You need to learn what materialism is. The way you are trying to use the word is nothing like the way any educated person uses it. Talk about sending a confused message. Alternately, you are trying to create a strawman argument. If not, learn to high school physics, learn to freshman college philosophy, or at least read something as modern as Locke or Berkeley. Then spend ten years on Quantum Mechanics and Information Physics, and you might be able to add something constructive to this discussion.
And the answer to your rhetorical question at the end is actually a clear "Yes!". You should also read Sir Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn so you learn why it's a yes and not anything else. Here's a hint, don't waste people's time treating a real question as a mere rhetorical tool. There have been hundreds of thousands of man hours devoted to creating a philosophy of science and dozens of brilliant books written on the subject. Most working scientists took at least one philosophy of science course to get their degree. If you want to insult all of them that took that course seriously and didn't just treat it as a nonsense prerequisite to the subject, go ahead, but claiming that there is no such thing puts the burden of proof squarely in your court.
To any Atheists reading this far, Black Parrot is claiming to be defending your position against religious ones. Unfortunately, following his argument logically means that to justify Atheism, you have to give up all physics post Isaac Newton and all modern philosophy of science. Do you really want to say "I am an Atheist, so Einstein isn't science. I reject all modern science post Newtonian strict materialism to cling to my unreligious non-beliefs." Because, I thought, you know, just as a vague impression up till now, that maybe some of you Atheists actually have a logical argument or two to explain why you support it instead. If Black Parrot is speaking for you, you don't. I could deliberately pick the most stupid sounding religion ever (maybe something with a creation myth involving spaceships like gold colored DC-10s, and a big volcano), secure it wasn't nearly as absurd as the Atheist position as it's being stated above.
If people go back to some variant of LAN/Sneakernet/Station Wagon full of CDs type file trading, then porn will become the universal currency of trade. Maybe some file traders will really want games, pop music or favorite TV show episodes, but the likeliest thing for anyone who has those to take in trade will be porn. Instead of getting Indonesian Ladyboys in Bondage vids because you like them, people will need to focus on whatever types of porn are likely to be most in demand with their trading group (And they'll have an excuse for the kinkier stuff - "That yiffie stuff is just for trading!").
It's an industry where employment costs (particularly for the actors) are a very low share of the total operating costs. For something reasonably analogous, A change in the H1B visa laws might have a pretty large impact on a company that employs lots of highly skilled technical people, but absolutely no impact on the fast food industry. If someone suggests that the H1B issue is why McDonalds is currently gaining market share against Burger King, they are simply wrong, even if, in theory, that issue could have a big effect on the relative market share of Apple and Microsoft. For one example, having to hire union electricians and gaffers would have roughly four to five times the effect on production costs that doubling all porn actors wages would have, and when California passed a law requiring HIV testing on all persons potentially engaging in transmissive acts, it actually raised employee costs more than 10 years of inflationary effects in the industry.
The film owners still have a legal right to sue for infringement, and there's some pretty good arguments for a moral right, BUT...
The industry is claiming they need very high statutory damages to make up for the tremendous losses they say 'piracy' produces. If those losses are really so high in part because of cases where the industry itself screws up, then the industry doesn't really deserve especially high statutory damages, AND giving those to the industry may encourage their incompetence rather than them reformulating their business models to make 'piracy' less attractive. Metaphorically, the punishment for auto theft should not be made so attractive to the victim that he or she deliberately doesn't lock his or her car in a known bad neighborhood. Running up demand when you are not prepared to meet it, and delaying consumer gratification while the product is hot, are simply bad business models.
The industry is also claiming they have a special need for taxpayers to foot more of the costs of them filing these lawsuits. If that same industry isn't bothering to do simple things they reasonably can to make those lawsuits unnecessary, then they themselves are the ones manufacturing that special need. That's one reason I qualified the part about moral rights, above - The industry has been claiming that the 'pirates' are solely responsible for creating that special need. If the industry itself is denying its own share of the responsibility, that undercuts their moral position. Going back to the metaphor I used, having your car stolen gives you no moral right to deliberately lie to the judge (and through him, the taxpayers paying the costs of a criminal prosecution) about whether you locked the doors or not.
Panspermia is a theoretical solution in search of a problem it actually applies to.
It's been invoked to explain the origin of life, or deal with some step in the origin of life problem that seems to have ultra low probabilities or otherwise be a real sticking point.
The whole universe is now believed to be a little over 12 billion years old, whereas Earth is about 4.5 Billion years old. If there is actually something that seems very improbable with just 4.5 Billion years, then it is still a pretty long shot with 2.5x to 3x the time. Now if the Universe was thousands or billions of times as old as Earth, that might make a real difference, but Earth's age is simply too large a fraction of the total time for the whole universe for Panspermia theories to buy a process much additional time.
Beyond that, matter doesn't drift around inside the universe all that fast. Most of the universe is so far away from here that the normal travel time for a comet or interstellar cloud becomes tremendous. If spores of some sort started evolving in, say, the Great Andromeda Whirlpool a billion years before life started on Earth, that whole extra billion years would be eaten up in travel time, making their evolution there no more likely at best than them evolving right here. To get around this, Panspermia theories have to postulate exotic events such as comets ejected from their solar systems at very much faster speeds than are predicted by regular astronomy. The levels of complexity, as you put it, increase very rapidly.
He also advocated ending all immigration and the "Anchor baby Filth'. I'm not going to blame him in the right just for that, but if you read his manifesto enough to find your quote and ignored that part, you are deliberately lying. Lee was insane. Trying to use him to paint a political movement you don't like as the cause is a good way to get more violence going. I doubt you have enough discipline to control your hatred by actually seeking to speak the truth first and foremost, but I do urge just that on you - learn to care more about the truth and human life than you do about spreading lies and hatred. Actually reading Lee's manifesto with understanding reveals he thought many people were valueless or of negative value. Your own life is worth more than he thought - don't waste it in lies and prove him right.
Should it be called just a loophole?
Actually getting a physical object to behave like quantum entanglement is present is a challenging task, much like getting an object to reliably store data in a form that doesn't degrade with repeated access in the first place. There are only a few ways to store data in forms that can take 100,000+ access cycles, give the date back quickly enough to be useful to other parts of the system, or have low enough rates of corruption to be genuinely useful to the user. When you factor in costs, the choices get more limited - after 50+ years of development, it's still general practice to compromise and use slow methods of storage for much of the storage needed. With data storage, nature seems to be insisting - fast, cheap, reliable - pick any two of three (at best).
Even if the underlying principle (as you put it) says there must exist some methods that aren't vulnerable to this sort of attack, turning those methods into engineering processes may entail other problems so great that no one would want to develop those lines of research unless they were forced out of other, originally more attractive options. This may well be a problem that comes back in one form or another for decades.
