Bingo, what gets done by whom is a business decision not a technical one, the kid found the technical solution so he has gone above and beyond his job and deserves a pat on the head for it. It's now up to management to either eat the loss because it was "their fault" or pass the problem back to the vendor if it was the "vendors fault". Manually flicking a bios switch on every machine probably costs in the region of $5-10 per machine in a corporate environment, if there are 5 machines management will just eat the loss because it's not worth arguing about, if there are 5000 machines then management will be re-reading the contract in an effort to get the vendor to either fix or compensate for it. In fact I strongly suspect management's initial reasoning went something like "what the vendor supplied didn't work, I'm not spending a cent of MY budget to investigate or fix THEIR problem", all they greybeads (like me) just shrugged and kept on doing their own jobs.
This sort of thing looks crazy when you are not part of the desicion making process, for example I knew an executive who got hauled over the coals for saving the company $4.5M, his problem was that the original estimate was $9M so he had "unecassarlily tied up" half of that money for a year. I still don't fully understand why this pissed off the bean-counters but it did. The wisdom in these situations is to accept most people are NOT idiots in their own job and that there is a valid reason for their behaviour that you are simply unaware of. In other words don't run around telling people how to suck eggs (unless it's your job to train egg suckers), just ask them (in a non-critical manner) why they took the desicion they did, at least one of you will learn something.
It's not good enough for an election to be fair, it has to be seen as fair by all "resonable" participants. In my mind the best course for SCOTUS would have been to avoid making any decision at all by ordering a fresh election without the use of the offending "chad" technology, this would clearly have put the desicion back in the hands of the people. However that's a pragmatic course of action and we all know "the law is an ass", not a pragmatist.
Disclaimer: as a non-american I don't have any stake in how you run your elections.
Meh - I'm happy to fork out $80 for Attenbourough's "Planet Earth" box set, it's much more effective to use your dollar to change the market rather than pretend it doesn't exist.
There's nothing illegal about DOWNLOADING a copyrighted file, if there was then the intenet itself would be illegal since every html, video, audio, etc, file ever created is automatically copyrighted at the time of creation. How it wound up being avaiable for download on the internet is not the downloader's problem, legally or morally.
OTOH: From your id and the use of a combination car / broken window analogy, I suspect you already know this and are just another unimaginative troll.
wouldn't all matter collapse into a common gravitational center?
Yes, assuming it's not ripped apart by the expansion of space and assuming there is enough mass in the cloud for gravity to eventually dominate the other forces. Note that some of these filiments are long enough that the two ends are not gavitationally bound (due to the exansion of space).
As I understand it the reason that DM comes in filaments between galaxies rather than seperate blobs has something to do with quantum fluctuations when our observable universe was compresed into a point particle, it also appears that the bulk of the normal matter (galaxy clusters) occurs where these filaments meet (although I don't know of a explaination as to why), the rest of the normal matter (lone galaxies and primordial gas) coincides with the dark matter filaments. In simplistic terms the matter in the universe is arranged like swiss cheese but the space containing the cheese is expanding to rapidly for the cheese to sucumb to gravity and lump together at a central point. Supercomputer models of the 14Gyr evolution of the universe that include dark matter are consistent with observations, models that only use normal matter are not as skillfull in reproducing ALL the observations.
To parahrase Feynmans answer to magnets, how do they work? that was taped long before the question became popular.
At the bottom of every rabbit hole is an explicit assumption. You just have to accept these fundemental assumptions as fact until someone comes along and peels another layer off the onion, assuming there is another layer? You can identify these explicit assumptions fairly easily because they cannot be described by anything more fundemental than themselves therefore all current descriptions of these fundemental properties of the universe are self referencing (or as Feynman put it "cheating"). Dark matter, gravity, spacetime, etc, are examples of these fundemental properties (slashdot challenge: try to come up with a description of a fundemental force or property of the universe that is not self referencing).
Modern physics accepts that we have no idea how these fundemental properties "work", like the universe itself they "just are". This is the "faith" part of science that confuses the hell out of religious and atheistic people alike, science (Natural philososphy) requires the "faith that the real world exists", it answers the proverbial "tree falling in the forest" question with a self-confident - yes! However all is not lost since we do know a hell of a lot about how these fundemental "miricales' behave, so faith in science is not blind faith, it is a faith that's deeply rooted in the utility of the results. ie: we have labeled our best description of this previously unobserved behaviour of the universe as "dark matter" in a way that is consistent with our current understanding of how the universe behaves.
