But couldn't we have made all these drawn out "first they'd have to learn how to fly commercial jetliners, not necessarily knowing which types they'd eventually board, then they'd have to successfully get to the cockpit without being incapacitated, and THEN they'd have to make the pilots think they were hijacking the plane,
Everything up to that point had been demonstrated on numerous occasions. It was in fact simple to convince the pilots that it was a hijacking because that is what had happened every time in the past. So no, it really isn't comparable.
Oh believe me, that was the first thing I thought of -- okay, i have a sick mind -- when I heard they were going to be banning water bottles on airplanes. "Terrorist caught with explosive device in their rectum. TSA promises new security regulation forthcoming. Airlines preemptively file for bankruptcy."
And for those of you who are noobs, here is how to install Linux on a dead badger.
Heh, my work place's web proxy blocked the site with the following message (emaphasis unchanged): "The site you requested is blocked under the following categories: Criminal Skills"
Before this gets too flamey (am I too late?), I think we're all entitled to some healthy scientific scepticism. If nobody asks questions, then nobody learns.
Yeah, but what's irritating is that the evolution skeptic's questions are always couched in and underlying rejection of evolution in its entirety. It isn't the sincere questioning of a student, it's the insincere questioning of someone waiting to find a whole and scream "A-ha! You don't know, which proves Genesis is true!"
And I say that as a scientific Christian, one of the "God made this amazing universe, so let's figure out how He did it" types. The disingenious questioning of Literalists is thus more offensive to me.
However both species while incapable of breeding are still fundamentally the same species. It is not like your going to end up with a walrus on one end, amd an elephant on the other, even though I could draw similarities amoungst both at all levels.
Why not, if you gave it enough time? Do you believe that mutations create genetic changes in a species over time which are selected for via natural selection to adapt it to its environment or not?
If you accept that they could mutate to the point of being incapable of breeding, then they won't share the same mutations, and you've already acknowledge that the species can undergo fundamental changes.
You're basically saying "I believe in microevolution, but not that it could change a species a lot." But really, changing pieces of genetic code can have a very large effect. Especially if you add up thousands and thousands of changes over millions of years, then yes you do end up with walruses and elephants and a plethora of differently mutated populations that long ago were part of the same population.
If you're using the term "Democracy" to mean "Direct Democracy", then it would be simpler if you would do so. A Republic is a form of Democracy. A Republic, at least as used to describe the United States, is better said as "Representative Democracy", if only because historically "Republic" has not necessarily implied any form of elected representation at all, it merely meant a state ruled by something other than a hereditary monarch, usually a President.
But you're right that representative democracy has its advantages over a direct democracy. As Plato noted, Democracy is doomed as soon as the people realize they can vote themselves money out of the coffers. Instead only a select elite have that power. By the way, the last line of your post made me chuckle. Extra TP indeed.
Ah, well, I see. And now I have to admit that it's pretty moronic to waste so much time arguing with them about it. It's like butting heads with a ram -- they're proud of their thick-headedness, and I only end up with a head ache.
If fundamentalist Islam is the problem, why would you invade one of the most secular states in the region? That'd be like fighing Stalinism by invading Australia or fighting Nazism by invading pre-war France.
The only invasion that actually made any sense at all was the invasion of Afghanistan. Actual threat to the U.S.? Check. Actual example of destructive fundamentalist government? Check. Actual chance of going well and being successfull? Check.
Too bad Afghanistan is being neglected because of the cluster-fuck that is Iraq. Any truly valid reason one can give for invading Iraq either applies tenfold to Afghanistan or only makes any sense after fininshing in Afghanistan.
That doesn't mean the most repeated reason is the only reason, or neccissarily even the primary reason.. it's just the one that sounds the best or is the most passionate.
Okay, well I was specifically talking about the reasons used to justify the war to the American people, not his real intentions stated or unstated. There are still people who believe those reasons, and that's what I was originally refuting. If that's the source of a misunderstanding, then hopefully it is now resolved. As far as those real reasons are concerned, I think they range between craptastic and nefarious.
As the war became more unpopular, the "revisionist" history became even worse, to the point that the entire nation seems to have a screw loose arguing over non-issues and historical trivia, to the point where they bring up "well you believe that WMD's exist *AND* Jehovah you stoopid christian; neener neener!" in the middle of evolution debates.