No, it's Russian, not Yiddish. (And yes, I know you were making a stupid racial slur, not a point). Anyway, 'Nekulturny' is Russian for uncultured, so pronounce it as you think Susan Ivanova would and it will be close enough. By they way, it's also a grand insult, taken much more seriously among native Russian speakers than it sounds it would be in translation.
The world's full of free where nobody assumes they need a 300 page + liscence to cover every possibility. I volunteer through my church for a food distribution project. We don't ask the people who get help not to disclose where it comes from, identify us workers in public, or any of a host of other legal situations of the sort that get put into private contracts. We pretty much assume that nobody is being given the right to get people's phone numbers without asking them directly if it's all right, and then call them in private instead of going through the church office (that's calls going either way). But, if one of the people we help persisted in begging me for gas money upon recognizing me as that guy from the church food give away, yes, I might bitch about it, even though its not in writing anywhere that they have specifically agreed not to.
Here's the real issue. If you are dealing with Microsoft, and you do expect something back, you don't need a small set of limitations such as are in the GPL, you need a 300 page plus, spell out every possible scenario, get an army of very, very skilled lawyers to evaluate it in advance, and then hope liscence. One of the reasons I say this is, if there is no formal liscence requiring it, Microsoft apparently gives absolutely nothing. It's not that they do or don't have to, it's that when they could choose to or not, they always choose not. If it might be in their own interest to give something to encourage more of what they are receiving, they still choose not. If looking to the future would show that the goose that lays golden eggs won't lay any more after it's made into pate, they choose not to think that far ahead. If that's how they treat FOSS, that's how they treat everybody else too. I'd go out of business if I treated everyone that way. There's plenty of times I do things that involve giving the customer at least reasonable quality rather than the strict terms of the contract. One of the things that makes me choose to do this is it discourages them bitching about my actions, and I probably make a lot more money overalll by not having as many people going around criticizing me to other potential customers. It's the potential for 'bitching' that makes that happen.
Microsoft does not have a contract that says these people must discuss these free transactions only in court, or anything else like that, does it? If Microsoft is allowed to 'give back' whatever it wants, including nothing at all, then the other side is equally allowed to bitch, whereas, if there's an implied requirement the FOSS developers act like this free software transaction was a contract and it included a clause saying they would not make critical statements to the media, then why isn't there an implied requirement for Microsoft to give some form of encouragement to the free software developers?
Slashdot tends to post or link to only a patent summary at best, and many of these sound trivial as summaries. Often it's the more detailed part of a patent that explains why something is non-obvious or truly novel, and why the scope of the patent doesn't cover what people think sounds like prior art, but something genuinely new. This also applies to scientific publications and accounts of experiments, drafts or proposals of new legislation, and other areas - a short summary of anything complex generally reads more like many other summaries than the whole work actually reads like other works.
Personally, if the patent is for something material, I assume it actually reflects novelty in invention unless a detailed reading shows reason to doubt that. Patents for business methods and software patents seem to have more clinkers, and maybe giving them the same benefit of a doubt is a mistake.
Patents certainly have abuses, with the chief one to my mind being that many of them are simply not worth all that much and distort the percieved value of a publicly traded company to investors, because the investors often read only the same summaries and think that the company has a billion dollar sure fire money making patent portfolio on hand, just as the typical reader here thinks there is always prior art and somebody is being a jerk by ignoring it. But this is like lawsuits in general - all too many investors regard any company suing over anything as having an inside track to making money.
In theory, GPL is less free than PD. In practice though - standing matters in court. It's hard to get a court to hear a case over someone fraudulently claiming to own a Public Domain work. If they actually filed suit against you, you would have clear standing, since they were threatening to damage you by taking your money if they won the suit. But, what if they just sent you a cease and desist, falsely claiming to own the work, but not actually announcing they plan to file charges if you publish or distribute? You haven't been threatened with actual damages yet. So maybe the court won't hear the case yet either. Now suppose your business model was to get a loan to print copies of a public domain book, i.e. Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist or the Big Book of Celtic Knotwork patterns. You probably have to reveal the existence of the fraudulent claim to act in good faith with whomever is giving you a loan, and hope that they agree this doesn't affect your ability to make a profit and repay that loan. If they back out, you might be able to sue for damages over it, but it won't be as easy or straightforward as if the 'bad guys' filed first and you countersued. Public domain can be a pain in the ass if somebody with money is involved.
For one real example, take Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan. One of the claims over whether a work was derived from Book 4 and earlier of the Tarzan series, then already PD, or a latter book that wasn't PD yet, ended up hinging on whether a ring worn by Tarzan was first described by Burroughs or first illustrated by a cover artist, with Burroughs picking it up from the illustration for one edition of book 4, and adding it to his description of Tarzan in book 6 and on, and whether the cover artist's picture counted as work for hire for either Burroughs or a publisher, or neither. At some point the court was entertaining arguments that the cover artist had meant to depict a Lapis Lazuli and not a Sapphire, as "anyone could clearly see" from the incredibly faded 1922 illustration on cheap pulp paper more than 50 years later. It at least seems possible that if one of these less free liscences had been involved, that case would have ended up a lot simpler and more clear cut. If I was a small publisher, involved in a case where other parties included someone such as Universal Pictures or Disney, and I found that the case might hinge on a point as difficult as that, I'd probably wish someone had used a GPL, a Creative Commons liscence, or something that made a lot of these extranious issues not matter.
Of course, if I had thought a work was under the GPL and something like this case happened, I might equally be wishing someone had just declared their intent to put it in the public domain.
Harry Potter - Death is permanent, even for major good guys. Star Trek III - Spock comes back.
For all these shows, you can reasonably debate whether a given point has scientific accuracy, whether it is 'realistic', or is 'rational' or even internally consistent. Try to average the conclusions on all those points and give the whole series a single rating, and you have left the realm where reason applies.
An entire planet existing as a city? This makes no sense from a material logistics point of view, at all. There is nothing like this in Star Trek.
