Sure, the probability or transit decreases with greater orbital periods
...yes, and with the orbital angle of the planet in question -- out of an entirely rotated set of orbital possibilities, only a few intercept the path to the telescope; and the further out the planet is, the less chance. That's why the close in ones are easy, and the ones in earthlike orbits are not.
and you're kidding yourself about continents or clouds
Briefly, the resolution achievable using interferometry is proportional to the observing frequency and the distance between the antennas farthest apart in the array. In space, the distance between the antennas, the number of antennas, and the size of the antennas are all matters of raw materials, no more. Once we can manufacture *in* space using materials gleaned from asteroids, there's hardly any limit at all to the size of the synthesized aperture.
The only limitation is the usual one - the data is as old as it is distant.
Believe me, pal, we haven't even begun to construct telescopes of the capabilities our current technologies can enable. We're just putting the money in incredibly stupid places. As today, we just stuffed another fifty nine billion dollars down the Pentagon's automated money disposal. Not to mention the 8.7 billion they "lost."
these planets are NOT "all in short, close orbits"
Wrong. Kepler only sees close in earth sized planets, with almost no exceptions. Even though it's looking at the same area over a long time.
The reason for this is that for Kepler to see a transit of an earth sized planet, said planet has to occult the star; which in turn means that the planet's orbit has to lie on a plane defined by us and the target star, within a margin of error defined by the planet's diameter against the cone defined by the star at one end and the telescope at the other, which, with an earth like planet, is damned small.
So the further away an earth sized planet gets from its star, the less likely you are to spot it, even with just the slightest deviation for the orbital plane. The consequence of this is that earth sized planets are spotted close in, and basically nowhere else except against extreme odds. Larger planets are spotted because the orbital plane can be significantly more tilted and still result in occultation.
And, even when you *do* spot the earth sized ones that aren't close-in, you still can't tell much about them. They might be like Venus and boil metals, or they might be like mars and freeze your butt off, or anywhere in between, and even if you could tell *that*, you still wouldn't know if they were supporting life.
So again, we're back to needing an optical telescope that can actually resolve the planets, see clouds, continents, etc. Long baseline, multiple aperture, etc. We should do it ASAP. Just keep firing units up there until we have a huge array over millions of miles. Now that would be a telescope worth having. No single aperture instrument is going to tell us anything really interesting about any planet outside our solar system. All they see are indirect hints.
Why devastation ships? There is a literally infinite number of planets, why devastate the ones that already contain life, it's easier to find an other.
Look around. See any wildcats? Beavers? Wolves? Bears? If you do, you live in a *very* atypical area.
There are very few left. And why? Because they tend to inconvenience humans. So humans kill 'em off. Ruthlessly, and with zero thought to their experience of the matter. No reason to expect an alien race to do us any different, is there?
And consider: We're far more dangerous than any of the above. Nuclear weapons. Bio weapons. Viciously territorial to a fault and beyond. Uncontrolled breeders. We create huge amounts of waste. We have very little care for our environment. We're both technically sophisticated and massively superstitious. We regularly kill our own for reasons ranging from mating to religion to entertainment, so what hope would an alien race have to think they might be exempted?
I'll tell you what, if I was the alien race, I'd wipe us out just as a prophylactic measure, and then use the remains as fertilizer to try and repair the damage we've done.
These planets are all in short, close orbits, so they're not earth like in any sense we'd care about.
What we need is an in-space, long-baseline multi-array so we can *see* planets in other solar systems. Then we'd have some worthwhile data in areas we care about. Do we *really* care if there is a small, boiled-dry word spinning around its sun every three or four days? No. We care if there's something with what we can believe is a habitable environment. For us, or for someone else. And we're not going to learn that by watching for wobbles in stellar output.
If the average life span of an ET is 10,000 years the time necessary for space travel isn't such an impediment any longer.
You're making an awfully big assumption here, that is that the rate of thinking is stretched similarly to the life span. If you somehow magically extended my lifespan to 10000 years, I can't say I'd be ready to spend a thousand of them stuck in a space vehicle. Even a pretty nice one. I don't see why you'd assume any different of an alien species.