Dark matter is therefore simply the label for the description of what we observe. If it suggest new observations via predictions then great, if it gets them right even better, but even though you have leant a lot more about how it behaves, you still don't actually know what dark matter is ( I particularly like clip for his sly one finger salute to book burning priests at ~2:42).
When I was a kid black holes were considered by many scientists to be "mathematical curiosities", we still haven't directly observed a black hole but we have seen enough indirect evidence to 'know' there must be something at the center of galaxies that matches our description of a black hole because of the way matter and space behave in those locations. Simarly we have not actually observed dark matter but the indirect evidence is such that we know there is something out there that fits our description of dark matter. Sure it's possible that modern physics is like the ancient greek model of the universe, totally indistinguishable from reality due to the accuracy of it's predictions. What you need to overturn the acceptance of dark matter, or any other theory that is generally accepted as "scientific fact" is....
1. An experiment that shows a prediction made by the current model is wrong, Galieo did this by using a new instrument to observe the (previously unknown)moons of Jupiter orbiting Jupiter rather than Earth (as predicted by the greek model). To do the same with a dark matter dector means the current model must make a prediction as to what it expects to be observed in such a detector, does it? Or does it say dark matter is "something" that interacts with normal matter via gravity alone? - I honetsly don't know?
2. A new model that makes all the correct predictions made by the current model, plus correcrtly predicts the outcome of 1. Without this, point 1 simply becomes a known limitation of the original theory (and an extremely attractive Phd subject).
He just signed our digital freedoms away without asking anybody
No he didn't, Obama can sign what ever treaty he wants (in fact it's common practice for a head of state to do that), however in most non-dictatorships this is simply an "in principle" agreement, it's not a done deal until it is ratified by congress/parliment. You do however have a good point with the transparency thing, I don't see why they can't develop the text of the treaty in public, the IPCC manage to do a similar feat for a much more complex and contraversial subject, and they do for a measly $5-6M/yr.
Odd, most people label me as a left-winger but I don't think there is anything inherently evil about corporations or governments, both are mearly organisational 'tools' that we use to do things that no man can do alone.
I've been following this and it sounded like they were going through a very long check list of possibilities. Trying one thing after another. And this whole thing about "we're getting close" was mostly that they were getting close to the end of the list of possibilities.
Not really, the standard model predicted what was found. however "finding it" involves using statistical analysis on an enormous number of individual experiments. Think of it like a very long time exposure of an extremely faint astronomical object, the longer the exposure the better the clarity of what you have "found". If you have two independent "time exposures" you can combine them for even greater clarity, which is basically what has been done here, two different experiments using different technology and techniques have come up with the same "picture" predicted by the standard model.
It would be deeply embarrassing if after all this they make a break through.
If that's what you think then you really need to listen to some actual scientists talking about their work, and there's no better starting point than a youtube search for Feynman interviews, but don't stop there have a listen to Sagan, EO Wilson, and the rest, even Alan Alda is worth listening to, not for his views on the higgs but for the way he approaches scientists in his interviews.
You will discern a side of human nature in these people, but it's a side that is rarely seen in the political/corporate world, ( the best name I can come up with is "self-skepticisim"). You see, no matter who predicted what, all physicists have "won" because the Higgs has moved from "best theory" to "scientific fact" but it will never reach a point of absolute certainty because physicists will never stop thinking of new ways to test their models.
I'm obviously a layman and my opinion on these matters isn't worth much.
The value of your opinion is not limited by your layman status, it's limited by your lack of undersatnding of how to judge the strength of the scientific evidence.
Yes, I find it odd that covering a few hundered square k/m with PV's is seen as a "gigantic expense", but re-plumbing the entire N. America continent with a new network of oil pipelines is a "necessary investment".
I'm not a climatologist either but I have been interested in it for at least 30yrs. Having said that, wtf does the "MMGW" acronymn stand for?