But original Trek and spin offs were all notorious for the Planet with only one City plot, and all those other related bits:
The culture with higher tech than the federation, but only found on one planet. They have 'ion' power, but they don't actually use those spaceships to explore or colonise. The culture with higher tech that never left any traces on the place the Enterprise visited the week before, never built spaceships at all with that high tech, and never explored their neighborhood. They have invented TV, but have only one TV network. The planet where everyone comes from the same ethnic group, speaks the same language, and supports the same system of government, even though they are too low tech to keep a single planetwide system together . Their momma even dresses them all alike. The planet that's ALL desert, or ALL jungle, or ALL thrall training camps. (OK, that last one's pretty cool, but...). The ultrapowerful uberaliens millions of years more evolved than us, who:
a. don't know of any of the other ultrapowerful uberaliens - though they claim to know just about everything.
b. didn't explore and are confined to one planet.
c. act surprised when the federation shows up.
d. act more surprised when the federation demonstrates an advanced trait such as not blindly slaughtering everything they can shoot in the first five minutes. This is after they have probed the ship's data banks and studied federation history exaustively with their 'godlike' minds. "Sonaofagun, you people actually act like your records say you do - that's so different from the last thousand primitive races that have shown up here during our fifty million year history."
e. promise to enforce peace between the federation and somebody else, but forget about it within a few episodes. The culture with routine time travel, that lets the federation borrow that tech and alter time as they choose, rather than going back and warping the federation's history.
I can think of good, hard SF where the story ends up being about something that might happen, and by the end, we might want it to happen: Here's a short list for potential converts:
The Novel length version of Greg Bear's Blood Music, (but not the short story, that's definitely a 'would NOT want it to happen') Arthur C. Clarke - Childhood's End, The City and the Stars, 2001 (if you ignore the sequels, as Clarke himself recommended) John Brunner - The Stone that Never Came Down Brainstorm (the Christopher Walken/Natalie Wood film, not the Jeff Hunter film)
Variability in half life/decay rates is unlikely, and this data is not nearly enough to prove a significant effect. Because of the massive amount of research done on radioactive decay as part of various nations bomb making projects, looking for ways to get a hyper-fast reaction with less material or get criticality at all from some borderline case substances, this data would have to be supported by a quality new major research project to be taken at all seriously. Probably, the study would have to get a similar 33 day cycle for the same isotopes as these reports, AND find the same cycle for a bunch of others, AND rule out some of the possible alternate causes by doubleblind testing.
If that's done by some place such as MIT or one of the national labs, and the data glitch persists, then it starts counting as very significant. For just one reason, Supersymetry theories predict short lived supersymetric particles such as the Selectron and the Sneutrino. The supersymetric versions of particles have substantially more rest mass than the regular versions. Neutrinos that couple more strongly to neutron cross section of a nucleus could arguably actually be Sneutrinos. To live long enough to cross the 8 light minute gap between Earth and Sun, they would have to be moving at incredibly close to the speed of light, much more so than for regular neutrinos, which are already very close (around 99.0%). Somewhere around 99.97% of C, you get enough time dilation on Sneutrinos that they could routinely make it across the gap.
So, solar emission models for this effect could be predicting both a way to experimentally validate Supersymetry AND the existence of a reaction deep inside the solar core that produces such incredibly energetic particles. Furthermore, you could derive the energy of the initial solar reaction by sending a space probe outward towards Mars and perhaps beyond, and having it run constant testing on a radioactive isotope sample on-board to see if/when the effect falls off. Such an experiment could be incorporated into an existing planned mission, say another Mars Observer or Cassini to Saturn style probe.
That's why this is interesting - it may be a 10,000 to 1 longshot, but a. If it's true, it's a major step for both subatomic physics and astrophysics, and b. if it's true, it makes some predictions where we can do further experiments and refine the theories, and some of these should be in a reasonable cost range compared to alternates (such as building a particle accelerator from the Earth to the Moon to possibly get a little closer to proving/disproving Supersymetry).
Re:Nothings confirmed...
on
UVB-76 Explained
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I've argued earlier that the limited number of transmissions and their brevity doesn't support a military mission. Naturally I'm relieved that this claim appears to be possible disinformation or an unsupported fabrication, as that makes me look less wrong. But, at the risk of being eventually proven solidly wrong, I'll go out on a limb. Military ops normally require a lot more communications than this. 33 short transmissions spread over several decades is so obviously less than needed to support a series of ongoing combat operations that I can think of much better candidates. The profile fits a small network of spies (where small = 1 to 4 or 5) who are highly skilled and ideologically dedicated (presumably to modern Russia). These wouldn't be cheap, low level spies who were citizens of the investigated nation, doing their work for the sort of pay the Russians can manage, but well motivated, able to operate with a minimum of strategic level guidance, and not needing constant reassurance from their handlers to be useful. Probably they are all Russian citizens and came up through the system via a military or former KGB route so their loyalty is presumed solid. It's also likely they are doing long term data gathering, for example reporting on Strategic level government decisions or Multinational level business, and are free to persue a line of enquiry they think is reasonable, within limits set at lengthy intervals by these messages.
Other possibilities: 1. They (or equally likely just he or she), may be in a place where it is exceptionally difficult to get them more modern communications gear, new code books, or other physical contact, hence the Russians are relying on a very old system. Agents in North Korea, for example, might entail this difficulty. 2. The antenna is operationally attached, not to a particular agent, but to a particular country (see #1 above). Russia probably doesn't have a lot of ongoing espionage activity in some small out of the way countries, i.e. Iceland, or New Zealand. 33 messages in many years might fit their overall commitment to spy on such regions rather well. 3. Or, the transmitter is used only for a particular data type. It's easy to jump to these communications being something spectacular and 'James Bondian' such as assassination orders, but this system might be used just to broadcast instructions for what to do when a spy uses a dead-drop system and something happens to the message before the receiver can pick it up, or to give a basic physical description whenever someone has to contact an agent they don't know by sight. Either of those triggers would give the sort of highly irregular pattern of transmissions we see here.
I'm betting on agent contact. They have at least one spy in some isolated location/circumstances, where they don't want to attract attention by physically contacting the person(s) to update equipment or set up some new communications channel. (or they have updated procedures, but occasionally something glitches and they use this as a fall back system until they can fix it). This person or persons is/are under deep cover, probably with a goal of stealing technical, business related secrets such as manufacturing processes or market plans, and is/are unlikely to be connected to either sabotage or short time span military secrets. Occasionally, that person or persons still sends them information, so they broadcast an acknowledgement or updated instructions. This makes particular sense if they have either developed a really good set of advance instructions that has correctly anticipated many contingencies, or they have some good, knowledgeable and self motivated/largely self directed field agents so they can keep messages terse. There can't be very many field people in the network, but if it's a fall back method, I could see maybe three or four even as rare as broadcasts have been.
As a fallback communications option, this might be triggered only when somebody misses a face to face contact, for example, or when a physical dead-drop needs to be changed. One thing a simple code like this one might support would be a basic description of new contact persons - a few letters could easily be enough to describe a contact's gender, age range, hair and eye color, height, build, mode of travel, and some distinguishing features.
I agree heartily this isn't aimed at someone on a sub, not just for your reasons but because the method is better suited to an agent who has a lot of flexibility and is producing long term intelligence than someone in a tactical or operational position.
