I suppose someone who can't or wont parse out the errors in "creation implies a creator" would also be too lazy to do the same with "What's the point in having nukes if you don't use them?"
Mike Huckabee: "I believe there is a God who was active in the creation process.... if anybody wants to believe that they are the descendants of a primate, they are certainly welcome to do it."
Serious presidential candidate who many *many* people think is just great. "...welcome to it." gee thanks Mike, way to condescend.
A couple of weeks ago I drove overnight from Montreal to Toronto and part of the way I was in range of an American religion station. Some guy went on and on and on about evolution. A) Keep it to yourselves, thanks. B) How is it that there is no shame in spewing such ignorant anti-intellectual backwards medieval bullshit day and night day after day for all to hear? How did that become ok?
From the country that gave us 9 out of 10 Martian landers that didn't crash, Apollo, Leonard Bernstein, Velcro, metal matrix composites, the Space Shuttle Main Engines, Moby Dick, Core 2 *and* K-10, cosmic background radiation...well, you get the point.
What worries me is how much worse will it get before it gets better. Or even worse, will it get better?
Disappointing. This is after all Google (Motto: Our Office Plants Are Smarter Than You Not That We Have Office Plants Because Well You Wouldn't Understand Why Not) so I would have expected at the very least 15-minutes undelay into the future.
You just know they have that tech but they won't share it because, well for reasons that take tensor calculus to explain.
Don't say 'oot and aboot' that's just stupid. And if you looked at that and thought those should have been double quotes, I'd hire you.
Number Two
Canadian girls are easy except in Toronto Montreal Calgary Vancouver St John St Johns Halifax Quebec City Gander and lets see where else have I lived...
Number Three
There is one city called St. John and another one called St Johns nobody knows which is which
Number Four
Pants are expected to be worn at work
Number Six
Math skills are important for getting a job
Number Seven
Is a nice number. Too bad that movie had to ruin it for me
Number Three Redux
I just looked it up and St John is where they actually do say oot and aboot
Number Five
Better late than never
Number Eight
Montreal has potholes and Toronto has that smell so take your pick. In Calgary, bring your own cardboard box to live in. Vancouver has a commuter train that takes you into the middle of the woods.
Number Nine
Saskatchewan is flat because the 6000 kph winds blew all the hills into Lake Superior
Number Ten
There are lots of high tech jobs in Ottawa but the only thing to do there in your spare time is laugh at Corel's office building.
From reading TFA, the dust they are talking about is *within* the galaxies. Because of it galaxies don't emit as brightly edge-wise.
But perpendicular to the plane there is little dust absorption. So the brightness of galaxies viewed this way shouldn't need much correction. Since most galaxies are viewed this way due to the bias caused by this effect, why would there need to be a major rethink of stellar brightness? I'm not getting it.
Maybe it's galactic density that needs correction.
Why is it that the authors of these various surveillance societies don't show good faith by building into their laws the requirement that the details of their own lives, being public servants and all, should be constantly monitored and broadcast.
(Personally I would have loved to have the online Clintoncam available a few years back.)
This falls right into the same category which results in that strange coincidence whereby the people who decide who gets paid how much just coincidentally always happen to be worth the very most themselves.
Anyway. Bring on the revolution. It's starting soon I just know it...any day now...
I'm not really familiar with swords but I know a little bit about steel. The Wikipedia description didn't make that much sense to me possibly because it's so brief.
Martensite and pearlite aren't two mutually exclusive phases as such. Pearlite is a combination of ferrite and cementite. Ferrite is alpha-iron, a particular crystal form of pure iron, and cementite is iron carbide Fe3C. So pearlite itself is actually two phases interspersed. In plain carbon steel, pearlite forms from eutectic (.77% carbon) austenite when it is slowly cooled through the eutectoid at 727C.
Less than.77%C and you get pearlite plus a phase of extra ferrite, more than.77%C and you get pearlite and a phase of extra cementite.