The only "theory" I know of concerning storms other than the obvious more heat == more turbulance is that the N. Hemisphere jet stream will ocillate more and the ocillations will move slower. This will increase the likeleyhood of Atlanitic hurricanes being "killed" by the sheraing of the jet stream, but on a global scale the monsoon rains will increase and the sub-tropic deserts will expand due to the more intense Hadley cells (Hadley cells = convection currents on either side of the equator that pump moist air up over the tropics where it dumps the moisture as rain after which the dry dry air falls down on the sub-tropical deserts). In other words heat will increase the amount of water traveling through the hydrological cycle, this is already happening as evidenced by the atmosphere already holding 4% more water vapour than it did 40yrs ago. Note also that the increase in water vapour is more evidence of a warmer planet since the atmosphere is basically chemically staurated with H20 and the only way to increase it is to raise either the temprature or the pressure (and I don't think gravity is any stronger than it was in the 70's).
So yeah, to a certain extent the jury is still out on storms. It's pretty certain we will get more floods/snow and more droughts/heatwaves but it won't necassarily comes via hurricanes and blizzards.
Meanwhile NC recently banned their civil engineers from considering the impact of any rise in sea levels due to AGW, they insist that infrastructure planning must only use the historical sea level records for forcasting future sea levels.
As for TFA, the phenomena of thermal inertia has been understood for decades (it's why the hottest weather occurs a month or two AFTER the summer solctice, and is also the origin of the "pluto is warming" canard). More and better data have added weight to that knowledge and more finely tuned our accounting of what mechanisim is responsible for what portion of the changes (such as the recent stories about the draining of aquifiers contributing to the rise). All this is because the IPCC avoids using data that is less that 2yrs old in it's reports, they're currently approaching the cut off date for new data to be added to the 2014 reports so you can expect to see these kind of stories over the next month or so. The next two years will be spent arguing over the expected 100k or so individual review critisisims of the draft reports.
Under BAU he world will continue to warm past 2100, at some point the Greenland and Antartic ice sheets will melt (estmates range from 2-5 centuries). That may seem like a long time but many engineering projects take on those time scales (the stabalising of the tower of pizza is one trivial example).
I hate semantic pedantry like this
It simple comprehension skills, if there's is anything to hate it's the dishonesty of those who deliberately twist and misquote his words for political gain.
We have island towns as opposed to island cities but they still have to have wires, roads, and pipes feeding them. BTW, they call the Alice a city but it's really just a town.
socialism just ensures that we all live in squalor. Just look at the ex-soviet state lifestyle
Choosing the USSR as an example of socialisim is like choosing Somalia as an example of capitalisim. The scandanavian countries are more socialist than most and they are definitely not "living in squalor". Thing is when you tie yourself to one ideology you automatically throw out all the good ideas from other ideologies which is why US citizens currently pay top dollar for a second rate health system.
The US system is ideologically afraid that someone will get "something for nothing", so afraid that they spend most of that extra money on an army of accountants that do nothing but try and work out who pays for what and how. In other words it's costing the average US citizen more to exclude each other from health care than it would to bite the bullet and implement a sane system (almost 10X more for a single-breadwinner family of four when compared to Australia's 'solialist' system).
you don't have a right to another's property without his permission
Of course not, but there are different definitions of what is and isn't private property. For example it's virtually impossible to amass billions in private property in a Scandanavian country due to the tax regime, meaning it's impossible for the bulk of the nations weallth to be concentrated into a few hands as it is in the US. This doesn't mean you can't be rich in a Scandanavian country, it just means you can't be filthy rich. And lets face it, most people become filthy rich via luck or hereditry, they DO NOT work any harder than the guy who cleans their corporate bathroom.
I'm no bill gates fan
I'm a big fan of his philanthropic activities, the guy has put his money where his mouth is and (along with Warren Buffet) has encoraged many other billionaires to make similar pledges. Did he (or any other multi-billionaire) do anything to "deserve" that level of property and power in the first place? - Definitely not.
Australia is as big as the US with less than a tenth of the population and our utilities/roads/sewers/etc are closer to Western European standards than US standards. The difference is regulatory frameworks, the US have gutted theirs in the last decade or so, kinda like they did with the financial industry. Australia and Europe have things like universal service obligations which make it illegal for utilities to discriminate against remote customers.
Lots of physicists talk like that, it's not a religious statement it's a common was to express ideas. Similar thing in IT, people talk about programs wanting/thinking this or that but nobody actually believes the code "wants" or "thinks" anything.