Well, yeah, arguing with people who still think Saddam was behind 9/11 and that we found nukes in Iraq tends to make people crazy.
This is a Republic, not a Democracy.
Which is like saying "This is a square, not a quadrilateral".
Yet you're right that misleading the people isn't a crime, and he doesn't need the support of the people to invade. In a literal sense. However we are a Democracy, and while George W. isn't going to be up for re-election, those who supported him in Congress and went along with his lies are and they are poignantly aware that this is a democracy. They do need the support of the people to maintain their power that allowed them to approve the war. This is why, ultimately, the WMD "issue" matters -- because without that issue, the people would not have supported the war, Congress fearing re-election would not have supported the President, and the President would not have started the war. Yeah, he could have, but that doesn't make it a pratical reality.
Of course now their method of maintaining their seat is to continue the big lie -- invading was necessary for [reason du jour] and has always been the reason, the war is going great, we can't give up or the terrorists win! Basically hoping that the same Orwellian nonsense that got them to where they are will keep them there.
Ring species are the best example that spring to mind -- a species develops and spreads around a natural barrier, like a mountain range, changing as it goes, until the diverging populations meet at the other end of the barrier. All along the ring, populations can interbreed, however at the point at which they meet the populations cannot.
I think there's been something done in a lab with flies, creating non-cross-breedable mutations, but I'm not certain so I can't give you a cite.
But the thing is, you're basically talking about the difference between micro-evolution (changes within a species) and macro- (creation of new species). If you accept micro-evolution, then it is only logical to also accept macro. If you take a population of one species, and separate it into two species with no contact with one another, then each of those populations will experience different mutations within itself, i.e. different paths of micro-evolution. Eventually these divergent paths will grow enough apart that were you to remove the barrier between the two populations that they would no longer be able to interbreed. Presto-chango, you've got macro-evolution, because macro-evolution is really just micro-evolution operating on separate populations.
Otherwise you're saying that a species can change over time, but never enough that it would be unable to breed with one of its ancient ancestors or with members of the species that have also changed over time yet not shared changes.
Yes, yes, they produced as long a list of reasons why invading Iraq was a good, necessary thing as possible.
Yet in every press statement, every address to the nation, every interview with Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney, and G.W.Bush, it was Terrorism and WMD front and center. Nothing was mentioned as often, nothing was harped on as much. No other issue received as much attention and as much effort to prove it true. WMD were not only why we had to invade, but why we had to invade NOW. None of those other issues justified immediate unilateral action, none of them were used as such justification.
You want to talk about sound-biting? Who was it who said "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud"?
So you see, it was the administration who was harping on WMD over any other issue, of reducing a complex issue to sound bites. And I agree that they are morons.
Just because they were long-winded and thorough in their address to the U.N., which also featured WMD and false evidence of their existence in a major way, does not make all those other reasons equal. You must realize this, if you were actually awake in the run-up to war and not just researching this post-facto. The American people supported the war because we needed to take out Saddam's WMDs. The administration knew this, this is why they harped on it so much, and pretending otherwise is to be more stupid than they were. It's revisionist history, and it's disgusting.
It's not really survival of the fittest. In fact, that which survives, survives. And when the environment changes, it stops surviving.
I've thought for some time that "survival of the fittest" was misleading, because it implies a strict total ordering, and the idea of the superiority of one organism over another. I prefer "survival of the sufficiently fit", because it emphasizes the thing which you are saying: That which survives, survives, and if it does then it was "good enough".
Anyone who thought we went to war because Saddam might have had some mustard gas was and is a moron.
Sure, anyone who believed the stated claims of the President, or of our Secretary of State at the UN, was and is a moron. Sadly this includes a lot of sitting UN members and our allies in the "coalition of the willing".
Anyone who believes that the American people would have supported the war without the fear-mongering about WMD was and is a moron. Without the WMD issue we would not be in Iraq, simple as that.
We went to war because Iraq continuously breached the negotiated cease fire for a decade and we got tire of air bombing them on a weekly basis and supporting an embargo that was internationally unpopular.