This is all for steel that is slowly cooled from austenite. If quenched quickly enough, pearlite formation is suppressed (note that pearlite, being two phases, requires diffusion for the C atoms to migrate out of the ferrite phase into the cementite phase). What you get instead is martensite, which is a metastable phase where the carbon atoms remain interspersed through the iron. It is metastable because the carbons don't really want to be where they are and if they can be made to diffuse (by raising the temperature, a process called annealing) the carbons will move and pearlite will form.
If the quench is not "fast", martensite does not form fully or at all. The result might be less martensite and some pearlite or another form called bainite.
With all that, you can see why I wonder about the statement that martensite and pearlite are "binary phases". Depending on the quench rate, you can get different ratios of finely interspersed zones of the two material forms. Evidently we would like to get martensite on the cutting edge for hardness and pearlite in the middle of the blade for toughness. That means slower cooling in the middle, which I would assume means coating the center of the blade with clay to insulate it and slow the cooling rate.
What the effect of putting "clay and iron" on the blade is a bit mysterious, for the iron to have any value I would think it would have to be allowed to diffuse into the blade during the heat treat process. Also it seems that different carbon contents are used in different parts of the blade which does make sense, higher carbon content causes martensite to form more easily.
Are you really saying that the system which dictates every aspect of political, public, and private life in those countries has no influence on their societies?
As you pointed out it's hard to draw the line between politics and religion in some predominantly Islamic countries. When religion and politics get mixed I find it unlikely that the true character of the religion will emerge unscathed.
Are there barbaric passages in the Qu'ran? Yes. Just as there are in the bible. So why has Islam arrived at this point? Apart from the capricious whims of history, one reason totalitarianism gravitates toward Islam is the decentralized nature of the religion.
There is no centralized authority structure in Islam to pronounce upon the actions of radicals. The vast majority of Imams in the world would disavow the "violence" interpretation of jihad in the modern world, but there is no universally recognized body that could throw violent Islamists out of the religion for attempting to speak in it's name.
This is so fascinating. I had no idea there could possibly be two-way advocacy about this. If I had of known I would have worn my asbestos underwear:)
Honest question, Bayesian-wise, how could/would one interpret the 50% number in the article? Is there an intuitive interpretation? Is it quantitative or qualitative?
Just my luck huh, here I go looking all smart then some uber Bayesian has to come along and spoil my party.
Anyway, with little expectation of anything good coming from this (for my ego I mean), here's why I don't usually think in Bayesian terms. Correct me if I'm wrong which I probably am.
While I have heard Bayesians talk about probability not meaning the same thing as as "normal", I've never seen any Bayes p which means anything other than a relative likelihood that I'm familiar with. If there is a bag with 3 red balls and 2 white balls in it, the probability of randomly drawing a red ball out is 3/5 even to a Bayesian, right?
I believe, and here is where I could be all wrong, that as Bayesians we should interpret the 50% number from the OP as an a-priori estimate which is to be refined if we ever get better information. But doesn't that have the same problem that I talked about, which is that the thing under consideration is not a stochastic variable?
And even if it is valid to do that, simply elevating the 50% to the status of an a-priori estimate doesn't suddenly make it a more accurate or even legitimate number. I mean, does it?
As for the error estimate which ended up being the crux of my previous argument, well, referring back to the wiki article on Bayes that you linked to, interestingly even they give the example here of a case where we have no prior knowledge of how many different colored balls are in the bag in which case we would use a uniform a-priori distribution which is exactly what I described originally, it could be anywhere between 0% and 100%, we don't know.
"This is a high-risk program," said Ron Ho, a researcher at Sun Laboratories who is one of the leaders of the effort. "We expect a 50 percent chance of failure, but if we win we can have as much as a thousand times increase in performance."
Whenever anyone says there is a 50% chance of something happening they really mean "I have no idea. No idea at all. I'm guessing."
In probability theory, "p" has a specific meaning which is roughly stated as "the ratio of the total number of positive outcomes to the total number of possible outcomes in a population". So for the number of 50% to be right, it must be known that if this research was repeated a million times, 500,000 times there would be success and 500,000 times there would be failure. But this makes no sense because the thing being measured is not a stochastic property. It is simply an unknown thing.