I think it's most likely that colonization and visits, etc., will be done by cybernetic devices that are able to switch on and off as required, bringing gifts of information and possibly machines to build infrastructure. We're probably less than a century from being able to make them ourselves.
We only keep molten lead around for Halloween, and even then, we keep it on the balcony where we can pour it handily over the doorstep in response to the doorbell. Is your clique so limited that we don't qualify? Elitist bastard. I'm not even going to tell you about the pools of molten gold, then.
Honestly, I find this "magic" marketing strategy to be a complete turnoff.
No, really, it's magic. Look closely: You see how the trackpad will only work with OS 10.6? Yet it's nothing more than a trackpad, same as the Macbooks have had for years? Brother, it takes magic to make that thing not work with OS 10.5, believe me. It's not a matter of just writing code and realizing, hey, this won't work with an earlier OS... no, it takes sorcery to make that happen. Possibly a pact with the very debbil hisself.
Access to porn on the iPad is unlimited. If you're wifi connected, you have the whole Internet, which is more porn than you can possibly consume. For free. If you're 3G connected, you're a sucker.:)
You can also store movies and stills and stories on the iPad, and they can be as porn-y as you can imagine. Or more so.
All Jobs has done is prevent apps that are themselves porn-y, in his estimation, from getting into the app store. This is such a minor restriction -- and has so little to do with actually restricting you from accessing porn -- that it is very hard to *honestly* consider it a limitation, unless you are a developer making a porn app.
What if you dedicate your life to the acquisition of wealth, and find yourself deliriously happy with all the goodies and the fun you can have with them and your favorite people, not to mention the lack of worries about bills, the complete lack of debt, the steadily increasing nest egg you can leave your offspring, the charities you can choose to enable, the fine home, copious lands, fast cars, motorcycles, snowmobiles, watercraft, yacht, quads, a huge library, your own personal theater, any healthcare you and/or yours need at any time, the ability to travel anywhere, anytime, based on nothing more than current interest, and do so in luxury and style...
What about those poor rich bastards who just can't find a way to be unhappy the way you imagine they should be? Do you send them cards explaining how... disadvantaged... they are?
"Makes sense", my ass. You're just jealous as hell of people with more means than you have. I laugh at your discomfort.:)
I would only point out that a war, once under way, is its own reason for continuing. The amount of funds that flow to special interests -- military suppliers and ancillaries -- as a consequence of an ongoing major conflict is almost incomprehensible. Fuel, ammo, weapons... the list is long and very expensive. Happy special interests mean jobs and security for congresscritters post-elected positions, as well as the usual raft of dinners, jaunts, escorts, club memberships, favors for friends, and so forth. And of course, power is its own reward.
I write, and revise, a *lot* in perl. Also python, C, and others.
I go back to python code a year later, it's blatantly obvious what it's doing.
I go back to perl code a year later, it might as well be sanskrit. It is *loaded* with bullshit like $_, $., $? and similar that are towards the APL end of the scale in absolute opacity; if you use these (and you should), your code will devolve into unreadable crap, because reading it isn't possible... you have to interpret it on the fly, it's simply not human-readable -- you either find it in a collection of utterly arbitrary crap you've memorized or written down, or stare at it in blank amazement, or (if you're smart) refer to wordy-ass comments that duplicate the code, except they're readable. Quick! What's the global variable for the index of the first element in an array, and of the first character in a sub-string? Look! Here's $0, what is it? (it's a file name... but does it include a path?) What platform am I on? It's a fscking mess is what it is.
This is but one type of example, I'm not going to waste my time with an AC trying to explain in the general case, or every specific case, why readability is important; one day you'll figure it out, or you'll remain stunted as a programmer, not my problem either way.
But I will give you an expert tip: if you'd like a language that actually helps you program, learn python, and stay away from perl unless you absolutely must do maintainance.
As for the humor of a site that only allows text posts, but is extremely poor at handling text... even to the point of straight-up HTML and unicode entities... where you can't express things as basic as a trademark symbol or a degree mark... well, if you can't see it, I can't help you. But I can laugh at you. And I am.:)
I don't think we went to Afghanistan for mineral rights b/c we didn't know that mineral rights were worth such a tremendous amount of money until we started the war in 2001
1) future control of resources (mineral) and 2) future control of pipeline routes.