I've done plenty of hiking the old fashioned way, counting paces, orienting maps, correcting for the local difference between grid and magnetic north, etc. I really recommend it as training for more modern systems. For one, magnetic north moves - the angle shown on an old map is likely to be incorrect within a few years, so you learn to get updated information and annotate your maps. In the same way, climbing routes get reworked, sometimes an idiot comes along and puts bolts on the route, sometimes someone else chops those bolts out. If you climb or spelunk seriously, you learn to keep up with a network of people who might have updated data. That approach worked again for me when I got a GPS, where it translated into getting regular map updates and just making sure I knew how old the information I had was.
If you know how to 'box' around obstacles to keep a pace count, then you know why you might want to figure a big, clearly defined box around an obstacle in general, even when you aren't counting steps. For example, Laurel grows in dense clusters, full of tangles and exposed roots, in parts of the Smokies, and wild boar love these clusters. They can grow to many acres in extent. It can be impossible to keep oriented by the sun in them, or to keep a line of sight on a distant peak or other reference. Sometimes people call them Laurel Hells because it's so easy to get lost in them. If you're used to boxing such obstacles, then you have it pretty clear how much of a detour you need to make to stay properly clear of one, because the standard box method teaches including a pretty generous margin of error. So, you know how much extra walking you should expect with newer methods.
If you haven't dealt with them the old fashioned way, GPS is a strong temptation to just push through a Laurel Hell. I've given in to it, only to realize that you can spend so much time working around the completely impassable parts and crossing concealed gulleys and streams, that the short cut won't save you any time or bother, even if it's now technically more practical to try.
"Other countries" in this case is Sweden. Maybe Burkina Faso or New Zealand will care a bit about what happens in Sweden, but certainly, Sweden itself will care a lot. The US hasn't done any post earthquake hospital missions to Sweden in quite some time - so this is going to become the sort of thing the citzens judge the US by, with little more positive to offset it.
This starts turning into a definition problem. A matter of semantics.
A mind anything like a human being's runs on a hardware substrate that's built to interact with a physical environment in ways that promote organic survival. A mind that isn't anything like a human mind could run on very differently designed hardware, but then, if it's that different, how do you determine if it's equivalently complex, and ultimately, what justifies calling it a mind at all? People such as Vernor Vinge have speculated about software as sophisticated as a human mind, or more so, yet without self awareness (c. f. A Fire Upon the Deep). Others have speculated about whether such a mind need have self preservation instincts or drives, and if it would be possible to incorporate self preservation at a higher level as a conscious instruction set (ultimately an argument that goes back to Asimov's three laws or further, in its simplest forms).
Rigorously speaking, the whole formulation is logically meaningless. There's no such thing as "on the level of a human mind" but without self awareness, free will (or its illusion if you prefer), or an ego. It's a real stretch to claim there's meaning in "on the level of a human mind" but without a subconscious, or emotions. It's even way too ambiguous for real science to speak of "on the level of a human mind", but without reproductive drives or tiered social modeling.
I'm not claiming that strong AI, all the way up to a Vingean galactic scale super parasite thought virus for one example, isn't possible. What I am claiming is that you could objectively say such a thing was more powerful than a human mind, in that it could destroy a tremendous number of human minds by destroying their related bodies, but you couldn't claim that it was more powerful than a human mind in the mental sense, except in that same trivial sense as claiming a calcuator is more powerful than a human mind because it can do a rote calculation faster. Dr Kurzweil's hypothetical AI mind simulated on 2050's technology is really the same situation - we may well be able to run a simulation of certain parts of the brain that don't entail interacting with objective external reality in the sort of complexity space he is describing, in a mere 10 to 20 years, but how is that like a human mind? Manifesting environmental awareness and self awareness are two of the things that makes a human mind count as powerful or complex, and claiming something else is equivalent and deserves to be called the same thing because it can't do the same things simply doesn't make sense.
Simulation of a human level mind will probably come, but it will run on either specialized hardware of about the same complexity as a brain and nervous/sensory system, or on more generalized hardware built at well above that capacity, and it will probably be further delayed by software evolution until well after such hardware is possible.
What better a way to get the cops to go in and render everyone harmless, than to shoot at some fire fighters?
Since shooting at the first responders may get you shot back at, or get the authorities to issue ammo to the national guard and issue shoot to kill all looters orders, or get the locals wanting to lynch you for causing the responders to delay, and trigger various other responses such as that, are you really sure you want to claim that its the best method?.
Night otLD didn't really explain where its Zombies came from. There's talk about radiation from Venus, and other such possible explanations, but nobody has time in the film to follow up and announce something definitive.
But that's what makes any logical arguments unsettleable. If you know very little about how a whole complex phenomenon works, you can't be sure what its limits are, or what to expect next. If you don't even know if Zombies are a natural or supernatural phenomenon, or if they fit a disease model at all, of course you don't know how the condition is 'transmitted', because you don't even know if it is transmitted, in the way we normally use that word. If Zombies are supernatural, you can't even expect them to work according to the second law of Thermodynamics - name anything at all that you could still predict about anything if it is suddenly allowed to violate the second law at unpredictable intervals and in unpredictable ways. The Romero Dead films are one big Deus Ex Machina. In the end, they boil down to God makes the humans automatically too stupid to figure out what's going on, God arbitrarily does whatever it wants, and God wants certain humans to automatically lose, but some of them not until 90 minutes or so are up. Zombies will have whatever powers and limits God wants at that instant, and God has no longer term plan than freaking the filmgoers out. The whole thing becomes no better than those stories where the surprise ending is "the last two people are named Adam and Eve", or "It Was All A Dream". The first one was a bit better than that, laying down some rules like 'head shots stop them', and keeping the timeframe short enough that a lack of understanding on the human race's part is more plausible, but Romero's choice in the sequels was to break rule after rule until the films lose so much of their remaining grounding all debate about the Zombie problem becomes unsupportable. It could be worse - Return of the Living Dead got there in its first 30 minutes.
So all the big banks that had to be bailed out were the ones subject to the equal opportunity in lending rules Congress passed, right? Oh, wait, no 16 out of 17 of them were investment banks and primary insurance crafters that didn't offer any sub prime loans at all, and couldn't be pressured to offer more because that wasn't any part of their basic business. Blaming the whole debacle on Congress explains Fannie and Freddie, and One private lender out of 17 (It explains those three's problems to some extent, not really nearly all). It may be fair to include it as one contributing factor, but it's like pointing to the kids playing with matches near one house, and not mentioning the guys spreading gasoline all over the whole neighborhood.