Slashdot Mirror
Bingo, what gets done by whom is a business decision not a technical one, the kid found the technical solution so he has gone above and beyond his job and deserves a pat on the head for it. It's now up to management to either eat the loss because it was "their fault" or pass the problem back to the vendor if it was the "vendors fault". Manually flicking a bios switch on every machine probably costs in the region of $5-10 per machine in a corporate environment, if there are 5 machines management will just eat the loss because it's not worth arguing about, if there are 5000 machines then management will be re-reading the contract in an effort to get the vendor to either fix or compensate for it. In fact I strongly suspect management's initial reasoning went something like "what the vendor supplied didn't work, I'm not spending a cent of MY budget to investigate or fix THEIR problem", all they greybeads (like me) just shrugged and kept on doing their own jobs.
This sort of thing looks crazy when you are not part of the desicion making process, for example I knew an executive who got hauled over the coals for saving the company $4.5M, his problem was that the original estimate was $9M so he had "unecassarlily tied up" half of that money for a year. I still don't fully understand why this pissed off the bean-counters but it did. The wisdom in these situations is to accept most people are NOT idiots in their own job and that there is a valid reason for their behaviour that you are simply unaware of. In other words don't run around telling people how to suck eggs (unless it's your job to train egg suckers), just ask them (in a non-critical manner) why they took the desicion they did, at least one of you will learn something.
It's not good enough for an election to be fair, it has to be seen as fair by all "resonable" participants. In my mind the best course for SCOTUS would have been to avoid making any decision at all by ordering a fresh election without the use of the offending "chad" technology, this would clearly have put the desicion back in the hands of the people. However that's a pragmatic course of action and we all know "the law is an ass", not a pragmatist.
Disclaimer: as a non-american I don't have any stake in how you run your elections.
Meh - I'm happy to fork out $80 for Attenbourough's "Planet Earth" box set, it's much more effective to use your dollar to change the market rather than pretend it doesn't exist.
There's nothing illegal about DOWNLOADING a copyrighted file, if there was then the intenet itself would be illegal since every html, video, audio, etc, file ever created is automatically copyrighted at the time of creation. How it wound up being avaiable for download on the internet is not the downloader's problem, legally or morally.
OTOH: From your id and the use of a combination car / broken window analogy, I suspect you already know this and are just another unimaginative troll.
wouldn't all matter collapse into a common gravitational center?
Yes, assuming it's not ripped apart by the expansion of space and assuming there is enough mass in the cloud for gravity to eventually dominate the other forces. Note that some of these filiments are long enough that the two ends are not gavitationally bound (due to the exansion of space).
As I understand it the reason that DM comes in filaments between galaxies rather than seperate blobs has something to do with quantum fluctuations when our observable universe was compresed into a point particle, it also appears that the bulk of the normal matter (galaxy clusters) occurs where these filaments meet (although I don't know of a explaination as to why), the rest of the normal matter (lone galaxies and primordial gas) coincides with the dark matter filaments. In simplistic terms the matter in the universe is arranged like swiss cheese but the space containing the cheese is expanding to rapidly for the cheese to sucumb to gravity and lump together at a central point. Supercomputer models of the 14Gyr evolution of the universe that include dark matter are consistent with observations, models that only use normal matter are not as skillfull in reproducing ALL the observations.
And for all the metaphysics types out there it's been pointed out a map of the universe at the largest scale looks remarkably like the nuron network in a brain
You're not the first AC to cut thier own throat with Occam's razor, and you won't be the last.
To parahrase Feynmans answer to magnets, how do they work? that was taped long before the question became popular.
At the bottom of every rabbit hole is an explicit assumption. You just have to accept these fundemental assumptions as fact until someone comes along and peels another layer off the onion, assuming there is another layer? You can identify these explicit assumptions fairly easily because they cannot be described by anything more fundemental than themselves therefore all current descriptions of these fundemental properties of the universe are self referencing (or as Feynman put it "cheating"). Dark matter, gravity, spacetime, etc, are examples of these fundemental properties (slashdot challenge: try to come up with a description of a fundemental force or property of the universe that is not self referencing).
Modern physics accepts that we have no idea how these fundemental properties "work", like the universe itself they "just are". This is the "faith" part of science that confuses the hell out of religious and atheistic people alike, science (Natural philososphy) requires the "faith that the real world exists", it answers the proverbial "tree falling in the forest" question with a self-confident - yes! However all is not lost since we do know a hell of a lot about how these fundemental "miricales' behave, so faith in science is not blind faith, it is a faith that's deeply rooted in the utility of the results. ie: we have labeled our best description of this previously unobserved behaviour of the universe as "dark matter" in a way that is consistent with our current understanding of how the universe behaves.