And why didn't we profit in the Sudan
We didn't go there. If you mean, why didn't we go there, the answer is because it would have cost us more than we can see we would gain. If there are new mineral discoveries or petroleum discoveries, this may change. What won't change it is the body count.
Seems like it was also about revenge, political theater ("doing something"), etc..
Well, not really. Those were invoked as excuses, but if you think it through, that's not the case. There were far less expensive, and far more effective, response options in order to "do something" (including those that address the actual problems, Islam, and Saudi Arabia in particular.)
As far as political theater goes, again, we could have spent far less money and made a much greater impact, at a time when the world was very much on our side, with a simple, one-time response (such as turning Mecca into a large crater, either conventionally or with a nuclear weapon.) Personally, that would have been my choice, rather than invading a non-Muslim country (Iraq) and pretending they were a threat, when they were nothing of the kind.
And of course locally, we could have actually solved the aircraft-as-precision-weapon problem by simply isolating the cockpit from the passengers, and that's what we should have done if indeed that were the goal. But it isn't -- control of our own citizens is the goal, and if you look at things in that light, you can see that everything that has been done is aimed just that way.
So if we have any material gain from a war, that excludes any chance at a moral motive too?
No. That's not what I said. I said we only go to war when we have a profit motive. My point was, and remains, that moral issues don't justify or steer what we're doing. Monetary issues do.
We regularly stand by, doing absolutely nothing, while children and women are raped and worse. So I find it quite distasteful when someone tries to justify our presence in, for instance, Afghanistan, under the aegis "we're doing good." We're acting in our own selfish interests, and any good that is done is strictly a sideline.
Remember: We do have the capability to step in; the fact that we don't do so is what sets the measure of our moral fiber as a country. We use our power only for profit. Morally speaking, our government is bankrupt.
If your standard for finding something untrue is that you haven't personally seen it
My standard for finding an extraordinary claim true is multifaceted. First, I look for corroboration. If you tell me the sky is green outside, I will turn to other observers and ask, "what color is the sky outside?" If all the observers report "green", then I have corroboration. In history, this is a key mechanism for validation: historians try very hard to find information from more than one source that agrees on a particular datum. The question of Jesus's existence fails this test horribly, because there is no report of his existence from his time. There are just a few reports of Christians (not of Christ) that date from about 50...100 AD; then everything else is from the bible, which dates from even later -- of the 5000 or so known documents that have been vetted against the bible, we have not one that can be reliably dated to AD 0...100; every one comes from later, or is simply a copy. So the bible itself doesn't bring even the story, much less the observation, into the time when Jesus was supposed to have walked. Corroboration is entirely lacking here.
Next, I look at the quality of the data. The bible, for one, is massively infested with nonsense, as well as contradictions. On the nonsense front, we have all manner of magic; parting of the sea, etc. Now, as magic has, thus far, turned out to be nothing but nonsensical claims, I tend to regard the bible as the same. As Sagan put it, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But there is none. So I tend to doubt the book unless there is corroboration (such as there is for a king here, a land there.)
Finally, I apply Occam's razor: The simplest answer for a ridiculous magical claim is that it is made up. If someone wishes to show me that is not the case, then I require a demonstration.
If anyone could turn water into wine, Jesus would probably be regarded as just another preacher. The fact that we can't, and that no one has been able to reproduce this feat, is evidence that He was God.
Then the fact that superman can fly is evidence he is superman, right? I mean, he's got his own books, the books say he can fly, and therefore there is a superman, right? This is exactly your logic, and it's really pitiful.
I'm curious, by what leap of logic are you able to state something untrue? Can you prove it false? Or is it merely that you can't understand it?
You mistake me. The bible makes extraordinary claims. It is not up to be to prove them untrue. It is up to you, the believer, to prove them true, which in turn will take extraordinary evidence.
By all means, do so. Pray to your God to change the water on my desk to wine. Or, if you like, there's a woman I know with diabetes, extreme weight issues, and mental problems. Have him heal her. I'd notice that, too. Or, I know of an individual who has done great wrong, whom the legal system has mistakenly identified as a "victim." Your God would know exactly of whom and what I speak; pray to him to turn that person into a pillar of salt. So there you go. I will come *directly* back to you if any of those things comes to pass.