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You need to learn what materialism is. The way you are trying to use the word is nothing like the way any educated person uses it. Talk about sending a confused message. Alternately, you are trying to create a strawman argument. If not, learn to high school physics, learn to freshman college philosophy, or at least read something as modern as Locke or Berkeley. Then spend ten years on Quantum Mechanics and Information Physics, and you might be able to add something constructive to this discussion.
And the answer to your rhetorical question at the end is actually a clear "Yes!". You should also read Sir Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn so you learn why it's a yes and not anything else. Here's a hint, don't waste people's time treating a real question as a mere rhetorical tool. There have been hundreds of thousands of man hours devoted to creating a philosophy of science and dozens of brilliant books written on the subject. Most working scientists took at least one philosophy of science course to get their degree. If you want to insult all of them that took that course seriously and didn't just treat it as a nonsense prerequisite to the subject, go ahead, but claiming that there is no such thing puts the burden of proof squarely in your court.
To any Atheists reading this far, Black Parrot is claiming to be defending your position against religious ones. Unfortunately, following his argument logically means that to justify Atheism, you have to give up all physics post Isaac Newton and all modern philosophy of science. Do you really want to say "I am an Atheist, so Einstein isn't science. I reject all modern science post Newtonian strict materialism to cling to my unreligious non-beliefs." Because, I thought, you know, just as a vague impression up till now, that maybe some of you Atheists actually have a logical argument or two to explain why you support it instead. If Black Parrot is speaking for you, you don't. I could deliberately pick the most stupid sounding religion ever (maybe something with a creation myth involving spaceships like gold colored DC-10s, and a big volcano), secure it wasn't nearly as absurd as the Atheist position as it's being stated above.
If people go back to some variant of LAN/Sneakernet/Station Wagon full of CDs type file trading, then porn will become the universal currency of trade. Maybe some file traders will really want games, pop music or favorite TV show episodes, but the likeliest thing for anyone who has those to take in trade will be porn. Instead of getting Indonesian Ladyboys in Bondage vids because you like them, people will need to focus on whatever types of porn are likely to be most in demand with their trading group (And they'll have an excuse for the kinkier stuff - "That yiffie stuff is just for trading!").
It's an industry where employment costs (particularly for the actors) are a very low share of the total operating costs. For something reasonably analogous, A change in the H1B visa laws might have a pretty large impact on a company that employs lots of highly skilled technical people, but absolutely no impact on the fast food industry. If someone suggests that the H1B issue is why McDonalds is currently gaining market share against Burger King, they are simply wrong, even if, in theory, that issue could have a big effect on the relative market share of Apple and Microsoft. For one example, having to hire union electricians and gaffers would have roughly four to five times the effect on production costs that doubling all porn actors wages would have, and when California passed a law requiring HIV testing on all persons potentially engaging in transmissive acts, it actually raised employee costs more than 10 years of inflationary effects in the industry.
The film owners still have a legal right to sue for infringement, and there's some pretty good arguments for a moral right, BUT ...
The industry is claiming they need very high statutory damages to make up for the tremendous losses they say 'piracy' produces.
If those losses are really so high in part because of cases where the industry itself screws up, then the industry doesn't really deserve especially high statutory damages, AND giving those to the industry may encourage their incompetence rather than them reformulating their business models to make 'piracy' less attractive. Metaphorically, the punishment for auto theft should not be made so attractive to the victim that he or she deliberately doesn't lock his or her car in a known bad neighborhood. Running up demand when you are not prepared to meet it, and delaying consumer gratification while the product is hot, are simply bad business models.
The industry is also claiming they have a special need for taxpayers to foot more of the costs of them filing these lawsuits. If that same industry isn't bothering to do simple things they reasonably can to make those lawsuits unnecessary, then they themselves are the ones manufacturing that special need. That's one reason I qualified the part about moral rights, above - The industry has been claiming that the 'pirates' are solely responsible for creating that special need. If the industry itself is denying its own share of the responsibility, that undercuts their moral position. Going back to the metaphor I used, having your car stolen gives you no moral right to deliberately lie to the judge (and through him, the taxpayers paying the costs of a criminal prosecution) about whether you locked the doors or not.
Panspermia is a theoretical solution in search of a problem it actually applies to.
It's been invoked to explain the origin of life, or deal with some step in the origin of life problem that seems to have ultra low probabilities or otherwise be a real sticking point.
The whole universe is now believed to be a little over 12 billion years old, whereas Earth is about 4.5 Billion years old. If there is actually something that seems very improbable with just 4.5 Billion years, then it is still a pretty long shot with 2.5x to 3x the time. Now if the Universe was thousands or billions of times as old as Earth, that might make a real difference, but Earth's age is simply too large a fraction of the total time for the whole universe for Panspermia theories to buy a process much additional time.
Beyond that, matter doesn't drift around inside the universe all that fast. Most of the universe is so far away from here that the normal travel time for a comet or interstellar cloud becomes tremendous. If spores of some sort started evolving in, say, the Great Andromeda Whirlpool a billion years before life started on Earth, that whole extra billion years would be eaten up in travel time, making their evolution there no more likely at best than them evolving right here. To get around this, Panspermia theories have to postulate exotic events such as comets ejected from their solar systems at very much faster speeds than are predicted by regular astronomy. The levels of complexity, as you put it, increase very rapidly.
He also advocated ending all immigration and the "Anchor baby Filth'. I'm not going to blame him in the right just for that, but if you read his manifesto enough to find your quote and ignored that part, you are deliberately lying. Lee was insane. Trying to use him to paint a political movement you don't like as the cause is a good way to get more violence going. I doubt you have enough discipline to control your hatred by actually seeking to speak the truth first and foremost, but I do urge just that on you - learn to care more about the truth and human life than you do about spreading lies and hatred. Actually reading Lee's manifesto with understanding reveals he thought many people were valueless or of negative value. Your own life is worth more than he thought - don't waste it in lies and prove him right.
Should it be called just a loophole?
Actually getting a physical object to behave like quantum entanglement is present is a challenging task, much like getting an object to reliably store data in a form that doesn't degrade with repeated access in the first place. There are only a few ways to store data in forms that can take 100,000+ access cycles, give the date back quickly enough to be useful to other parts of the system, or have low enough rates of corruption to be genuinely useful to the user. When you factor in costs, the choices get more limited - after 50+ years of development, it's still general practice to compromise and use slow methods of storage for much of the storage needed. With data storage, nature seems to be insisting - fast, cheap, reliable - pick any two of three (at best).
Even if the underlying principle (as you put it) says there must exist some methods that aren't vulnerable to this sort of attack, turning those methods into engineering processes may entail other problems so great that no one would want to develop those lines of research unless they were forced out of other, originally more attractive options. This may well be a problem that comes back in one form or another for decades.