Actually we went to war in order to support a larger middle eastern agenda that in part involved having large military bases in a location strategically close to Iran and opening up the possibility of closing bases in Saudi Arabia which was and is becoming poltically undesireable.
But seriously, if you're trying to retrofit the violation of cease fire as our stated reason for invading, you're delusional. That was at best an afterthought, a half-arsed attempt to justify it legally even though the legal entity behind the breached clauses did not support the unilateral action taken. WMD were Reason #1 We Need To Invade Iraq Right Now.
It was in the press, I read several stories about it, but not for very long because it was so uneventful that even the administration's PR department couldn't get any political bank out of it.
All they found was pre-Gulf War I stock, their chemical payloads degraded and useless as will happen to these agents if they are not actively maintained. In one case the ones who found it actually breached the container of sarin gas, but were unharmed because it wasn't sarin gas any more.
All it proves is first, Saddam used to have a chemical weapon stockpile, a fact that hasn't been in doubt since the 80s, and second that the first gulf war and the subsequent inspections were sufficient to end his weapons program. So no wonder they didn't want to play it up.
If they had actually found WMD, then they wouldn't be appologizing over the intelligence failures while Bush's approval rating slumps, now would they? They'd be trumpeting their amazing success on a daily basis! Thus do the Pres' most sypophantic supporters believe things that even the Pres doesn't believe. Which saddens me.
Each of which pre-dated the First Gulf War, and had not been maintained, making them useless for the function for which they were originally intended, the function that had us so scared that we invaded the country. They are not "partially diminished", they are "functionaly disabled non-weapons".
The claim was that Saddam had continued his WMD programs after the first war and had continued to build and maintain an arsenal. Everyone knows he had one before the first war, and that he did a bad job of accounting for them, and nobody says or said this wasn't so. It is that claim which has been proven false, and the discovery of only old, unmaintaned, useless weapons actually reinforces the fact that the original claim was a lie.
Saddam had no working chemical weapons when we invaded, that major motivation for the war was a sham and lie, and since you actually have the facts in front of you but choose to misinterpret them this shows that of the 50% who believe it to be true you are part of the sad subset who wants to believe that it is true.
Sounds like one of the grammatical errors I make when I'm editing a sentence -- especially a sentence typed into a tiny edit box in a browser. For example, I might have written "Did Humans Evolve? No, Says America." Then I might decide I don't like anthropomorphizing the country, and change it to say "Americans", but forget to change the verb to agree.
Evolution isn't a scientific truth. It's a theory.
Changes of species over time is a fact, in the sense that we've observed it. Explanations for how this occurs and what paths it has taken in the past are theory, and a very well established and emperically backed theory at that. Still, I'll accept this as a useful instance of pedantry.
I've gotten conflicting answers from people in industry, often seemingly related to how old they are (and thus whether they'd have been around for the actual-tape-mask phase), which is why I said I wasn't sure. Since "tape out" with magnetic tape would still be somewhat of a euphamism whereas "tape out" with real tape is literal, I'm still not convinced it refers to magnetic tape.
The plans themselves being the masks used to create the various layers in the silicon. These mask sets were in times past designed by placing colored pieces of tape onto paper. I'm not certain, but I think the term "tape out" actually refers to those bygone days of literally "taping out" the mask set.
My take is that will filter out most of your terrorists though.
Really? You think that a system that produces thousands of potential terorrist suspects a day at an airport like O'Hare is going to be treated seriously enough that it actually catches the one real terrorist that crosses through it every few months?
Um, no. The way we filter out most terrorists is by searching for physical evidence that actually indicates intent and which makes false positives easy to identify. That we have already accomplished. The only way this buzz-word-wrapped version of a shitty polygraph is going to make planes a less attractive target for terrorism is by ensuring that nobody wants to fly so there isn't a target in the first place.
Has it occurred to you that cause and effect are in play, but that the idealogy of the people using terror to win more jihaddi hearts and minds are, in fact, also a little crazy?
Sure their ideology is crazy, but their methodology is cold-bloodedly rational. But I'm glad to see that you don't reject the common-sense notion that it was Spain's involvement in the war that made them a potential target. Just like Canada's participation in the invasion of Afghanistan could have made them a target of local al Qaeda sympathizers -- note that even the prosecutors aren't alleging direct al Qaeda connections.