What is probably vaguely intended when a number like this is given is that if you took all the things in the history of the world that "felt" like this in the beginning, half of them will have worked out and half will have not.
How on earth could any mortal human know that?
But it gets even more complicated. One cannot state a probability like this without stating how confident one is in the estimate of the number. So really a person should say the probably of success of this endeavor is between 45% and 55% and this estimate will be correct 19 times out of 20.
With that as background here is what I humbly suggest 50% really means: it means "I have no idea how to quantify the error of this estimate. It doesn't matter what the estimate is because the error band could possibly stretch between 0% and 100%. So I'll split the difference and call it 50%". But that is wrong, the statement should be "I estimate the probability of success to be between 0% and 100%".
But nobody does that because it makes them look stupid.
So whenever anyone says there is a 50% chance, or a 50/50 probability of something happening, they might as well talk in made-up Klingon words, the information content of their statement will be equivalent.
First of all I'm an atheist who is puzzled that religion in all it's mystic forms continues to have so much influence in our nominally enlightened times. Don't take me as an apologist for Islam.
...since we, as a people, are not somehow inherently better than Arabs or Persians (perfectly true), then any differences in our societies cannot be attributed to religion or culture?
How do you separate the different factors: economic, political, historical, religious, demographic, and "cultural" (whatever that is) and say that just one, the religion, is the problem? I can't. I didn't say religion and culture have no influence, but you seem to be saying they should be the prime suspects until proven otherwise. That makes no sense to me.
Particularly because religious doctrine is so open to abuse by megalomaniacs with the gift of the gab, and doubly so in Islam where there is no central authority, so local Imams can make all sorts of crazy pronouncements based on that they are wannabe tinpot dictators of the local village.
Because we think that a theocratic regime that, for starters, does not recognize a universal right to life is not a just society? I don't get how that reasoning goes.
Well I'm sorry, but it just doesn't look to me like the problem in the Islamic world is Islam, it's poverty and rotten political systems. Which is the fault of history, greed, and power, not the type of magic the poor slobs believe in. But the type of exchanges in this story show, people just want a relgion to hate. Still after all these years and in this gathering place of supposedly educated people, so many just want to hate a religion. *Sigh*
We sit around all rich and advanced and western, but beneath it all we just need someone to hate. Another tribe to vilify.
Islam, which does not tolerate a wide variety of other Free Speech.
Shenanigans my good man. The canons of Islam are no more nor less ridiculous than those of any other major religion. Just as Richard Dawkins points out that "Christian morality" cannot possibly come from the bible, "Muslim intolerance" is also a myth.
Which is not to say that there isn't something barbaric going on in the Muslim world. Could it have something to do with the average income of Muslims being about 1/7 of incomes in the west? Could it have something to do with the west often financing those of their leaders that are fascist strongmen like Musharraf, Hussein, the Shah of Iran, and Suharto?
I've deployed to the richest Muslim societies on the planet, and seen the best they can do under the guidance of your oppressive, barbaric, pseudo-Nazi superstition.
If you are referring to Saudi Arabia, let's talk about Aramco, through which American money has supported the rule of the House of Saud and the Wahibbist's grip on Saudi society for decades. Dontcha think that would piss some people off, particularly those who live under that regime without profiting?
No, Islam itself is not the problem. It's economics and politics that are the source of this era of Muslim weirdness. This is definitely not a case of we are better than them, it's a case of, boy we are lucky we weren't born in one of those countries.
Anyway. I always wondered about the philosophical implications of allowing someone to own the vibrations in the air. What I mean is, if someone makes the air around me vibrate in a particular way, I'm not allowed to observe it as I wish. One way of observing the vibrations would be to observe the effect those vibrations have on a particular machine. Call it a "recording machine".
The same goes for photons that impact my body. I'm not allowed to observe them in arbitrary ways, only in certain prescribed ways.
The reason such a strange rule makes sense, they say, is that the vibrations and photons aren't the real issue, the thing in question is the *meaning* of those phenomena. Those phenomena represent "performance".