No, it's Russian, not Yiddish. (And yes, I know you were making a stupid racial slur, not a point).
Anyway, 'Nekulturny' is Russian for uncultured, so pronounce it as you think Susan Ivanova would and it will be close enough. By they way, it's also a grand insult, taken much more seriously among native Russian speakers than it sounds it would be in translation.
The world's full of free where nobody assumes they need a 300 page + liscence to cover every possibility. I volunteer through my church for a food distribution project. We don't ask the people who get help not to disclose where it comes from, identify us workers in public, or any of a host of other legal situations of the sort that get put into private contracts. We pretty much assume that nobody is being given the right to get people's phone numbers without asking them directly if it's all right, and then call them in private instead of going through the church office (that's calls going either way). But, if one of the people we help persisted in begging me for gas money upon recognizing me as that guy from the church food give away, yes, I might bitch about it, even though its not in writing anywhere that they have specifically agreed not to.
Here's the real issue. If you are dealing with Microsoft, and you do expect something back, you don't need a small set of limitations such as are in the GPL, you need a 300 page plus, spell out every possible scenario, get an army of very, very skilled lawyers to evaluate it in advance, and then hope liscence. One of the reasons I say this is, if there is no formal liscence requiring it, Microsoft apparently gives absolutely nothing. It's not that they do or don't have to, it's that when they could choose to or not, they always choose not. If it might be in their own interest to give something to encourage more of what they are receiving, they still choose not. If looking to the future would show that the goose that lays golden eggs won't lay any more after it's made into pate, they choose not to think that far ahead. If that's how they treat FOSS, that's how they treat everybody else too. I'd go out of business if I treated everyone that way. There's plenty of times I do things that involve giving the customer at least reasonable quality rather than the strict terms of the contract. One of the things that makes me choose to do this is it discourages them bitching about my actions, and I probably make a lot more money overalll by not having as many people going around criticizing me to other potential customers. It's the potential for 'bitching' that makes that happen.
Microsoft does not have a contract that says these people must discuss these free transactions only in court, or anything else like that, does it? If Microsoft is allowed to 'give back' whatever it wants, including nothing at all, then the other side is equally allowed to bitch, whereas, if there's an implied requirement the FOSS developers act like this free software transaction was a contract and it included a clause saying they would not make critical statements to the media, then why isn't there an implied requirement for Microsoft to give some form of encouragement to the free software developers?
Slashdot tends to post or link to only a patent summary at best, and many of these sound trivial as summaries. Often it's the more detailed part of a patent that explains why something is non-obvious or truly novel, and why the scope of the patent doesn't cover what people think sounds like prior art, but something genuinely new. This also applies to scientific publications and accounts of experiments, drafts or proposals of new legislation, and other areas - a short summary of anything complex generally reads more like many other summaries than the whole work actually reads like other works.
Personally, if the patent is for something material, I assume it actually reflects novelty in invention unless a detailed reading shows reason to doubt that. Patents for business methods and software patents seem to have more clinkers, and maybe giving them the same benefit of a doubt is a mistake.
Patents certainly have abuses, with the chief one to my mind being that many of them are simply not worth all that much and distort the percieved value of a publicly traded company to investors, because the investors often read only the same summaries and think that the company has a billion dollar sure fire money making patent portfolio on hand, just as the typical reader here thinks there is always prior art and somebody is being a jerk by ignoring it. But this is like lawsuits in general - all too many investors regard any company suing over anything as having an inside track to making money.
In theory, GPL is less free than PD. In practice though - standing matters in court. It's hard to get a court to hear a case over someone fraudulently claiming to own a Public Domain work. If they actually filed suit against you, you would have clear standing, since they were threatening to damage you by taking your money if they won the suit. But, what if they just sent you a cease and desist, falsely claiming to own the work, but not actually announcing they plan to file charges if you publish or distribute? You haven't been threatened with actual damages yet. So maybe the court won't hear the case yet either. Now suppose your business model was to get a loan to print copies of a public domain book, i.e. Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist or the Big Book of Celtic Knotwork patterns. You probably have to reveal the existence of the fraudulent claim to act in good faith with whomever is giving you a loan, and hope that they agree this doesn't affect your ability to make a profit and repay that loan. If they back out, you might be able to sue for damages over it, but it won't be as easy or straightforward as if the 'bad guys' filed first and you countersued. Public domain can be a pain in the ass if somebody with money is involved.
For one real example, take Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan. One of the claims over whether a work was derived from Book 4 and earlier of the Tarzan series, then already PD, or a latter book that wasn't PD yet, ended up hinging on whether a ring worn by Tarzan was first described by Burroughs or first illustrated by a cover artist, with Burroughs picking it up from the illustration for one edition of book 4, and adding it to his description of Tarzan in book 6 and on, and whether the cover artist's picture counted as work for hire for either Burroughs or a publisher, or neither. At some point the court was entertaining arguments that the cover artist had meant to depict a Lapis Lazuli and not a Sapphire, as "anyone could clearly see" from the incredibly faded 1922 illustration on cheap pulp paper more than 50 years later. It at least seems possible that if one of these less free liscences had been involved, that case would have ended up a lot simpler and more clear cut. If I was a small publisher, involved in a case where other parties included someone such as Universal Pictures or Disney, and I found that the case might hinge on a point as difficult as that, I'd probably wish someone had used a GPL, a Creative Commons liscence, or something that made a lot of these extranious issues not matter.
Of course, if I had thought a work was under the GPL and something like this case happened, I might equally be wishing someone had just declared their intent to put it in the public domain.
Harry Potter - Death is permanent, even for major good guys.
Star Trek III - Spock comes back.
For all these shows, you can reasonably debate whether a given point has scientific accuracy, whether it is 'realistic', or is 'rational' or even internally consistent. Try to average the conclusions on all those points and give the whole series a single rating, and you have left the realm where reason applies.
An entire planet existing as a city? This makes no sense from a material logistics point of view, at all. There is nothing like this in Star Trek.
But original Trek and spin offs were all notorious for the Planet with only one City plot, and all those other related bits:
The culture with higher tech than the federation, but only found on one planet. They have 'ion' power, but they don't actually use those spaceships to explore or colonise.
The culture with higher tech that never left any traces on the place the Enterprise visited the week before, never built spaceships at all with that high tech, and never explored their neighborhood. They have invented TV, but have only one TV network.
The planet where everyone comes from the same ethnic group, speaks the same language, and supports the same system of government, even though they are too low tech to keep a single planetwide system together . Their momma even dresses them all alike.
The planet that's ALL desert, or ALL jungle, or ALL thrall training camps. (OK, that last one's pretty cool, but...).