I have no problem accepting that people who view terrorism as a legitimate tactic are nuts. I do have a huge problem accepting that their targets are chosen randomly, or because those targets have contrary ideologies. There are tons of potential targets with contrary ideologies, that would be easier to terrorise than Spain was or is, but that have no terrorism. It's political policies that cause nations to become targets, whether it's the U.S. meddling in Middle Easter politics or Iraq meddling with countries with Western allies. There is a reason the U.S. was targeted by al Qaeda, and it didn't have jack shit to do with our freedom.
The only way we are ever going to truly address terrorism in a meaningful way is by facing some nasty truths about ourselves, and refusing to face those truths and calling the enemy crazy is counter productive in the extreme.
Oh sure, and those insurgent groups were probably estatic that we've been blaming everything on al Qaeda, since it took pressure off of them. Funny how we killed Zarqawi, but the violence hasn't abated at all. Just like we were saying it was all Bathists causing the ruckus until we captured Saddam, and then the violence only escalated and we had to change our tune. Of course we have to keep giving al Qaeda as much of the spotlight as possible, because without the 9/11 connection backing for the war might drop to untenable levels. So the perfect match of Bush and bin Laden continues, each serving the other's agenda with a disturbing amount of relish.
Or perhaps you mean places like Spain? The families of a couple hundred commuters there would probably disagree with your thoughts on that.
You mean the ones who voted out the government that got them into the war (and tried to lie to avoid the people from seeing the connection between the war and the bombing) and voted in the government that promised to get them out of the war?
Sorry bub, but they do agree with me.
Some people aren't so retarded that they think cause and effect don't apply to them. The rest think terrorists are just craaaaazy and do things for no reason.
A piece of string laid across the track may be "new", but it hardly constitutes a "hurdle".
As for teams, wouldn't a terrorist be like most humans and feel more secure when surrounded by their fellows? But really this suffers from the problem that all profiles intended to detect "intent" suffer from when faced with organized groups -- the group simply performs dry runs to determine who sets off the profile, and they are excluded from the live run.
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But couldn't we have made all these drawn out "first they'd have to learn how to fly commercial jetliners, not necessarily knowing which types they'd eventually board, then they'd have to successfully get to the cockpit without being incapacitated, and THEN they'd have to make the pilots think they were hijacking the plane,
Everything up to that point had been demonstrated on numerous occasions. It was in fact simple to convince the pilots that it was a hijacking because that is what had happened every time in the past. So no, it really isn't comparable.
Oh believe me, that was the first thing I thought of -- okay, i have a sick mind -- when I heard they were going to be banning water bottles on airplanes. "Terrorist caught with explosive device in their rectum. TSA promises new security regulation forthcoming. Airlines preemptively file for bankruptcy."
And for those of you who are noobs, here is how to install Linux on a dead badger.
Heh, my work place's web proxy blocked the site with the following message (emaphasis unchanged): "The site you requested is blocked under the following categories: Criminal Skills"
Before this gets too flamey (am I too late?), I think we're all entitled to some healthy scientific scepticism. If nobody asks questions, then nobody learns.
Yeah, but what's irritating is that the evolution skeptic's questions are always couched in and underlying rejection of evolution in its entirety. It isn't the sincere questioning of a student, it's the insincere questioning of someone waiting to find a whole and scream "A-ha! You don't know, which proves Genesis is true!"
And I say that as a scientific Christian, one of the "God made this amazing universe, so let's figure out how He did it" types. The disingenious questioning of Literalists is thus more offensive to me.
Exactly. Getting rid of caps lock is retarded. It's current location is retarded. War on Caps Lock? War on stupid keyboard layouts!
However both species while incapable of breeding are still fundamentally the same species. It is not like your going to end up with a walrus on one end, amd an elephant on the other, even though I could draw similarities amoungst both at all levels.
Why not, if you gave it enough time? Do you believe that mutations create genetic changes in a species over time which are selected for via natural selection to adapt it to its environment or not?
If you accept that they could mutate to the point of being incapable of breeding, then they won't share the same mutations, and you've already acknowledge that the species can undergo fundamental changes.