If we stopped believing any source that couldn't prove itself, we'd have no history at all.
History is not made up of reports from the past, taken at face value. If you think it is, you don't understand what historians do. History is also not an equally weighted tapestry, where every event is known to the same degree of certainty. There are reported events we simply don't believe; there are events we think may be true, but lack corroboration; there are events that are highly corroborated and for which we entertain little doubt -- and there are events all along a similar spectrum.
Your claim -- that we would have no history -- is complet
What the hell are they so busy doing? Clearly not editing article submissions.
It is a careful balance between collecting ad revenue and ignoring the shortcomings of the moderation mechanism.
Only the most modern of management techniques have been used to arrive at this complex and deeply nuanced operating strategy; only here, at the heart of the technical community, can we find an implementation that so perfectly reflects (in the sense of reflection about the opposite axis) the technical nature of its users.
Left out sarcastic end sentence as Slashdot doesn't display the U0161 character."
Slashdot is written in Perl, a language that tends to self-obfuscate within minutes of having been written. Consequently, updating the code base for trivial things like correct display of posted text is highly problematic. Also, even if the Perl implementation was written in non-standard (that is, comprehensible) fashion, to quote Rob Malda in a recent letter to me, "Unfortunately there really isn't any engineering time available to make any changes these days"
It's not futile any longer. Today, nuclear weapons enable (a) killing everyone, (b) destroying the infrastructure, (c) poisoning the land, (d) all at extremely low financial cost as compared to even a minor invasion. For a few million dollars, we can clear out hundreds of square miles (air burst of 25-to-350 kt dial-a-yield cruise missiles at the high end.) It costs more than that to even put a smallish special-ops group boots-on-ground.
The fact that it hasn't been done points you to the real reason we make war: For profit. It is far more beneficial to pump a huge military-industrial complex in the undertaking of a half-hearted "occupation" of a nation with valuable strategic resources (oil, minerals, etc.), plus it retains access to the resources, than it is to actually win and get it over with. So we don't even try. We just prime and re-prime the war pump until the public won't have it any longer, then we start a new war.
The fact is, if we wanted to win in Afghanistan today, and that were the only criteria -- we would have won by tomorrow. Ergo, that's not why we are there, or even primarily why we are there. Follow the money. Works every time.
Actually they did. At the very least they are of the opinion that violence against people who stone women and rape children is not allowed.
The thing is, that's not what is going on. If that were the goal, the US would be at war simultaneously with many African and Middle Eastern countries. But we're not. We're at war only where we have current or potential future strategic interests - oil, mineral resources, etc.
In every case, you will see that we go to war where it benefits us financially. Even war itself has been tuned to benefit us financially -- just look at how our government allots funds. We have built a huge military-industrial complex that depends on continuing conflict, and coincidentally, we are continuously involved in conflict that keeps those funds flowing.
The naive -- like you -- are easily deceived by tales of what the bad guys do in places like Afghanistan; but these things are done just as enthusiastically (or more so) in countries with no strategic value to us, and we roundly ignore them at the government level. Sudan, for instance, has recently engaged in wholesale internal violence of a nature completely unknown in Afghanistan. And we, the USA, the "world's policeman", did what? Not a damned thing. Why? Simple: Sudan has minimal strategic value to us.
Follow the money. It's that simple. It's been that simple for many decades. All talk of "child rape" is cover designed to satisfy the majority of citizens, who pay very little attention to anything but the surface issues they are presented with.
In America, we have passed laws that list people for the rest of their lives as felons, creating a permanent underclass that can only aspire to the very lowest forms of employment. Even then, they are accepted only if they are unopposed by higher class citizens. These people completely lose the ability to participate in the vast majority of attempts to better themselves.
These listings directly affect not only employment opportunities, but also credit scores, insurance rates, privacy (in many ways) and where people are allowed to live.
This society is learning how to use memory and identification together as the broadest, most effective cudgel possible. We have wholly abandoned the idea of rehabilitation in favor of retribution.
We are well into the process of hardcore stratification; worries about what might end up on a myspace page are part and parcel of the classing-is-good attitude that our society has assumed.