So ok. I hereby attach meaning to every single action that I make for the rest of my life. They are to be considered a performance. Anyone seeking to observe or record my actions without my consent is hereby committing a copyright violation.
There is a whole science to reading speech that is attempting to balance many competing interests.
In this case I'd list some of the competing interests as:
Don't want to actually lie. Don't want to say anything your worst enemy shouldn't know. Don't want to be *perceived* to be doing either of the preceding. Want to appear receptive to questions. Want to remain politically neutral.
I'm sure there are many more.
I did manage to tease out one interesting tidbit from two questions of mine the General was kind enough to answer:
Question #9: When asked if a cyber-attack could lead to a shooting war, the General replies (to paraphrase) that the response to any given scenario is up to elected officials, not the DoD. Fair enough. But...
Question #7: When asked about the difference between criminal and military-like actions online, the General replies that, depending on the nature of the attack, his group would "recommend a proper response".
So, while the ultimate decision is always to be up to the CinC, the DoD isn't without an opinion as the answer to #9 might imply. The real answer would get into operational planning which, of course, can't be revealed.
Actually I find the answers interesting to parse, knowing that they must have been massaged by so many experts.
None of which is meant to belittle the fact that the General actually took time to go though this exercise. Very refreshing.
His 'spirit' is the actual laws that govern the universe as far as I can tell.
Just to expand on that, Einstein pointed to Spinoza's God to explain what he believed.
Einstein:
I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.
Slashdot Mirror
SSE
Most of us just have to ctrl-tab and there's all the milf's we could ever need.
Hahahaha yeah I bet she's a real goer I bet she is oooooo her "inbox" that's good mmmmmm yeah "spam" in her "inbox" I bet she's a real goer she is.
Yeah...
So what's it like?
I suppose someone who can't or wont parse out the errors in "creation implies a creator" would also be too lazy to do the same with "What's the point in having nukes if you don't use them?"
Mike Huckabee: "I believe there is a God who was active in the creation process. ... if anybody wants to believe that they are the descendants of a primate, they are certainly welcome to do it."
Serious presidential candidate who many *many* people think is just great. "...welcome to it." gee thanks Mike, way to condescend.
A couple of weeks ago I drove overnight from Montreal to Toronto and part of the way I was in range of an American religion station. Some guy went on and on and on about evolution. A) Keep it to yourselves, thanks. B) How is it that there is no shame in spewing such ignorant anti-intellectual backwards medieval bullshit day and night day after day for all to hear? How did that become ok?
From the country that gave us 9 out of 10 Martian landers that didn't crash, Apollo, Leonard Bernstein, Velcro, metal matrix composites, the Space Shuttle Main Engines, Moby Dick, Core 2 *and* K-10, cosmic background radiation...well, you get the point.
What worries me is how much worse will it get before it gets better. Or even worse, will it get better?
Disappointing. This is after all Google (Motto: Our Office Plants Are Smarter Than You Not That We Have Office Plants Because Well You Wouldn't Understand Why Not) so I would have expected at the very least 15-minutes undelay into the future.
You just know they have that tech but they won't share it because, well for reasons that take tensor calculus to explain.
The Concise Guide
Number One
Don't say 'oot and aboot' that's just stupid. And if you looked at that and thought those should have been double quotes, I'd hire you.
Number Two
Canadian girls are easy except in Toronto Montreal Calgary Vancouver St John St Johns Halifax Quebec City Gander and lets see where else have I lived...
Number Three
There is one city called St. John and another one called St Johns nobody knows which is which
Number Four
Pants are expected to be worn at work
Number Six
Math skills are important for getting a job
Number Seven
Is a nice number. Too bad that movie had to ruin it for me
Number Three Redux
I just looked it up and St John is where they actually do say oot and aboot
Number Five
Better late than never
Number Eight
Montreal has potholes and Toronto has that smell so take your pick. In Calgary, bring your own cardboard box to live in. Vancouver has a commuter train that takes you into the middle of the woods.