You're basically saying "I believe in microevolution, but not that it could change a species a lot." But really, changing pieces of genetic code can have a very large effect. Especially if you add up thousands and thousands of changes over millions of years, then yes you do end up with walruses and elephants and a plethora of differently mutated populations that long ago were part of the same population.
If you're using the term "Democracy" to mean "Direct Democracy", then it would be simpler if you would do so. A Republic is a form of Democracy. A Republic, at least as used to describe the United States, is better said as "Representative Democracy", if only because historically "Republic" has not necessarily implied any form of elected representation at all, it merely meant a state ruled by something other than a hereditary monarch, usually a President.
But you're right that representative democracy has its advantages over a direct democracy. As Plato noted, Democracy is doomed as soon as the people realize they can vote themselves money out of the coffers. Instead only a select elite have that power. By the way, the last line of your post made me chuckle. Extra TP indeed.
Ah, well, I see. And now I have to admit that it's pretty moronic to waste so much time arguing with them about it. It's like butting heads with a ram -- they're proud of their thick-headedness, and I only end up with a head ache.
If fundamentalist Islam is the problem, why would you invade one of the most secular states in the region? That'd be like fighing Stalinism by invading Australia or fighting Nazism by invading pre-war France.
The only invasion that actually made any sense at all was the invasion of Afghanistan. Actual threat to the U.S.? Check. Actual example of destructive fundamentalist government? Check. Actual chance of going well and being successfull? Check.
Too bad Afghanistan is being neglected because of the cluster-fuck that is Iraq. Any truly valid reason one can give for invading Iraq either applies tenfold to Afghanistan or only makes any sense after fininshing in Afghanistan.
That doesn't mean the most repeated reason is the only reason, or neccissarily even the primary reason.. it's just the one that sounds the best or is the most passionate.
Okay, well I was specifically talking about the reasons used to justify the war to the American people, not his real intentions stated or unstated. There are still people who believe those reasons, and that's what I was originally refuting. If that's the source of a misunderstanding, then hopefully it is now resolved. As far as those real reasons are concerned, I think they range between craptastic and nefarious.
As the war became more unpopular, the "revisionist" history became even worse, to the point that the entire nation seems to have a screw loose arguing over non-issues and historical trivia, to the point where they bring up "well you believe that WMD's exist *AND* Jehovah you stoopid christian; neener neener!" in the middle of evolution debates.
Well, yeah, arguing with people who still think Saddam was behind 9/11 and that we found nukes in Iraq tends to make people crazy.
This is a Republic, not a Democracy.
Which is like saying "This is a square, not a quadrilateral".
Yet you're right that misleading the people isn't a crime, and he doesn't need the support of the people to invade. In a literal sense. However we are a Democracy, and while George W. isn't going to be up for re-election, those who supported him in Congress and went along with his lies are and they are poignantly aware that this is a democracy. They do need the support of the people to maintain their power that allowed them to approve the war. This is why, ultimately, the WMD "issue" matters -- because without that issue, the people would not have supported the war, Congress fearing re-election would not have supported the President, and the President would not have started the war. Yeah, he could have, but that doesn't make it a pratical reality.
Of course now their method of maintaining their seat is to continue the big lie -- invading was necessary for [reason du jour] and has always been the reason, the war is going great, we can't give up or the terrorists win! Basically hoping that the same Orwellian nonsense that got them to where they are will keep them there.
Ring species are the best example that spring to mind -- a species develops and spreads around a natural barrier, like a mountain range, changing as it goes, until the diverging populations meet at the other end of the barrier. All along the ring, populations can interbreed, however at the point at which they meet the populations cannot.
I think there's been something done in a lab with flies, creating non-cross-breedable mutations, but I'm not certain so I can't give you a cite.
But the thing is, you're basically talking about the difference between micro-evolution (changes within a species) and macro- (creation of new species). If you accept micro-evolution, then it is only logical to also accept macro. If you take a population of one species, and separate it into two species with no contact with one another, then each of those populations will experience different mutations within itself, i.e. different paths of micro-evolution. Eventually these divergent paths will grow enough apart that were you to remove the barrier between the two populations that they would no longer be able to interbreed. Presto-chango, you've got macro-evolution, because macro-evolution is really just micro-evolution operating on separate populations.