The ultrapowerful uberaliens millions of years more evolved than us, who:
a. don't know of any of the other ultrapowerful uberaliens - though they claim to know just about everything.
b. didn't explore and are confined to one planet.
c. act surprised when the federation shows up.
d. act more surprised when the federation demonstrates an advanced trait such as not blindly slaughtering everything they can shoot in the first five minutes. This is after they have probed the ship's data banks and studied federation history exaustively with their 'godlike' minds. "Sonaofagun, you people actually act like your records say you do - that's so different from the last thousand primitive races that have shown up here during our fifty million year history."
e. promise to enforce peace between the federation and somebody else, but forget about it within a few episodes.
The culture with routine time travel, that lets the federation borrow that tech and alter time as they choose, rather than going back and warping the federation's history.
How about "Han shot Greedo first, because he was NOT AN IDIOT!" ?
I can think of good, hard SF where the story ends up being about something that might happen, and by the end, we might want it to happen:
Here's a short list for potential converts:
The Novel length version of Greg Bear's Blood Music, (but not the short story, that's definitely a 'would NOT want it to happen')
Arthur C. Clarke - Childhood's End, The City and the Stars, 2001 (if you ignore the sequels, as Clarke himself recommended)
John Brunner - The Stone that Never Came Down
Brainstorm (the Christopher Walken/Natalie Wood film, not the Jeff Hunter film)
Variability in half life/decay rates is unlikely, and this data is not nearly enough to prove a significant effect. Because of the massive amount of research done on radioactive decay as part of various nations bomb making projects, looking for ways to get a hyper-fast reaction with less material or get criticality at all from some borderline case substances, this data would have to be supported by a quality new major research project to be taken at all seriously. Probably, the study would have to get a similar 33 day cycle for the same isotopes as these reports, AND find the same cycle for a bunch of others, AND rule out some of the possible alternate causes by doubleblind testing.
If that's done by some place such as MIT or one of the national labs, and the data glitch persists, then it starts counting as very significant. For just one reason, Supersymetry theories predict short lived supersymetric particles such as the Selectron and the Sneutrino. The supersymetric versions of particles have substantially more rest mass than the regular versions. Neutrinos that couple more strongly to neutron cross section of a nucleus could arguably actually be Sneutrinos. To live long enough to cross the 8 light minute gap between Earth and Sun, they would have to be moving at incredibly close to the speed of light, much more so than for regular neutrinos, which are already very close (around 99.0%). Somewhere around 99.97% of C, you get enough time dilation on Sneutrinos that they could routinely make it across the gap.
So, solar emission models for this effect could be predicting both a way to experimentally validate Supersymetry AND the existence of a reaction deep inside the solar core that produces such incredibly energetic particles. Furthermore, you could derive the energy of the initial solar reaction by sending a space probe outward towards Mars and perhaps beyond, and having it run constant testing on a radioactive isotope sample on-board to see if/when the effect falls off. Such an experiment could be incorporated into an existing planned mission, say another Mars Observer or Cassini to Saturn style probe.
That's why this is interesting - it may be a 10,000 to 1 longshot, but a. If it's true, it's a major step for both subatomic physics and astrophysics, and b. if it's true, it makes some predictions where we can do further experiments and refine the theories, and some of these should be in a reasonable cost range compared to alternates (such as building a particle accelerator from the Earth to the Moon to possibly get a little closer to proving/disproving Supersymetry).
I've argued earlier that the limited number of transmissions and their brevity doesn't support a military mission. Naturally I'm relieved that this claim appears to be possible disinformation or an unsupported fabrication, as that makes me look less wrong. But, at the risk of being eventually proven solidly wrong, I'll go out on a limb. Military ops normally require a lot more communications than this. 33 short transmissions spread over several decades is so obviously less than needed to support a series of ongoing combat operations that I can think of much better candidates. The profile fits a small network of spies (where small = 1 to 4 or 5) who are highly skilled and ideologically dedicated (presumably to modern Russia). These wouldn't be cheap, low level spies who were citizens of the investigated nation, doing their work for the sort of pay the Russians can manage, but well motivated, able to operate with a minimum of strategic level guidance, and not needing constant reassurance from their handlers to be useful. Probably they are all Russian citizens and came up through the system via a military or former KGB route so their loyalty is presumed solid. It's also likely they are doing long term data gathering, for example reporting on Strategic level government decisions or Multinational level business, and are free to persue a line of enquiry they think is reasonable, within limits set at lengthy intervals by these messages.
Other possibilities:
1. They (or equally likely just he or she), may be in a place where it is exceptionally difficult to get them more modern communications gear, new code books, or other physical contact, hence the Russians are relying on a very old system. Agents in North Korea, for example, might entail this difficulty.
2. The antenna is operationally attached, not to a particular agent, but to a particular country (see #1 above). Russia probably doesn't have a lot of ongoing espionage activity in some small out of the way countries, i.e. Iceland, or New Zealand. 33 messages in many years might fit their overall commitment to spy on such regions rather well.
3. Or, the transmitter is used only for a particular data type. It's easy to jump to these communications being something spectacular and 'James Bondian' such as assassination orders, but this system might be used just to broadcast instructions for what to do when a spy uses a dead-drop system and something happens to the message before the receiver can pick it up, or to give a basic physical description whenever someone has to contact an agent they don't know by sight. Either of those triggers would give the sort of highly irregular pattern of transmissions we see here.
I'm betting on agent contact. They have at least one spy in some isolated location/circumstances, where they don't want to attract attention by physically contacting the person(s) to update equipment or set up some new communications channel. (or they have updated procedures, but occasionally something glitches and they use this as a fall back system until they can fix it). This person or persons is/are under deep cover, probably with a goal of stealing technical, business related secrets such as manufacturing processes or market plans, and is/are unlikely to be connected to either sabotage or short time span military secrets. Occasionally, that person or persons still sends them information, so they broadcast an acknowledgement or updated instructions. This makes particular sense if they have either developed a really good set of advance instructions that has correctly anticipated many contingencies, or they have some good, knowledgeable and self motivated/largely self directed field agents so they can keep messages terse. There can't be very many field people in the network, but if it's a fall back method, I could see maybe three or four even as rare as broadcasts have been.
As a fallback communications option, this might be triggered only when somebody misses a face to face contact, for example, or when a physical dead-drop needs to be changed. One thing a simple code like this one might support would be a basic description of new contact persons - a few letters could easily be enough to describe a contact's gender, age range, hair and eye color, height, build, mode of travel, and some distinguishing features.
I agree heartily this isn't aimed at someone on a sub, not just for your reasons but because the method is better suited to an agent who has a lot of flexibility and is producing long term intelligence than someone in a tactical or operational position.