Number Nine
Saskatchewan is flat because the 6000 kph winds blew all the hills into Lake Superior
Number Ten
There are lots of high tech jobs in Ottawa but the only thing to do there in your spare time is laugh at Corel's office building.
And not even AC. Ballsy!
From reading TFA, the dust they are talking about is *within* the galaxies. Because of it galaxies don't emit as brightly edge-wise.
But perpendicular to the plane there is little dust absorption. So the brightness of galaxies viewed this way shouldn't need much correction. Since most galaxies are viewed this way due to the bias caused by this effect, why would there need to be a major rethink of stellar brightness? I'm not getting it.
Maybe it's galactic density that needs correction.
Comes to /. for technical advice: good!
/. relationship advice: o noes!!!!
Gets from
Why is it that the authors of these various surveillance societies don't show good faith by building into their laws the requirement that the details of their own lives, being public servants and all, should be constantly monitored and broadcast.
(Personally I would have loved to have the online Clintoncam available a few years back.)
This falls right into the same category which results in that strange coincidence whereby the people who decide who gets paid how much just coincidentally always happen to be worth the very most themselves.
Anyway. Bring on the revolution. It's starting soon I just know it...any day now...
I'm not really familiar with swords but I know a little bit about steel. The Wikipedia description didn't make that much sense to me possibly because it's so brief.
Martensite and pearlite aren't two mutually exclusive phases as such. Pearlite is a combination of ferrite and cementite. Ferrite is alpha-iron, a particular crystal form of pure iron, and cementite is iron carbide Fe3C. So pearlite itself is actually two phases interspersed. In plain carbon steel, pearlite forms from eutectic (.77% carbon) austenite when it is slowly cooled through the eutectoid at 727C.
Less than .77%C and you get pearlite plus a phase of extra ferrite, more than .77%C and you get pearlite and a phase of extra cementite.
This is all for steel that is slowly cooled from austenite. If quenched quickly enough, pearlite formation is suppressed (note that pearlite, being two phases, requires diffusion for the C atoms to migrate out of the ferrite phase into the cementite phase). What you get instead is martensite, which is a metastable phase where the carbon atoms remain interspersed through the iron. It is metastable because the carbons don't really want to be where they are and if they can be made to diffuse (by raising the temperature, a process called annealing) the carbons will move and pearlite will form.
If the quench is not "fast", martensite does not form fully or at all. The result might be less martensite and some pearlite or another form called bainite.
With all that, you can see why I wonder about the statement that martensite and pearlite are "binary phases". Depending on the quench rate, you can get different ratios of finely interspersed zones of the two material forms. Evidently we would like to get martensite on the cutting edge for hardness and pearlite in the middle of the blade for toughness. That means slower cooling in the middle, which I would assume means coating the center of the blade with clay to insulate it and slow the cooling rate.
What the effect of putting "clay and iron" on the blade is a bit mysterious, for the iron to have any value I would think it would have to be allowed to diffuse into the blade during the heat treat process. Also it seems that different carbon contents are used in different parts of the blade which does make sense, higher carbon content causes martensite to form more easily.
As you pointed out it's hard to draw the line between politics and religion in some predominantly Islamic countries. When religion and politics get mixed I find it unlikely that the true character of the religion will emerge unscathed.
Are there barbaric passages in the Qu'ran? Yes. Just as there are in the bible. So why has Islam arrived at this point? Apart from the capricious whims of history, one reason totalitarianism gravitates toward Islam is the decentralized nature of the religion.
There is no centralized authority structure in Islam to pronounce upon the actions of radicals. The vast majority of Imams in the world would disavow the "violence" interpretation of jihad in the modern world, but there is no universally recognized body that could throw violent Islamists out of the religion for attempting to speak in it's name.
If Islam as a religion has a problem, it is that.
This is so fascinating. I had no idea there could possibly be two-way advocacy about this. If I had of known I would have worn my asbestos underwear :)
Honest question, Bayesian-wise, how could/would one interpret the 50% number in the article? Is there an intuitive interpretation? Is it quantitative or qualitative?
