from enemy action than from accidents and friendly fire because it means you're in a serious fight.
Emergency crews, firefighters, and police, the bulk of the official response to disaster and such, for example, rely on radio not on cell phones.
Right, so you're claiming that telephones are unimportant during an emergency.
No, I merely noted that actual emergency workers don't rely on them. And given that the cell network currently can go down during a large scale emergency (not just any emergency), cell phones can't be currently an important part of large scale emergency response.
Let us recall that my reply was to your previous and very different characterization of my statements as "nobody needs a telephone during an emergency". You might need all sorts of things that aren't there in an emergency. For example, if you're seriously injured you need to be in an emergency room not underneath a pile of rubble.
These things are rare. We don't have to speculate, we just look at the occurrence of actual large scale emergencies that overwhelm the local cell network infrastructure.
How rare? I ask because I'm pretty sure you're just making this up. And what about other unrelated things that happen during an emergency? Someone bombs Boston, and what about a robbery that happens at the same time? Any one scenario is rare, but when you add up all the various possible rare scanarios, are they really so unrealistic?
Well, that's not a very honest answer. Where's this data that supports or undermines my point? I'm the only one doing work here.
This story indicates that "unusual events" happen a few times a year (including holidays like New Year's Eve). I don't know how many emergencies make that up, but some of them would be normal holidays.
and yet, we might have to shut that network down when it's most needed.
Wait, so are you admitting here that cell phone infrastructure is needed during emergencies?
No, I wasn't. It was a precondition of your argument. If we depend on cell phones to report problems during large scale emergencies (as you desire), then we need to consider reasonable scenarios where we have to turn off that network precisely at the time we most need it. If we don't, then it doesn't matter if we turn off the network.
Personally, I'm dissatisfied by your "honesty" in this discussion. My statements are misconstrued (your shifting equating of my observation that emergency response doesn't depend on cell phones with at least two different statements or my "admission" above about cell phone infrastructure just above); you demand hard numbers from me while simultaneously providing no support for your own side aside from a few contrived emergency scenarios and irrelevant analogies; repeatedly asking "But then are we really ok with that?" (when that has been answered a number of times to the affirmative, which I gather we somehow didn't "really" mean); and of course, there's the annoyingly dismissive and erroneous "The whole post sounds like you're searching for reasons for me to be wrong without having a real argument."
The bottom line is that cell phone networks are already expensive. Everything I've read implies that expanding them to handle rare emergency loads costs a lot and there just isn't a good case for spending that kind of money. That's the best I can say.
How much money should we spend on education? Well, if our society invests $1 in tax money in a kid, and we get $2 back in social benefits, we should invest as much money as we can with those returns. Any business would. If we went back to the levels of investment in public education we had in the 1960s and 1970s, I think we'd have the same high rates of economic development we had in that time.
What makes you think the US spends less per child on education now than then? The US is still one of the leaders in per capita spending. As I understand it, if we went back to the spending of the 60s, we would be spending somewhat less at the K-12 level and about a factor of 3 or 4 less at the college level.
I think what's happening here is that we aren't getting that $2 of return on $1 of educational spending. And I'm deeply cynical of any society-wide effort such as public education that glibly transfers blame to "parents" when it fails.
You claim you never said, "nobody needs a telephone during an emergency." and yet you quote yourself saying, "We don't rely on the cell phone network in an emergency."
And I was right. Those two statements have very different meanings. Emergency crews, firefighters, and police, the bulk of the official response to disaster and such, for example, rely on radio not on cell phones. I already addressed most of your issues in my previous post, but I'll highlight a few things.
It's one example of how a cell phone might help you in an emergency. That situation might be rare, but if you start aggregating all of the possible rare emergency situations where a cell phone might be helpful, I think you'll find that it's probably not such a rare thing. Plus, it's not much more contrived to say, "maybe you'd be injured by conscious and emergency services wouldn't know where to look for you," than to say, "well maybe emergency services would find you if you banged on something." They're trained to listen for noise, not because they'll necessarily be able to find anyone making noise, but because *they have nothing else to go on*.
These things are rare. We don't have to speculate, we just look at the occurrence of actual large scale emergencies that overwhelm the local cell network infrastructure.
These disasters include a considerable subset which damages or destroys the cell phone network.
First, that seems like a big assumption with no evidence behind it.
The world has had earthquakes, tsunami, landslides, riots, explosions and fires, and power outages and such. These routinely take out cell network infrastructure. So the disasters may be rare, but the conditional probability of cell network damage given a disaster big enough to generate overwhelming call volume is not.
That's a totally different issue. Regardless of whether the cell phone network can handle capacity during an emergency, they could still shut down networks if they suspect it's going to be triggered by a cell phone. It's not really what we're talking about here.
As I already answered, "Yet another risk which I didn't address". It's a "totally different issue" which happens to be relevant precisely because of the current context, a bombing attack in a high population area. Here, you advocate substantially beefing up a cell phone network to handle emergencies such as these and yet, we might have to shut that network down when it's most needed.
Damn China, it acts like mid-20th century America. Any good libertarian or fiscal conservative can tell you how badly this country turned out after they wasted all that government money.
So can oh, "good liberals" and a lot of other people. They have other excuses for why things didn't work, such as the greedy corporations having their way, but the bad did follow the "forward projects".
Sure, a lot of these things are niche applications, but there's a lot of niches and some of those niches are very large as well. As I see it, tablets and smartphones are just lightweight computing devices that fit specialized needs. That works better for a lot of people which is why we're seeing a shift to these devices. But they aren't "most" needs by any stretch.