Dark matter is therefore simply the label for the description of what we observe. If it suggest new observations via predictions then great, if it gets them right even better, but even though you have leant a lot more about how it behaves, you still don't actually know what dark matter is ( I particularly like clip for his sly one finger salute to book burning priests at ~2:42).
When I was a kid black holes were considered by many scientists to be "mathematical curiosities", we still haven't directly observed a black hole but we have seen enough indirect evidence to 'know' there must be something at the center of galaxies that matches our description of a black hole because of the way matter and space behave in those locations. Simarly we have not actually observed dark matter but the indirect evidence is such that we know there is something out there that fits our description of dark matter. Sure it's possible that modern physics is like the ancient greek model of the universe, totally indistinguishable from reality due to the accuracy of it's predictions. What you need to overturn the acceptance of dark matter, or any other theory that is generally accepted as "scientific fact" is....
1. An experiment that shows a prediction made by the current model is wrong, Galieo did this by using a new instrument to observe the (previously unknown)moons of Jupiter orbiting Jupiter rather than Earth (as predicted by the greek model). To do the same with a dark matter dector means the current model must make a prediction as to what it expects to be observed in such a detector, does it? Or does it say dark matter is "something" that interacts with normal matter via gravity alone? - I honetsly don't know?
2. A new model that makes all the correct predictions made by the current model, plus correcrtly predicts the outcome of 1. Without this, point 1 simply becomes a known limitation of the original theory (and an extremely attractive Phd subject).
You are full of shit Jane, and we both know it.
He just signed our digital freedoms away without asking anybody
No he didn't, Obama can sign what ever treaty he wants (in fact it's common practice for a head of state to do that), however in most non-dictatorships this is simply an "in principle" agreement, it's not a done deal until it is ratified by congress/parliment. You do however have a good point with the transparency thing, I don't see why they can't develop the text of the treaty in public, the IPCC manage to do a similar feat for a much more complex and contraversial subject, and they do for a measly $5-6M/yr.
Odd, most people label me as a left-winger but I don't think there is anything inherently evil about corporations or governments, both are mearly organisational 'tools' that we use to do things that no man can do alone.
Jane be honest, you have not watched the movie, nor have you even skimmed the reports they were based on, have you?
I've been following this and it sounded like they were going through a very long check list of possibilities. Trying one thing after another. And this whole thing about "we're getting close" was mostly that they were getting close to the end of the list of possibilities.
Not really, the standard model predicted what was found. however "finding it" involves using statistical analysis on an enormous number of individual experiments. Think of it like a very long time exposure of an extremely faint astronomical object, the longer the exposure the better the clarity of what you have "found". If you have two independent "time exposures" you can combine them for even greater clarity, which is basically what has been done here, two different experiments using different technology and techniques have come up with the same "picture" predicted by the standard model.
It would be deeply embarrassing if after all this they make a break through.
If that's what you think then you really need to listen to some actual scientists talking about their work, and there's no better starting point than a youtube search for Feynman interviews, but don't stop there have a listen to Sagan, EO Wilson, and the rest, even Alan Alda is worth listening to, not for his views on the higgs but for the way he approaches scientists in his interviews.
You will discern a side of human nature in these people, but it's a side that is rarely seen in the political/corporate world, ( the best name I can come up with is "self-skepticisim"). You see, no matter who predicted what, all physicists have "won" because the Higgs has moved from "best theory" to "scientific fact" but it will never reach a point of absolute certainty because physicists will never stop thinking of new ways to test their models.
I'm obviously a layman and my opinion on these matters isn't worth much.
The value of your opinion is not limited by your layman status, it's limited by your lack of undersatnding of how to judge the strength of the scientific evidence.
Yes, I find it odd that covering a few hundered square k/m with PV's is seen as a "gigantic expense", but re-plumbing the entire N. America continent with a new network of oil pipelines is a "necessary investment".
Pizza, Pisa, they both taste like cheese.
I'm not a climatologist either but I have been interested in it for at least 30yrs. Having said that, wtf does the "MMGW" acronymn stand for?