Because our society almost never revisits law, this situation is unlikely to reverse under almost any imaginable circumstance. Our citizens (and so our politicians) are pathologically unable to generalize in the way that our founders did, and so are perfectly willing to abandon any liberty or degree of freedom for any hint of safety, or what they perceive as safety, but isn't -- and that includes creating a hopeless underclass that lives under bridges.
Fine... and you'd still have been writing about someone you'd never met, about whose existence -- and magical acts, and birth, and resurrection -- you didn't witness, and which were of little import to you because there were very few Christians, and you weren't one of them (one of the reasons scholars doubt his remarks about Christ... they resonate as if written by a Christian, and use forms of language found nowhere else in his writing.)
Slashdot Mirror
No, sir, I am not.
Briefly, the resolution achievable using interferometry is proportional to the observing frequency and the distance between the antennas farthest apart in the array. In space, the distance between the antennas, the number of antennas, and the size of the antennas are all matters of raw materials, no more. Once we can manufacture *in* space using materials gleaned from asteroids, there's hardly any limit at all to the size of the synthesized aperture.
The only limitation is the usual one - the data is as old as it is distant.
Believe me, pal, we haven't even begun to construct telescopes of the capabilities our current technologies can enable. We're just putting the money in incredibly stupid places. As today, we just stuffed another fifty nine billion dollars down the Pentagon's automated money disposal. Not to mention the 8.7 billion they "lost."
Wrong. Kepler only sees close in earth sized planets, with almost no exceptions. Even though it's looking at the same area over a long time.
The reason for this is that for Kepler to see a transit of an earth sized planet, said planet has to occult the star; which in turn means that the planet's orbit has to lie on a plane defined by us and the target star, within a margin of error defined by the planet's diameter against the cone defined by the star at one end and the telescope at the other, which, with an earth like planet, is damned small.
So the further away an earth sized planet gets from its star, the less likely you are to spot it, even with just the slightest deviation for the orbital plane. The consequence of this is that earth sized planets are spotted close in, and basically nowhere else except against extreme odds. Larger planets are spotted because the orbital plane can be significantly more tilted and still result in occultation.
And, even when you *do* spot the earth sized ones that aren't close-in, you still can't tell much about them. They might be like Venus and boil metals, or they might be like mars and freeze your butt off, or anywhere in between, and even if you could tell *that*, you still wouldn't know if they were supporting life.
So again, we're back to needing an optical telescope that can actually resolve the planets, see clouds, continents, etc. Long baseline, multiple aperture, etc. We should do it ASAP. Just keep firing units up there until we have a huge array over millions of miles. Now that would be a telescope worth having. No single aperture instrument is going to tell us anything really interesting about any planet outside our solar system. All they see are indirect hints.
Look around. See any wildcats? Beavers? Wolves? Bears? If you do, you live in a *very* atypical area.
There are very few left. And why? Because they tend to inconvenience humans. So humans kill 'em off. Ruthlessly, and with zero thought to their experience of the matter. No reason to expect an alien race to do us any different, is there?
And consider: We're far more dangerous than any of the above. Nuclear weapons. Bio weapons. Viciously territorial to a fault and beyond. Uncontrolled breeders. We create huge amounts of waste. We have very little care for our environment. We're both technically sophisticated and massively superstitious. We regularly kill our own for reasons ranging from mating to religion to entertainment, so what hope would an alien race have to think they might be exempted?
I'll tell you what, if I was the alien race, I'd wipe us out just as a prophylactic measure, and then use the remains as fertilizer to try and repair the damage we've done.
These planets are all in short, close orbits, so they're not earth like in any sense we'd care about.
What we need is an in-space, long-baseline multi-array so we can *see* planets in other solar systems. Then we'd have some worthwhile data in areas we care about. Do we *really* care if there is a small, boiled-dry word spinning around its sun every three or four days? No. We care if there's something with what we can believe is a habitable environment. For us, or for someone else. And we're not going to learn that by watching for wobbles in stellar output.
You're making an awfully big assumption here, that is that the rate of thinking is stretched similarly to the life span. If you somehow magically extended my lifespan to 10000 years, I can't say I'd be ready to spend a thousand of them stuck in a space vehicle. Even a pretty nice one. I don't see why you'd assume any different of an alien species.