Just my luck huh, here I go looking all smart then some uber Bayesian has to come along and spoil my party.
Anyway, with little expectation of anything good coming from this (for my ego I mean), here's why I don't usually think in Bayesian terms. Correct me if I'm wrong which I probably am.
While I have heard Bayesians talk about probability not meaning the same thing as as "normal", I've never seen any Bayes p which means anything other than a relative likelihood that I'm familiar with. If there is a bag with 3 red balls and 2 white balls in it, the probability of randomly drawing a red ball out is 3/5 even to a Bayesian, right?
I believe, and here is where I could be all wrong, that as Bayesians we should interpret the 50% number from the OP as an a-priori estimate which is to be refined if we ever get better information. But doesn't that have the same problem that I talked about, which is that the thing under consideration is not a stochastic variable?
And even if it is valid to do that, simply elevating the 50% to the status of an a-priori estimate doesn't suddenly make it a more accurate or even legitimate number. I mean, does it?
As for the error estimate which ended up being the crux of my previous argument, well, referring back to the wiki article on Bayes that you linked to, interestingly even they give the example here of a case where we have no prior knowledge of how many different colored balls are in the bag in which case we would use a uniform a-priori distribution which is exactly what I described originally, it could be anywhere between 0% and 100%, we don't know.
Interesting stuff.
Whenever anyone says there is a 50% chance of something happening they really mean "I have no idea. No idea at all. I'm guessing."
In probability theory, "p" has a specific meaning which is roughly stated as "the ratio of the total number of positive outcomes to the total number of possible outcomes in a population". So for the number of 50% to be right, it must be known that if this research was repeated a million times, 500,000 times there would be success and 500,000 times there would be failure. But this makes no sense because the thing being measured is not a stochastic property. It is simply an unknown thing.
What is probably vaguely intended when a number like this is given is that if you took all the things in the history of the world that "felt" like this in the beginning, half of them will have worked out and half will have not.
How on earth could any mortal human know that?
But it gets even more complicated. One cannot state a probability like this without stating how confident one is in the estimate of the number. So really a person should say the probably of success of this endeavor is between 45% and 55% and this estimate will be correct 19 times out of 20.
With that as background here is what I humbly suggest 50% really means: it means "I have no idea how to quantify the error of this estimate. It doesn't matter what the estimate is because the error band could possibly stretch between 0% and 100%. So I'll split the difference and call it 50%". But that is wrong, the statement should be "I estimate the probability of success to be between 0% and 100%".
But nobody does that because it makes them look stupid.
So whenever anyone says there is a 50% chance, or a 50/50 probability of something happening, they might as well talk in made-up Klingon words, the information content of their statement will be equivalent.
First of all I'm an atheist who is puzzled that religion in all it's mystic forms continues to have so much influence in our nominally enlightened times. Don't take me as an apologist for Islam.
...since we, as a people, are not somehow inherently better than Arabs or Persians (perfectly true), then any differences in our societies cannot be attributed to religion or culture?How do you separate the different factors: economic, political, historical, religious, demographic, and "cultural" (whatever that is) and say that just one, the religion, is the problem? I can't. I didn't say religion and culture have no influence, but you seem to be saying they should be the prime suspects until proven otherwise. That makes no sense to me.
Particularly because religious doctrine is so open to abuse by megalomaniacs with the gift of the gab, and doubly so in Islam where there is no central authority, so local Imams can make all sorts of crazy pronouncements based on that they are wannabe tinpot dictators of the local village.
Because we think that a theocratic regime that, for starters, does not recognize a universal right to life is not a just society? I don't get how that reasoning goes.Well I'm sorry, but it just doesn't look to me like the problem in the Islamic world is Islam, it's poverty and rotten political systems. Which is the fault of history, greed, and power, not the type of magic the poor slobs believe in. But the type of exchanges in this story show, people just want a relgion to hate. Still after all these years and in this gathering place of supposedly educated people, so many just want to hate a religion. *Sigh*
We sit around all rich and advanced and western, but beneath it all we just need someone to hate. Another tribe to vilify.
