The problem comes in when you try and take a generality (valid or no) and start to apply it to specific individuals. There's usually enough variation individual to individual to counteract the genralities, because the magnitude of the generalities tends to be small.
Let's accept your premise that Etheopians, in general, run faster than Europeans (by which I take you mean that blacks run faster than whites) Yes, this may not be true at all yadda yadda (I'm with you there - we just need a postulate to discuss and this is nice and harmless.)
So after a huge study with lots and lots of checks and balances and tons of attention to correcting all mitigating factors, we determine that, on average, blacks run faster than whites.
Now its time for the Olympics. Should white runners be given a head start? For that matter, does it make any sense (given that nationality and ethnicity are almost never completely linked anymore) for any country to even field a white runner, given that (using this example, not necassarily true in real life etc) blacks run faster than whites?
Well, Olympic runners are the cream of their crop. Whatever genetics affect their particular metier, they came out on the high side (most likely) so it is entirely possible that a given white runner has genetics the equal or maybe even superior to his black counterparts. There's enough variation within populations to counteract the trend of the general population.
For a more real-world example, black people tend to be taller than asian people (at least in my experience - I wonder if there is any hard data on this) But if we assume that is true, that doesn't preclude the existance of short black people (Gary Coleman) or tall asian people (that chinese basketball player - Yao Ming)
Height at least we can see and measure objectively. But as soon as we start talking intangibles "who can run faster" or "who is more intelligent" applying generalities (which might be true in some sense) to individuals (where they almost certainly are untrue) opens up the very real possibility of unfairly punishing (or rewarding) an individual, for the supposed shortcomings or advantages of his genetic group.
It is further complicated by the fact that "nature" isn't the whole story; that "nurture" plays an equal or greater part in the ultimate performance of an individual than his or her genes. "Talent" is a very, very small predictor of success.
which discusses exactly this. Plus I have some real-life experience.
The biggest problem is that, independant of what point you wish to argue (group X is abnormally intelligent, group Y is sub-par) it's so bloody hard (if not well-nigh impossible) to actually measure intelligence. Even something as simple as measuring brain size turns out to be fraught with difficulties.
But IQ tests in particular suffer from no end of problems, especially on the lower end of the scale. Did person X score low because they lack intelligence, or because they lack education (not the same thing) or because of other factors.
I went to a Canadian Military College, which had very high standards of admission. Part of the admissions process was an IQ test of sorts (I don't know if it attempted to generate a classic IQ number, but the questions on it were of the classic "IQ" type)
As you can imagine, given that 1) I didn't know how much weight this test had on my admission and 2) my whole future depended on getting admitted, taking this test was pretty stressful. I did not do well at all, came close to panic several times during the test, and didn't come close to finishing.
Happily, I was admitted after all. About a month or two after arriving, we were given the test again. (The local psych department LOVED to give us tests; we were a population tailor-made for testing all sorts of theories) This time, we were told that we were being retested as a way of checking the validity of the test.
Well after two months of military boot camp, my stress tolerence was much higher. Furthermore, I knew that the results of the test would have no impact on my career. And taking the test was a lot more relaxing than marching around the parade square.
End result? I aced it. Finished with time to spare. No problem at all. And my peers all reported the same thing.
Now one could look at the "before" and "after" scores on this test, and conclude that military boot camp raised intelligence, often spectacularly. And you'd be wrong. I and my peers didn't get more intelligent; we got better at handling the stress associated with the test.
I have serious doubts that intelligence can ever be successfully measured in a rigourous, scientific manner - and that means ANY theory of genetic intelligence, be it high or low, pro or con, can ever be proven out.
It looks like it's sold out through until 2006. Playing with an online ticket broker (me an' the missus have been toying with the idea of a trip out to New Yawk to see it) the earliest show I could find open was Jan 06 2006.
Prices seem to run $120-$250 depending on seats. What is the going scalped price?
Niner downloaded (from iTunes, piss off) the soundtrack, and the new material rocks. I just about fell out of my chair at "We'll Never Succeed on Broadway".
I wonder if the original cast will make it to Toronto....
Yes, actually I do - look in any history textbook that discusses American foreign policy around the end of WW2.
Patton in particular was VERY keen to go after the Russians immediately after WW2 - the men and materiel for war was already on the ground, and the Russians (so he thought) were exhausted.
And don't forget that the 50's was the time of the "great Red scare", senator McCarthy and friends.