I think it's most likely that colonization and visits, etc., will be done by cybernetic devices that are able to switch on and off as required, bringing gifts of information and possibly machines to build infrastructure. We're probably less than a century from being able to make them ourselves.
We only keep molten lead around for Halloween, and even then, we keep it on the balcony where we can pour it handily over the doorstep in response to the doorbell. Is your clique so limited that we don't qualify? Elitist bastard. I'm not even going to tell you about the pools of molten gold, then.
No, really, it's magic. Look closely: You see how the trackpad will only work with OS 10.6? Yet it's nothing more than a trackpad, same as the Macbooks have had for years? Brother, it takes magic to make that thing not work with OS 10.5, believe me. It's not a matter of just writing code and realizing, hey, this won't work with an earlier OS... no, it takes sorcery to make that happen. Possibly a pact with the very debbil hisself.
Access to porn on the iPad is unlimited. If you're wifi connected, you have the whole Internet, which is more porn than you can possibly consume. For free. If you're 3G connected, you're a sucker. :)
You can also store movies and stills and stories on the iPad, and they can be as porn-y as you can imagine. Or more so.
All Jobs has done is prevent apps that are themselves porn-y, in his estimation, from getting into the app store. This is such a minor restriction -- and has so little to do with actually restricting you from accessing porn -- that it is very hard to *honestly* consider it a limitation, unless you are a developer making a porn app.
What if you dedicate your life to the acquisition of wealth, and find yourself deliriously happy with all the goodies and the fun you can have with them and your favorite people, not to mention the lack of worries about bills, the complete lack of debt, the steadily increasing nest egg you can leave your offspring, the charities you can choose to enable, the fine home, copious lands, fast cars, motorcycles, snowmobiles, watercraft, yacht, quads, a huge library, your own personal theater, any healthcare you and/or yours need at any time, the ability to travel anywhere, anytime, based on nothing more than current interest, and do so in luxury and style...
What about those poor rich bastards who just can't find a way to be unhappy the way you imagine they should be? Do you send them cards explaining how... disadvantaged... they are?
"Makes sense", my ass. You're just jealous as hell of people with more means than you have. I laugh at your discomfort. :)
I would only point out that a war, once under way, is its own reason for continuing. The amount of funds that flow to special interests -- military suppliers and ancillaries -- as a consequence of an ongoing major conflict is almost incomprehensible. Fuel, ammo, weapons... the list is long and very expensive. Happy special interests mean jobs and security for congresscritters post-elected positions, as well as the usual raft of dinners, jaunts, escorts, club memberships, favors for friends, and so forth. And of course, power is its own reward.
I write, and revise, a *lot* in perl. Also python, C, and others.
I go back to python code a year later, it's blatantly obvious what it's doing.
I go back to perl code a year later, it might as well be sanskrit. It is *loaded* with bullshit like $_, $., $? and similar that are towards the APL end of the scale in absolute opacity; if you use these (and you should), your code will devolve into unreadable crap, because reading it isn't possible... you have to interpret it on the fly, it's simply not human-readable -- you either find it in a collection of utterly arbitrary crap you've memorized or written down, or stare at it in blank amazement, or (if you're smart) refer to wordy-ass comments that duplicate the code, except they're readable. Quick! What's the global variable for the index of the first element in an array, and of the first character in a sub-string? Look! Here's $0, what is it? (it's a file name... but does it include a path?) What platform am I on? It's a fscking mess is what it is.
This is but one type of example, I'm not going to waste my time with an AC trying to explain in the general case, or every specific case, why readability is important; one day you'll figure it out, or you'll remain stunted as a programmer, not my problem either way.
But I will give you an expert tip: if you'd like a language that actually helps you program, learn python, and stay away from perl unless you absolutely must do maintainance.
As for the humor of a site that only allows text posts, but is extremely poor at handling text... even to the point of straight-up HTML and unicode entities... where you can't express things as basic as a trademark symbol or a degree mark... well, if you can't see it, I can't help you. But I can laugh at you. And I am. :)
No, actually, we did know.
If one can send seed ships to populate, one can send seed ships to devastate.
1) future control of resources (mineral) and 2) future control of pipeline routes.