The only "theory" I know of concerning storms other than the obvious more heat == more turbulance is that the N. Hemisphere jet stream will ocillate more and the ocillations will move slower. This will increase the likeleyhood of Atlanitic hurricanes being "killed" by the sheraing of the jet stream, but on a global scale the monsoon rains will increase and the sub-tropic deserts will expand due to the more intense Hadley cells (Hadley cells = convection currents on either side of the equator that pump moist air up over the tropics where it dumps the moisture as rain after which the dry dry air falls down on the sub-tropical deserts). In other words heat will increase the amount of water traveling through the hydrological cycle, this is already happening as evidenced by the atmosphere already holding 4% more water vapour than it did 40yrs ago. Note also that the increase in water vapour is more evidence of a warmer planet since the atmosphere is basically chemically staurated with H20 and the only way to increase it is to raise either the temprature or the pressure (and I don't think gravity is any stronger than it was in the 70's).
So yeah, to a certain extent the jury is still out on storms. It's pretty certain we will get more floods/snow and more droughts/heatwaves but it won't necassarily comes via hurricanes and blizzards.
Meanwhile NC recently banned their civil engineers from considering the impact of any rise in sea levels due to AGW, they insist that infrastructure planning must only use the historical sea level records for forcasting future sea levels.
As for TFA, the phenomena of thermal inertia has been understood for decades (it's why the hottest weather occurs a month or two AFTER the summer solctice, and is also the origin of the "pluto is warming" canard). More and better data have added weight to that knowledge and more finely tuned our accounting of what mechanisim is responsible for what portion of the changes (such as the recent stories about the draining of aquifiers contributing to the rise). All this is because the IPCC avoids using data that is less that 2yrs old in it's reports, they're currently approaching the cut off date for new data to be added to the 2014 reports so you can expect to see these kind of stories over the next month or so. The next two years will be spent arguing over the expected 100k or so individual review critisisims of the draft reports.
I hate semantic pedantry like this
It simple comprehension skills, if there's is anything to hate it's the dishonesty of those who deliberately twist and misquote his words for political gain.
We have island towns as opposed to island cities but they still have to have wires, roads, and pipes feeding them. BTW, they call the Alice a city but it's really just a town.
socialism just ensures that we all live in squalor. Just look at the ex-soviet state lifestyle
Choosing the USSR as an example of socialisim is like choosing Somalia as an example of capitalisim. The scandanavian countries are more socialist than most and they are definitely not "living in squalor". Thing is when you tie yourself to one ideology you automatically throw out all the good ideas from other ideologies which is why US citizens currently pay top dollar for a second rate health system.
The US system is ideologically afraid that someone will get "something for nothing", so afraid that they spend most of that extra money on an army of accountants that do nothing but try and work out who pays for what and how. In other words it's costing the average US citizen more to exclude each other from health care than it would to bite the bullet and implement a sane system (almost 10X more for a single-breadwinner family of four when compared to Australia's 'solialist' system).
you don't have a right to another's property without his permission
Of course not, but there are different definitions of what is and isn't private property. For example it's virtually impossible to amass billions in private property in a Scandanavian country due to the tax regime, meaning it's impossible for the bulk of the nations weallth to be concentrated into a few hands as it is in the US. This doesn't mean you can't be rich in a Scandanavian country, it just means you can't be filthy rich. And lets face it, most people become filthy rich via luck or hereditry, they DO NOT work any harder than the guy who cleans their corporate bathroom.
I'm no bill gates fan
I'm a big fan of his philanthropic activities, the guy has put his money where his mouth is and (along with Warren Buffet) has encoraged many other billionaires to make similar pledges. Did he (or any other multi-billionaire) do anything to "deserve" that level of property and power in the first place? - Definitely not.
"The government" is a paradox, it's simultaneously ominpotent and impotent.
Australia is as big as the US with less than a tenth of the population and our utilities/roads/sewers/etc are closer to Western European standards than US standards. The difference is regulatory frameworks, the US have gutted theirs in the last decade or so, kinda like they did with the financial industry. Australia and Europe have things like universal service obligations which make it illegal for utilities to discriminate against remote customers.
Lots of physicists talk like that, it's not a religious statement it's a common was to express ideas. Similar thing in IT, people talk about programs wanting/thinking this or that but nobody actually believes the code "wants" or "thinks" anything.
Google search has a long list of command line switches.
Those who don't demand proof are known as a "lunch mob".