If you imagine a world where Russia did not get the bomb right away, and where Patton was not killed in a car accident immediately after the war (and so was able to keep up pressure to go after the Russians) it's entirely possible - I won't go so far as "probable" - that the US would have invaded Russia.
I certainly know this - I got to read a lot of US policy and nuclear strategy white papers during the cold war. The US think tanks were working HARD to come up with a way to circumvent MAD; a way to employ nuclear weapons in a limited, "tactical" way, without triggering the MAD schenario. To me, it always looked like they were trying to find a way to make a "safe" first strike, and I know a lot of Russian generals got the same impression. I saw Reagan's "Star Wars" initiative as an *offensive* weapon, not a defensive one.
I honestly don't know if this reflected an American desire to be able to attack the Soviet Union specifically, if they were just wargaming out in public (which was stupid because of the diplomatic damage it did) or if it just rankled that they had all this weaponry and couldn't use it and they were looking for a way (on general principles, not for specific operations) to be able to, at least on paper, execute a first strike without triggering MAD.
As far as "psuedo-deterrant" goes, I don't agree. If you have operational nuclear weapons and a functional delivery system, that's a POWERFUL deterrent against a conventional force. The use of nuclear weapons against conventional forces has been a keystone of NATO policy since inception (to the point where I still remember the list of the 21 things you were supposed to do upon reciveing warning of an incoming FRIENDLY nuke strike - and the radio codename for an incipient stike is still jammed in my memory as well.
If Iran or North Korea had a credible nuclear force, they'd be pretty much immune from Iraq-style invasion. And I think they know it.
I agree that I don't think that either one of these states is crazy enough to attempt a nuclear first strike. They might bluster a lot (especially North Korea) but I don't think, especially given their limited stratigic range and (even more so) accuracy, having nukes doesn't give them much of an offensive lever at all. But defensive is another story. If the US pushed into North Korea, I'd expect to see nuclear strikes on the troop formations almost immediately - after all, that was NATO's plan as well.
It occurs to me that there may be a large percentage of Slashdot readers to whom nuclear war may not have the... relevance it did for my generation.
I guess I'm getting old....
Oddly enough, it turns out that nuclear weapons are a profoundly *stabilizing* influence on the countries that have them, if their immediate neighbours (and "neighbor" is defined by the reach of the delivery system, not so much geographic proximity)
The strategy is called "Mutually Assured Destruction" and boils down to this: if you nuke me, I'll nuke you, and enough of my weapons and delivery systems will survive such that I can ensure the complete destruction of your country, even if you achieve complete suprise"
Ever wonder why there are nuclear bombers, missiles, and submarines? That's the "nuclear triad" - you might take out any two of the legs, but the third will survive, and each carries enough destrctive power on its own to see MAD through, if required.
MAD ensures that there is no way to carry out a nuclear first strike without yourself being utterly immolated in the process. Any attack is thus an act of suicide.
This is so crazy that it works. It has kept the nuclear genie firmly imprisoned in its bottle since 1945, and I think that the threat of potential escelation of non-nuclear conflict amongst nuclear-armed nations to nuclear exchange has drastically limited the scope and intensity of wars since.
It hasn't been a perfect ride (Vietnam in particular was a mess largely created through one nuclear power misunderstanding the motives of another - see the documentary "Fog of War" for more on this) but consider the death tolls due to war from 1900-1945 to the same from 1946-2005. Not even close.
I predict, for example, that if the Soviet Union had not gotten nuclear weapons as quickly as they did, that there was a nontrivial probability that the US would have attacked the Soviet Union in the '50s. Both potential combatants having nuclear weapons almost certainly avoided another ground war in Europe.
Which brings us to the case of Iran and North Korea.
When more states gain access to nuclear weapons, that increases the probability that these weapons may actually get used; that is true. When these weapons are in the hands of leaders who may not be entirely stable (North Korea in particular) the situation becomes even more troublesome.
But consider this - I doubt that either state sees nukes as an offensive weapon. They know full well that any use of a nuke will almost certainly result in the obliteration of their own country. It is unlikely that either nation is that suicidal.
Instead, having nukes gives them the deterrant against invasion. Both states have the example of Iraq in front of them. If the US chose to invade conventionally, neither nation is likely to be able to stand for long. If, however, they have nukes, then they can do enough damage in a short enough time that perhaps they can make invasion too costly to consider; a deterrent.
The US, of course, opposes this, because they are the ones being deterred. A North Korea or Iran with nukes may be immunne from invasion (where now they are merely resistant) and the US would likely prefer to retain its freedom to invade if it felt it were to become necessary.