We didn't go there. If you mean, why didn't we go there, the answer is because it would have cost us more than we can see we would gain. If there are new mineral discoveries or petroleum discoveries, this may change. What won't change it is the body count.
Well, not really. Those were invoked as excuses, but if you think it through, that's not the case. There were far less expensive, and far more effective, response options in order to "do something" (including those that address the actual problems, Islam, and Saudi Arabia in particular.)
As far as political theater goes, again, we could have spent far less money and made a much greater impact, at a time when the world was very much on our side, with a simple, one-time response (such as turning Mecca into a large crater, either conventionally or with a nuclear weapon.) Personally, that would have been my choice, rather than invading a non-Muslim country (Iraq) and pretending they were a threat, when they were nothing of the kind.
And of course locally, we could have actually solved the aircraft-as-precision-weapon problem by simply isolating the cockpit from the passengers, and that's what we should have done if indeed that were the goal. But it isn't -- control of our own citizens is the goal, and if you look at things in that light, you can see that everything that has been done is aimed just that way.
No. That's not what I said. I said we only go to war when we have a profit motive. My point was, and remains, that moral issues don't justify or steer what we're doing. Monetary issues do.
We regularly stand by, doing absolutely nothing, while children and women are raped and worse. So I find it quite distasteful when someone tries to justify our presence in, for instance, Afghanistan, under the aegis "we're doing good." We're acting in our own selfish interests, and any good that is done is strictly a sideline.
Remember: We do have the capability to step in; the fact that we don't do so is what sets the measure of our moral fiber as a country. We use our power only for profit. Morally speaking, our government is bankrupt.
My standard for finding an extraordinary claim true is multifaceted. First, I look for corroboration. If you tell me the sky is green outside, I will turn to other observers and ask, "what color is the sky outside?" If all the observers report "green", then I have corroboration. In history, this is a key mechanism for validation: historians try very hard to find information from more than one source that agrees on a particular datum. The question of Jesus's existence fails this test horribly, because there is no report of his existence from his time. There are just a few reports of Christians (not of Christ) that date from about 50...100 AD; then everything else is from the bible, which dates from even later -- of the 5000 or so known documents that have been vetted against the bible, we have not one that can be reliably dated to AD 0...100; every one comes from later, or is simply a copy. So the bible itself doesn't bring even the story, much less the observation, into the time when Jesus was supposed to have walked. Corroboration is entirely lacking here.
Next, I look at the quality of the data. The bible, for one, is massively infested with nonsense, as well as contradictions. On the nonsense front, we have all manner of magic; parting of the sea, etc. Now, as magic has, thus far, turned out to be nothing but nonsensical claims, I tend to regard the bible as the same. As Sagan put it, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But there is none. So I tend to doubt the book unless there is corroboration (such as there is for a king here, a land there.)
Finally, I apply Occam's razor: The simplest answer for a ridiculous magical claim is that it is made up. If someone wishes to show me that is not the case, then I require a demonstration.
Then the fact that superman can fly is evidence he is superman, right? I mean, he's got his own books, the books say he can fly, and therefore there is a superman, right? This is exactly your logic, and it's really pitiful.
You mistake me. The bible makes extraordinary claims. It is not up to be to prove them untrue. It is up to you, the believer, to prove them true, which in turn will take extraordinary evidence.
By all means, do so. Pray to your God to change the water on my desk to wine. Or, if you like, there's a woman I know with diabetes, extreme weight issues, and mental problems. Have him heal her. I'd notice that, too. Or, I know of an individual who has done great wrong, whom the legal system has mistakenly identified as a "victim." Your God would know exactly of whom and what I speak; pray to him to turn that person into a pillar of salt. So there you go. I will come *directly* back to you if any of those things comes to pass.
History is not made up of reports from the past, taken at face value. If you think it is, you don't understand what historians do. History is also not an equally weighted tapestry, where every event is known to the same degree of certainty. There are reported events we simply don't believe; there are events we think may be true, but lack corroboration; there are events that are highly corroborated and for which we entertain little doubt -- and there are events all along a similar spectrum.
Your claim -- that we would have no history -- is complet
Zero post!!! +1 Anonymous, -1 Cowardly!
It is a careful balance between collecting ad revenue and ignoring the shortcomings of the moderation mechanism.