Islam, which does not tolerate a wide variety of other Free Speech.Shenanigans my good man. The canons of Islam are no more nor less ridiculous than those of any other major religion. Just as Richard Dawkins points out that "Christian morality" cannot possibly come from the bible, "Muslim intolerance" is also a myth.
Which is not to say that there isn't something barbaric going on in the Muslim world. Could it have something to do with the average income of Muslims being about 1/7 of incomes in the west? Could it have something to do with the west often financing those of their leaders that are fascist strongmen like Musharraf, Hussein, the Shah of Iran, and Suharto?
I've deployed to the richest Muslim societies on the planet, and seen the best they can do under the guidance of your oppressive, barbaric, pseudo-Nazi superstition.If you are referring to Saudi Arabia, let's talk about Aramco, through which American money has supported the rule of the House of Saud and the Wahibbist's grip on Saudi society for decades. Dontcha think that would piss some people off, particularly those who live under that regime without profiting?
No, Islam itself is not the problem. It's economics and politics that are the source of this era of Muslim weirdness. This is definitely not a case of we are better than them, it's a case of, boy we are lucky we weren't born in one of those countries.
The average income in the Muslim world is $3,700USD. In the west it's around $27,450USD as of the year 2000 Ref.
One of the two things you can almost always correlate with crime rates is average income (the other is the number of young men in a population).
Doesn't it appear that the words asteroid and hemorrhoid got accidentally switched at some point?
Apologies to serious people I'll go away now...
Are you sure you have seen right to the very very end of the very very last episode of season 3?
There are no season 4 spoilers in TFA.In TFA's page source is:
:bbc -->
<!-- Code for
<!-- START NetRatings Measurement V5.1 -->
<!-- COPYRIGHT 2003 NetRatings Limited -->
NetRatings being a tracking service of some sort.
Anyway. I always wondered about the philosophical implications of allowing someone to own the vibrations in the air. What I mean is, if someone makes the air around me vibrate in a particular way, I'm not allowed to observe it as I wish. One way of observing the vibrations would be to observe the effect those vibrations have on a particular machine. Call it a "recording machine".
The same goes for photons that impact my body. I'm not allowed to observe them in arbitrary ways, only in certain prescribed ways.
The reason such a strange rule makes sense, they say, is that the vibrations and photons aren't the real issue, the thing in question is the *meaning* of those phenomena. Those phenomena represent "performance".
So ok. I hereby attach meaning to every single action that I make for the rest of my life. They are to be considered a performance. Anyone seeking to observe or record my actions without my consent is hereby committing a copyright violation.
There is a whole science to reading speech that is attempting to balance many competing interests.
In this case I'd list some of the competing interests as:
Don't want to actually lie.
Don't want to say anything your worst enemy shouldn't know.
Don't want to be *perceived* to be doing either of the preceding.
Want to appear receptive to questions.
Want to remain politically neutral.
I'm sure there are many more.
I did manage to tease out one interesting tidbit from two questions of mine the General was kind enough to answer:
Question #9: When asked if a cyber-attack could lead to a shooting war, the General replies (to paraphrase) that the response to any given scenario is up to elected officials, not the DoD. Fair enough. But...
Question #7: When asked about the difference between criminal and military-like actions online, the General replies that, depending on the nature of the attack, his group would "recommend a proper response".
So, while the ultimate decision is always to be up to the CinC, the DoD isn't without an opinion as the answer to #9 might imply. The real answer would get into operational planning which, of course, can't be revealed.
Actually I find the answers interesting to parse, knowing that they must have been massaged by so many experts.
None of which is meant to belittle the fact that the General actually took time to go though this exercise. Very refreshing.
From: Joint Chiefs
To: General Lord
Encoding: S00per Seekrit COd3 #5
Ixnay on the LOL-ay, mkay?
Just to expand on that, Einstein pointed to Spinoza's God to explain what he believed.
Einstein:I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=u+of+t&btnG=Google+Search