So while I'm opposed to the idea of more countries getting access to nukes, on the principle that that increases the number of people who could potentially use them, I am forced to admit that stability might *increase* if more countries were capable of utilizing nuclear force.
I ran a major Netscape Directory server installation at a major US automaker. As far as I know, it's still running there. Started at 3.0, and was on 5.x when I left.
Netscape's internal replication did indeed suck for a while, where the biggest failure was the inability to emancipate a slave directory and make it a master if the master puked.
I got around that through the brilliantly elegant feature that Netscape had the OpenLDAP did not - the replication ChangeLog was availible via LDAP. I actually wrote a program called replicator.pl - that's right, in PERL! - that handled all our replication and made multi-master happen. Later on, when we bought this upstart young German automaker, that program did real-time replication with real-time schema translation between their directory inrastructure and ours.
An early version of that program is availible online - it was GPLed - and I have the code for the most up-to-date version if anybody wants it.
Later on, the internal Netscape->Netscape replication got solid enough to the point where it could be relied on, and replicator.pl was phased out except for where schema translation was required.
As for the plugin interface, we actually wound up using this. I'm not going to say what for... but it had to do with the way a certain bit of very important information from the mainframe systems got tied into the directory. We had a "oh shit!" moment, I dove into the plugin documentation, and less than an hour later we had a working solution that solved the problem COLD. Saved our collective asses. You might think it horrible, but it solved the problem.
And as far as speed goes, Netscape handled everything we threw at it. Where eDirectory would just give up and cry, Netscape would go blasting through serving data. It was an awesome bit of work. The Java console sucked, but the server itself was awesome, and Netscape's support was pretty good.
Now I wanted to try OpenLDAP, but the configuration and installation was a PITA, it didn't support Netscape's ACL syntax, nor would it support ACL updates over LDAP, the replication changelog wasn't availible over LDAP, and whenever I breached these subjects on the OpenLDAP lists, all I ever got was aggressive and nasty grief. People tellling me how what I wanted OpenLDAP to do was stupid.
Whatever. Good on RedHat. I fully expect those speed improvements will migrate into Netscape's server (God Bless the GPL!) and then the world will have speed, ease of use, and hopefully, a more polite developer base all rolled into one place.
I ran the Corporate Directory for a major US automaker for a number of years.
We used Netscape's Directory Server. There were hundreds of apps pointing at it, and the main Internet proxy server used it as the authentication service.
Over a million objects, hundreds of thousands of searches per day. It might crash once or twice per year, and never corrupted anything.
The management GUI sucked, but it was an outstanding product in all other respects.
That might have been true once upon a time, but the phishers are getting VERY good at hiding their phish.
I've seen a PayPal phish that was very sophisticated, doing things like putting bogus info into the URL bar, duplicating the layout of PayPal's site EXACTLY... it turned out to be very difficult to spot the smoking gun - I had to go look at the raw HTML to find it.
Had I not been as paranoid as I am, it could have easily suckered me.
Read the article, and follow some of the links to the actual attacks. It's amazing how good they are. (It's equally amazing that a web browser would do anything on link mouseover EXCEPT show the real target of a link!)
Yes, there are plenty of stupid people - some people actually buy products from spam, or send money to Nigeria, etc etc. But the quality of the phishers is getting so good that it is hard to tell (in some cases) what is valid or what is not.
My read is that Linus thinks that it might be a problem, but isn't convinced of the real-world seriousness of the problem - yet.
If you're going to claim that the sky is falling, you'd better bring evidence - like a reproduceable exploit. If you have one of those, you'll get the attention the problem deserves. And if you can't... then a problem that isn't a problem isn't a problem, isn't it?
See, you made my point. If you Picard-lovers weren't so busy having those staff meetings and finding out how every junior officer *felt* about each potential course of action, then you wouldn't be engaging the enemy at *close* range.
You would have, like Kirk, figured out that they were the enemy, made the immediate decision to engage NOW, and engaged at LONG range.
I'm telling you that *I*, trained in combat pistol shooting, which emphasized speed over almost all else, could not reliably shoot to wound in all but the most artificial of circumstances.
A novice with a pistol is not going to be any better than that. If they *try* to shoot to wound, they will most likely miss - with the end result being either a clean miss if they miss outboard, or a lethal body hit if they miss inboard.
Two novices with pistols who encounter each other will blaze away at each other and have a high miss rate (you see this all the time in security camara videos) It's not uncommon for novices - even trained police officers, for that matter - to empty a pistol without scoring a hit, especially at longer ranges.