Only the most modern of management techniques have been used to arrive at this complex and deeply nuanced operating strategy; only here, at the heart of the technical community, can we find an implementation that so perfectly reflects (in the sense of reflection about the opposite axis) the technical nature of its users.
Slashdot is written in Perl, a language that tends to self-obfuscate within minutes of having been written. Consequently, updating the code base for trivial things like correct display of posted text is highly problematic. Also, even if the Perl implementation was written in non-standard (that is, comprehensible) fashion, to quote Rob Malda in a recent letter to me, "Unfortunately there really isn't any engineering time available to make any changes these days"
Creation answers "tell me a made-up story, daddy."
There is no answer for "Why?" in the context of all reality, nor is there any practical need for such an answer.
The misconception that there needs to be such an answer is the foundation of a great deal of stupidity.
It's not futile any longer. Today, nuclear weapons enable (a) killing everyone, (b) destroying the infrastructure, (c) poisoning the land, (d) all at extremely low financial cost as compared to even a minor invasion. For a few million dollars, we can clear out hundreds of square miles (air burst of 25-to-350 kt dial-a-yield cruise missiles at the high end.) It costs more than that to even put a smallish special-ops group boots-on-ground.
The fact that it hasn't been done points you to the real reason we make war: For profit. It is far more beneficial to pump a huge military-industrial complex in the undertaking of a half-hearted "occupation" of a nation with valuable strategic resources (oil, minerals, etc.), plus it retains access to the resources, than it is to actually win and get it over with. So we don't even try. We just prime and re-prime the war pump until the public won't have it any longer, then we start a new war.
The fact is, if we wanted to win in Afghanistan today, and that were the only criteria -- we would have won by tomorrow. Ergo, that's not why we are there, or even primarily why we are there. Follow the money. Works every time.
The thing is, that's not what is going on. If that were the goal, the US would be at war simultaneously with many African and Middle Eastern countries. But we're not. We're at war only where we have current or potential future strategic interests - oil, mineral resources, etc.
In every case, you will see that we go to war where it benefits us financially. Even war itself has been tuned to benefit us financially -- just look at how our government allots funds. We have built a huge military-industrial complex that depends on continuing conflict, and coincidentally, we are continuously involved in conflict that keeps those funds flowing.
The naive -- like you -- are easily deceived by tales of what the bad guys do in places like Afghanistan; but these things are done just as enthusiastically (or more so) in countries with no strategic value to us, and we roundly ignore them at the government level. Sudan, for instance, has recently engaged in wholesale internal violence of a nature completely unknown in Afghanistan. And we, the USA, the "world's policeman", did what? Not a damned thing. Why? Simple: Sudan has minimal strategic value to us.
Follow the money. It's that simple. It's been that simple for many decades. All talk of "child rape" is cover designed to satisfy the majority of citizens, who pay very little attention to anything but the surface issues they are presented with.
In America, we have passed laws that list people for the rest of their lives as felons, creating a permanent underclass that can only aspire to the very lowest forms of employment. Even then, they are accepted only if they are unopposed by higher class citizens. These people completely lose the ability to participate in the vast majority of attempts to better themselves.
These listings directly affect not only employment opportunities, but also credit scores, insurance rates, privacy (in many ways) and where people are allowed to live.
This society is learning how to use memory and identification together as the broadest, most effective cudgel possible. We have wholly abandoned the idea of rehabilitation in favor of retribution.
We are well into the process of hardcore stratification; worries about what might end up on a myspace page are part and parcel of the classing-is-good attitude that our society has assumed.
Because our society almost never revisits law, this situation is unlikely to reverse under almost any imaginable circumstance. Our citizens (and so our politicians) are pathologically unable to generalize in the way that our founders did, and so are perfectly willing to abandon any liberty or degree of freedom for any hint of safety, or what they perceive as safety, but isn't -- and that includes creating a hopeless underclass that lives under bridges.
Fine... and you'd still have been writing about someone you'd never met, about whose existence -- and magical acts, and birth, and resurrection -- you didn't witness, and which were of little import to you because there were very few Christians, and you weren't one of them (one of the reasons scholars doubt his remarks about Christ... they resonate as if written by a Christian, and use forms of language found nowhere else in his writing.)