Otherwise you're saying that a species can change over time, but never enough that it would be unable to breed with one of its ancient ancestors or with members of the species that have also changed over time yet not shared changes.
Yes, yes, they produced as long a list of reasons why invading Iraq was a good, necessary thing as possible.
Yet in every press statement, every address to the nation, every interview with Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney, and G.W.Bush, it was Terrorism and WMD front and center. Nothing was mentioned as often, nothing was harped on as much. No other issue received as much attention and as much effort to prove it true. WMD were not only why we had to invade, but why we had to invade NOW. None of those other issues justified immediate unilateral action, none of them were used as such justification.
You want to talk about sound-biting? Who was it who said "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud"?
So you see, it was the administration who was harping on WMD over any other issue, of reducing a complex issue to sound bites. And I agree that they are morons.
Just because they were long-winded and thorough in their address to the U.N., which also featured WMD and false evidence of their existence in a major way, does not make all those other reasons equal. You must realize this, if you were actually awake in the run-up to war and not just researching this post-facto. The American people supported the war because we needed to take out Saddam's WMDs. The administration knew this, this is why they harped on it so much, and pretending otherwise is to be more stupid than they were. It's revisionist history, and it's disgusting.
It's not really survival of the fittest. In fact, that which survives, survives. And when the environment changes, it stops surviving.
I've thought for some time that "survival of the fittest" was misleading, because it implies a strict total ordering, and the idea of the superiority of one organism over another. I prefer "survival of the sufficiently fit", because it emphasizes the thing which you are saying: That which survives, survives, and if it does then it was "good enough".
Anyone who thought we went to war because Saddam might have had some mustard gas was and is a moron.
Sure, anyone who believed the stated claims of the President, or of our Secretary of State at the UN, was and is a moron. Sadly this includes a lot of sitting UN members and our allies in the "coalition of the willing".
Anyone who believes that the American people would have supported the war without the fear-mongering about WMD was and is a moron. Without the WMD issue we would not be in Iraq, simple as that.
We went to war because Iraq continuously breached the negotiated cease fire for a decade and we got tire of air bombing them on a weekly basis and supporting an embargo that was internationally unpopular.
Actually we went to war in order to support a larger middle eastern agenda that in part involved having large military bases in a location strategically close to Iran and opening up the possibility of closing bases in Saudi Arabia which was and is becoming poltically undesireable.
But seriously, if you're trying to retrofit the violation of cease fire as our stated reason for invading, you're delusional. That was at best an afterthought, a half-arsed attempt to justify it legally even though the legal entity behind the breached clauses did not support the unilateral action taken. WMD were Reason #1 We Need To Invade Iraq Right Now.
It was in the press, I read several stories about it, but not for very long because it was so uneventful that even the administration's PR department couldn't get any political bank out of it.
All they found was pre-Gulf War I stock, their chemical payloads degraded and useless as will happen to these agents if they are not actively maintained. In one case the ones who found it actually breached the container of sarin gas, but were unharmed because it wasn't sarin gas any more.
All it proves is first, Saddam used to have a chemical weapon stockpile, a fact that hasn't been in doubt since the 80s, and second that the first gulf war and the subsequent inspections were sufficient to end his weapons program. So no wonder they didn't want to play it up.
If they had actually found WMD, then they wouldn't be appologizing over the intelligence failures while Bush's approval rating slumps, now would they? They'd be trumpeting their amazing success on a daily basis! Thus do the Pres' most sypophantic supporters believe things that even the Pres doesn't believe. Which saddens me.
Each of which pre-dated the First Gulf War, and had not been maintained, making them useless for the function for which they were originally intended, the function that had us so scared that we invaded the country. They are not "partially diminished", they are "functionaly disabled non-weapons".
The claim was that Saddam had continued his WMD programs after the first war and had continued to build and maintain an arsenal. Everyone knows he had one before the first war, and that he did a bad job of accounting for them, and nobody says or said this wasn't so.
It is that claim which has been proven false, and the discovery of only old, unmaintaned, useless weapons actually reinforces the fact that the original claim was a lie.
Saddam had no working chemical weapons when we invaded, that major motivation for the war was a sham and lie, and since you actually have the facts in front of you but choose to misinterpret them this shows that of the 50% who believe it to be true you are part of the sad subset who wants to believe that it is true.