Yes, but only those of use who are genuinely sentient agree with that idea.
I've done plenty of hiking the old fashioned way, counting paces, orienting maps, correcting for the local difference between grid and magnetic north, etc. I really recommend it as training for more modern systems. For one, magnetic north moves - the angle shown on an old map is likely to be incorrect within a few years, so you learn to get updated information and annotate your maps. In the same way, climbing routes get reworked, sometimes an idiot comes along and puts bolts on the route, sometimes someone else chops those bolts out. If you climb or spelunk seriously, you learn to keep up with a network of people who might have updated data. That approach worked again for me when I got a GPS, where it translated into getting regular map updates and just making sure I knew how old the information I had was.
If you know how to 'box' around obstacles to keep a pace count, then you know why you might want to figure a big, clearly defined box around an obstacle in general, even when you aren't counting steps. For example, Laurel grows in dense clusters, full of tangles and exposed roots, in parts of the Smokies, and wild boar love these clusters. They can grow to many acres in extent. It can be impossible to keep oriented by the sun in them, or to keep a line of sight on a distant peak or other reference. Sometimes people call them Laurel Hells because it's so easy to get lost in them. If you're used to boxing such obstacles, then you have it pretty clear how much of a detour you need to make to stay properly clear of one, because the standard box method teaches including a pretty generous margin of error. So, you know how much extra walking you should expect with newer methods.
If you haven't dealt with them the old fashioned way, GPS is a strong temptation to just push through a Laurel Hell. I've given in to it, only to realize that you can spend so much time working around the completely impassable parts and crossing concealed gulleys and streams, that the short cut won't save you any time or bother, even if it's now technically more practical to try.
"Other countries" in this case is Sweden. Maybe Burkina Faso or New Zealand will care a bit about what happens in Sweden, but certainly, Sweden itself will care a lot. The US hasn't done any post earthquake hospital missions to Sweden in quite some time - so this is going to become the sort of thing the citzens judge the US by, with little more positive to offset it.
This starts turning into a definition problem. A matter of semantics.
A mind anything like a human being's runs on a hardware substrate that's built to interact with a physical environment in ways that promote organic survival. A mind that isn't anything like a human mind could run on very differently designed hardware, but then, if it's that different, how do you determine if it's equivalently complex, and ultimately, what justifies calling it a mind at all? People such as Vernor Vinge have speculated about software as sophisticated as a human mind, or more so, yet without self awareness (c. f. A Fire Upon the Deep). Others have speculated about whether such a mind need have self preservation instincts or drives, and if it would be possible to incorporate self preservation at a higher level as a conscious instruction set (ultimately an argument that goes back to Asimov's three laws or further, in its simplest forms).
Rigorously speaking, the whole formulation is logically meaningless. There's no such thing as "on the level of a human mind" but without self awareness, free will (or its illusion if you prefer), or an ego. It's a real stretch to claim there's meaning in "on the level of a human mind" but without a subconscious, or emotions. It's even way too ambiguous for real science to speak of "on the level of a human mind", but without reproductive drives or tiered social modeling.
I'm not claiming that strong AI, all the way up to a Vingean galactic scale super parasite thought virus for one example, isn't possible. What I am claiming is that you could objectively say such a thing was more powerful than a human mind, in that it could destroy a tremendous number of human minds by destroying their related bodies, but you couldn't claim that it was more powerful than a human mind in the mental sense, except in that same trivial sense as claiming a calcuator is more powerful than a human mind because it can do a rote calculation faster. Dr Kurzweil's hypothetical AI mind simulated on 2050's technology is really the same situation - we may well be able to run a simulation of certain parts of the brain that don't entail interacting with objective external reality in the sort of complexity space he is describing, in a mere 10 to 20 years, but how is that like a human mind? Manifesting environmental awareness and self awareness are two of the things that makes a human mind count as powerful or complex, and claiming something else is equivalent and deserves to be called the same thing because it can't do the same things simply doesn't make sense.
Simulation of a human level mind will probably come, but it will run on either specialized hardware of about the same complexity as a brain and nervous/sensory system, or on more generalized hardware built at well above that capacity, and it will probably be further delayed by software evolution until well after such hardware is possible.
What better a way to get the cops to go in and render everyone harmless, than to shoot at some fire fighters?
Since shooting at the first responders may get you shot back at, or get the authorities to issue ammo to the national guard and issue shoot to kill all looters orders, or get the locals wanting to lynch you for causing the responders to delay, and trigger various other responses such as that, are you really sure you want to claim that its the best method?.
Night otLD didn't really explain where its Zombies came from. There's talk about radiation from Venus, and other such possible explanations, but nobody has time in the film to follow up and announce something definitive.
But that's what makes any logical arguments unsettleable. If you know very little about how a whole complex phenomenon works, you can't be sure what its limits are, or what to expect next. If you don't even know if Zombies are a natural or supernatural phenomenon, or if they fit a disease model at all, of course you don't know how the condition is 'transmitted', because you don't even know if it is transmitted, in the way we normally use that word. If Zombies are supernatural, you can't even expect them to work according to the second law of Thermodynamics - name anything at all that you could still predict about anything if it is suddenly allowed to violate the second law at unpredictable intervals and in unpredictable ways. The Romero Dead films are one big Deus Ex Machina. In the end, they boil down to God makes the humans automatically too stupid to figure out what's going on, God arbitrarily does whatever it wants, and God wants certain humans to automatically lose, but some of them not until 90 minutes or so are up. Zombies will have whatever powers and limits God wants at that instant, and God has no longer term plan than freaking the filmgoers out. The whole thing becomes no better than those stories where the surprise ending is "the last two people are named Adam and Eve", or "It Was All A Dream". The first one was a bit better than that, laying down some rules like 'head shots stop them', and keeping the timeframe short enough that a lack of understanding on the human race's part is more plausible, but Romero's choice in the sequels was to break rule after rule until the films lose so much of their remaining grounding all debate about the Zombie problem becomes unsupportable. It could be worse - Return of the Living Dead got there in its first 30 minutes.
So all the big banks that had to be bailed out were the ones subject to the equal opportunity in lending rules Congress passed, right? Oh, wait, no 16 out of 17 of them were investment banks and primary insurance crafters that didn't offer any sub prime loans at all, and couldn't be pressured to offer more because that wasn't any part of their basic business. Blaming the whole debacle on Congress explains Fannie and Freddie, and One private lender out of 17 (It explains those three's problems to some extent, not really nearly all). It may be fair to include it as one contributing factor, but it's like pointing to the kids playing with matches near one house, and not mentioning the guys spreading gasoline all over the whole neighborhood.