By July 1980 the remark was being ascribed to the prominent statesman Winston Churchill. A journal based in London called "Mine and Quarry" of the Minerals Engineering Society reported on a speech given by a U.S. Governor at the "International Coal Show" in Chicago:
In his keynote address Governor James R. Thompson of Illinois quoted with evident approval Sir Winston Churchill as saying, "You can depend upon the Americans to do the right thing. But only after they have exhausted every other possibility."
Is it safe to go out now?
Of course not. 4chan might decide you're dark skinned and subject you to their full sanction - circling someone who kinda looks like you on a picture. I believe that's called "vigilantism" and we are sorely afraid of it.
No, I'm saying they COULD have opposed tyranny sufficiently vigorously, but they didn't. I'm saying, as Thomas Jefferson said: "a republic, if you can keep it".
They could have stopped it, but they didn't. Why? Occam's razor suggest to stick with a simple explanation. That is, they were "ok" with what their government was doing.
Or they couldn't have stopped it and didn't. Why? Because they weren't a majority of voters at the time. Occam's razor cuts in more ways than one.
However, let's be clear about it. Let's not say, "Well, emergencies never really happen and nobody needs a telephone during an emergency." That's dishonest.
I note that wasn't what was said. If we're going to be "clear" about this, here's what was originally said:
Anytime you have a large population in a small area all wanting to make calls, the system will be overloaded. Capacity is built for normal use (which is probably 95 or 99% of normal call volume). When there are spikes in demand exceeding this volume, the network will not work as well (or even fail). Also if the network is physically damaged (such as Hurricane Sandy) it won't carry even normal call volumes. How is this not common sesne ?
To that, you wrote:
Maybe we say, "We're ok with the cell phone network going out during an emergency, since those emergencies will be rare and the cost of making the network robust and redundant enough to handle the additional volume isn't worth being able to use your cell phone in an emergency." But then are we really ok with that? If we have a bombing in a major city and people can't really report what's going on because our telecommunications can't handle the strain, is that really alright?
And I wrote in turn:
Why do you think the answer would be anything other than "yes, it's ok"? We don't rely on the cell phone network in an emergency. Nor do we want to pay a lot extra just so that we can phone home from more emergencies. There's a huge cost here associated with this additional capacity (especially given the variety of disasters which can take out cell network capacity).
So to be clear, no one made the assertion you mention above.
But don't try to argue, "Well going 25 mph is just as safe and car crashes never really happen anyway."
As I recall the analogous case in question was a building collapsing on you in a large scale disaster. In that case, having the ability to make an immediate call worked only if a) you were conscious at the time and yet bleeding to death, and b) the overwhelmed emergency services could somehow get to you quickly and dig you out before you bled to death (so you couldn't be bleeding to death too quickly, but not too slow either), but yet c) would not have heard you in sufficient time through rival means of communication such as banging on stuff and yelling (after all, the first place they'll look for trapped people is in the rubble of collapsed buildings and the first thing they'll do when they get there is listen for trapped people). That's a very contrived situation.
No. I can't see that analogy. I think it's more like saying that putting a lot of money into beefing up a cell phone network still has the major problem that there are a variety of disasters that could take down the cell network anyway.
Right, hence the analogy. "There's no point in mitigating some risks because there will still be other risks." It's a bad argument. Risks are additive, and so having multiple different kinds of risks makes it even more important to mitigate risk where possible.
The point here is look at the context. You sorta advocated building up the cell phone network to handle the massive increase in call volume from a large scale disaster. These disasters include a considerable subset which damages or destroys the cell phone network. The risk hasn't changed, but there is a correlation between disaster and impairment of the cell network.
If you want the capacity of your overbuilt network to function in these cases, then you need to overbuild in other ways in order to insure the network still will likely function at the capacity you want.
Yet another risk which I didn't address is what happens when someone sets off bombs via cell phone triggers. Now, you might have to make a hard choice between keeping the cell phone network (
Well you could be losing blood, for example.
Sucks to be you then. I still don't get why these contrived scenarios are supposed to justify spending a lot of money beefing up cell phone coverage. It is rare for an activity to be completely absent of benefit for anyone.
So we shouldn't care if our cell phone network will fail in emergencies for one reason because it might possibly fail for other reasons? That's not very sensible. It's like saying, "Why should I wear my seatbelt when my car doesn't even have airbags?"
No. I can't see that analogy. I think it's more like saying that putting a lot of money into beefing up a cell phone network still has the major problem that there are a variety of disasters that could take down the cell network anyway. You then have to spend even more money to achieve some degree of certainty that your cell network will be present and able to support a flood of emergency calls. I doubt even in a city wide emergency that you'd save enough lives to justify the cost.
It is simply better to just have a much cheaper cell network that handles routine usage and instead, make sure your large scale emergency response efforts don't depend on cell phones.
How about the "looking at pictures means you're a irresponsible 4chan vigilante" angle?
Yep. The other AC replier nailed the core problem: don't meet the conditional, then the conclusion doesn't follow. And the talk of "quantum fluctuation" is a natural way to have local (but from our limited point of view, universal) fluctuations that appear to violate thermodynamics, but only because they occur in a larger infinite space.
We can't rule out such things because we don't know enough to do so.
There might not be a practical solution to remove space debris past some threshold, would you rather find out that the case after the fact?
Sure. At least you did something in space.
Which part of that statement are you having apparent difficulty with?
The part where this FBI statement is somehow relevant to the discussion at hand.
not post them on the internet to encourage vigilantism.
How does that encourage vigilantism? It's not like this is the first time that people have looked at pictures of a significant crime scene. This sort of thing has gone on for a while. And it hasn't led to a bunch of problems.