If they do hit, they have a good chance of it being lethal, because it is the nature of guns to be lethal. You cannot "pull" a bullet. You cannot shoot someone "softly". You either hit him or you don't, and the amount of lethal area is a good proportion of the total area.
Novice vs expert, the expert will put a couple of rounds centre of mass, and the novice will go down.
Novice pistol vs novice sword, my money is on the pistol. A novice with a sword is more of a danger to himself than anybody else, because it is the nature of swords to require skill to use effectively. The swordman is in great danger though, because the pistol shooter is highly unlikely to have enough control to be able to effectively shoot to wound, given that even experts find that very difficult to pull off.
Novice pistol vs expert sword raises the odds of success for the swordsman, but probably not enough to tip the balance, unless the range is VERY close and the swordsman VERY good. Woe to the mugger who suprises an Iado expert wearing his sword at close range!
Finally, pistol/blaster vs Jedi (and keep in mind please that the Jedi are FICTIONAL) The Jedi is by definition a supreme swordsman, such that he is actually capable of deflecting bullets with his sword, and one assumes undestands the likely result of cutting up the opponant's weapon mid-swing. With that extreme level of skill, the Jedi now has a defense against the gun (where another gunner has no defense save to hit first and hard) and thus has the ability to choose a more nonlethal response if he deems it appropriate.
OK, if you have a gun, and I have a sword, and we assume the aha! scenario where we bump into each other at 10-25m, then I'm in deep poodoo. My *only* chance is to try and rapidly close the distance and get inside your gun hand before you can get on line and start firing.
That's low percentage if you have any sort of draw at all. Just for grins, I tried this out - I have an air pistol that can be fired indoors, safely, and that does a pretty good job of simulating a Browning Hi-Power in all but the need to rack the slide. If we assume a round up the spout, the hammer forward, and the safety on, I was able to get a round centre of mass on a man-sized target at 10m from a cold draw in about a second.
Not bad for an old man of 35:) But at that kind of speed, there's no time for selectively wounding. Gun comes up on the sight line, the sights hit the centre of the target and the weapon fires.
There's no time for much more than reflex, because the target is closing quickly, and if he gets withing lunge distance, you're hosed. It's hard to parry well with a pistol.... not more than once, anyway.
Someone less practiced will be slower, but could probably still be counted on to get at least one round off before the distance was closed. And that round is going to be centre of mass, and taking a hit centre of mass is likely to be lethal.
Keep in mind we're talking about fairly low-power handgun rounds here too. Step it up to rifle or assault weapon calibres, and the damage gets MUCH worse. A 5.56 NATO round hits very, very hard out to about 600m. At 25m, its practically a cannon. A shot to a leg is liable to take the leg off. A centre of mass shot will have a little teeny entry hole, and a great big honkin' exit hole. You would be hard pressed to just "wound" even a willing target.
The downside to a rifle is that it takes longer to sweep the same arc as a pisol, and the muzzle is farther away from the body, meaning that the arc a swordsman needs to get inside is longer, meaning he has a bit better chance.
Anyway, try this one on - we both have pistols. You have yours out; mine is holstered. We encounter each other AHA! and you have a second in which to act before I shoot you.
You ain't shooting the gun out of my hand there Tex, so pretty much the only nonlethal shot left open to you is leg or hip. Let's say you get that shot off. If you miss, you die, because I'm shooting centre of mass because I ain't letting you get off a follow-up shot. If you hit, I'm going down, but I have a decent chance of still hitting you as I fall over, and if we assume no freak accidents like me banging my head on the way down, *I can still shoot at you while I'm down*
For that matter, if you manage to hit an arm or a shoulder, I can still shoot at you with the off hand (with reduced accuracy)
Somebody armed with a firearm is still dangerous until the weapon is out of ammunition or they are incapacitated - and an extemity hit probably won't do the job. If you shoot to wound, firstly you stand an excellent chance at missing entirely, and secondly, you stand an excellent chance of being killed by your (wounded) target's follow-on shot.
I am a very good pistol shot, trained specifically to shoot accurately very quickly. If you oblige me by standing still 25m away, I'll hit whatever extemity you like. At 10-15meters, I could probably shoot individual fingers off a stationary target. But moving? No way. Running at me, carrying a weapon? Centre of mass, baby.