Sounds like one of the grammatical errors I make when I'm editing a sentence -- especially a sentence typed into a tiny edit box in a browser. For example, I might have written "Did Humans Evolve? No, Says America." Then I might decide I don't like anthropomorphizing the country, and change it to say "Americans", but forget to change the verb to agree.
Evolution isn't a scientific truth. It's a theory.
Changes of species over time is a fact, in the sense that we've observed it. Explanations for how this occurs and what paths it has taken in the past are theory, and a very well established and emperically backed theory at that. Still, I'll accept this as a useful instance of pedantry.
I've gotten conflicting answers from people in industry, often seemingly related to how old they are (and thus whether they'd have been around for the actual-tape-mask phase), which is why I said I wasn't sure. Since "tape out" with magnetic tape would still be somewhat of a euphamism whereas "tape out" with real tape is literal, I'm still not convinced it refers to magnetic tape.
The plans themselves being the masks used to create the various layers in the silicon. These mask sets were in times past designed by placing colored pieces of tape onto paper. I'm not certain, but I think the term "tape out" actually refers to those bygone days of literally "taping out" the mask set.
My take is that will filter out most of your terrorists though.
Really? You think that a system that produces thousands of potential terorrist suspects a day at an airport like O'Hare is going to be treated seriously enough that it actually catches the one real terrorist that crosses through it every few months?
Um, no. The way we filter out most terrorists is by searching for physical evidence that actually indicates intent and which makes false positives easy to identify. That we have already accomplished. The only way this buzz-word-wrapped version of a shitty polygraph is going to make planes a less attractive target for terrorism is by ensuring that nobody wants to fly so there isn't a target in the first place.
Has it occurred to you that cause and effect are in play, but that the idealogy of the people using terror to win more jihaddi hearts and minds are, in fact, also a little crazy?
Sure their ideology is crazy, but their methodology is cold-bloodedly rational. But I'm glad to see that you don't reject the common-sense notion that it was Spain's involvement in the war that made them a potential target. Just like Canada's participation in the invasion of Afghanistan could have made them a target of local al Qaeda sympathizers -- note that even the prosecutors aren't alleging direct al Qaeda connections.
I have no problem accepting that people who view terrorism as a legitimate tactic are nuts. I do have a huge problem accepting that their targets are chosen randomly, or because those targets have contrary ideologies. There are tons of potential targets with contrary ideologies, that would be easier to terrorise than Spain was or is, but that have no terrorism. It's political policies that cause nations to become targets, whether it's the U.S. meddling in Middle Easter politics or Iraq meddling with countries with Western allies. There is a reason the U.S. was targeted by al Qaeda, and it didn't have jack shit to do with our freedom.
The only way we are ever going to truly address terrorism in a meaningful way is by facing some nasty truths about ourselves, and refusing to face those truths and calling the enemy crazy is counter productive in the extreme.
Oh sure, and those insurgent groups were probably estatic that we've been blaming everything on al Qaeda, since it took pressure off of them. Funny how we killed Zarqawi, but the violence hasn't abated at all. Just like we were saying it was all Bathists causing the ruckus until we captured Saddam, and then the violence only escalated and we had to change our tune. Of course we have to keep giving al Qaeda as much of the spotlight as possible, because without the 9/11 connection backing for the war might drop to untenable levels. So the perfect match of Bush and bin Laden continues, each serving the other's agenda with a disturbing amount of relish.
Or perhaps you mean places like Spain? The families of a couple hundred commuters there would probably disagree with your thoughts on that.
You mean the ones who voted out the government that got them into the war (and tried to lie to avoid the people from seeing the connection between the war and the bombing) and voted in the government that promised to get them out of the war?
Sorry bub, but they do agree with me.
Some people aren't so retarded that they think cause and effect don't apply to them. The rest think terrorists are just craaaaazy and do things for no reason.
A piece of string laid across the track may be "new", but it hardly constitutes a "hurdle".
As for teams, wouldn't a terrorist be like most humans and feel more secure when surrounded by their fellows? But really this suffers from the problem that all profiles intended to detect "intent" suffer from when faced with organized groups -- the group simply performs dry runs to determine who sets off the profile, and they are excluded from the live run.