As far as longer weapons... you ever have an axe head fly off when you are chopping wood? It doesn't fly at the tree; it takes off at the tangent point to the arc of the swing when the connection is broken. If I parry a swinging halbard or whatever with a lightsabre, taking the head of the weapon off, it will fly outboard of me, not at me.
Let's examine the (hypothetical of course) case where you and I come across each other, and we're both armed.
In most non-open-battlefield encounters, the distance between us is going to be somewhere between 10 to 25 metres.
Let's start with swords. Could be epee, could be sabre, could be katana, could be lightsabre - it doesn't really matter.
Barring misfortune, both of us should be able to unsheath our swords and come en garde before the other could close the distance. At 10m maybe if one of us is an iado expert perhaps that's close enough to attack straight out of the draw.... but in any case, odds are that we we be able to come en garde before closing the distance.
And that means that we will have the opportunity to defend against an attack made by the other. And in swordfighting, defense is stronger than attack - more points are made on the riposte than on the initial attack, as you tend to be more open during the attack than while defending.
That means we are going to have the opportunity to size each other up, come up with a plan, perhaps even *talk* to each other before commiting ourselves to a plan of action. A lot depends on relative skill of course; but if we are similarly skilled and I don't plan on making an attack, I can probably hold you off for quite some time if I restrict myself to defence only. Accordingly, if I decide to wound or disable only, I can withold the attack until such time as an opportunity to wound/disarm presents itself.
If your skill level is higher than mine, perhaps that opportunity will never come. Perhaps my clumsy defence will open up an avenue, and I wind up skewered.:) But all else being equal, *because my weapon has a defence as well as an attack function*, I can elect to attempt to withold lethal force if I choose not to kill you. Plus I have the opportunity to communicate with you while we are sparring, and perhaps you can be dissuaded verbally.
Now same scenario, but we have pistols instead of swords.
This is a different story. There is NO way for me to parry a pistol shot. There is NO need to close distance - at 10m, I can fire 5 shots in 3 seconds and keep all 5 rounds in an 1" circle (at least, I could once upon a time...) At 25m, that circle expands to about 3" - which still fits nicely on your chest. Plus the only physical effort you need to plug me is to point the gun at me and sucessfully pull the trigger - unlike the sword, which requires more physical effort and skill to execute a successful attack.
In this scenario, my only hope is to get my gun on line and firing before you can do the same, and do devestating, incapacitating damage that puts you down and keeps you down, without having the ability to get a shot off at me.
In real-world terms, that means shooting you centre of mass as many times as I can as soon as I can. Bullets are funny; sometimes a little.22 rimfire will kill a person stone dead with one shot, and other times somebody will take a dozen 9mm rounds and still keep coming. So it behooves me, if I want to survive, to get as many bullets into you as I can.
Now I do have a few other shots availible to me other than just centre of mass. I can shoot for kneecap, hip, head, and the old Western standby, gun.
Shooting at the gun is a ridiculously low percentage shot. I might be able to make that shot if you struck a Charlie's Angels pose and held it for a second or two, but there's no way I'm hitting your gun if it is coming out of a holster and being pointed at me. That only happens in the movies.
Hip and kneecap are attactive because a solid hit on either drops you - and you won't be running after me any time soon. But neither option stops you from shooting me once you are on the floor - or even on the way down to the ground.
And head is lethal, and a lower percentage shot than centre of mass.
That (if you'll pardon the pun) is the double-edge of the gun.
Speaking as one of those Canadian Forces Recce guys, the bayonet IS INDEED intended for use in combat.
Firstly, it's silent - or at least a whole lot quieter than gunfire. So it has use when you are infiltrating enemy areas and trying not to alert the whole world to where you are the way gunfire and muzzle flashes do.
Secondly, if you study infantry combat, you'll be suprised at just how often fighting reverts to bashing each other's brains out. Once you get into close quarters, it gets suprisingly hard to shoot somebody. Put a bayonet on the rifle, and now you have a short spear which is a VERY effective close-quarters weapon.
Thirdly, it has been shown time and again that there is a psychological effect to hearing the enemy fix bayonets. It scares the shit out of people. For some reason, being shot is OK, but the idea of somebody jamming a blade into you is much more frightening. There are reports from WW2 of units, holed up in a stong point and awaiting assault, surrendering when they heard the bayonets being fixed - and you can hear that very well, by the way.
We didn't spend a tremendous amount of time training in the use of the bayonet, but we DID train with it.
*thrust* and step and *thrust* and step and *jab* and *buttstroke* and move to next target....
I was thinking about parrying real bullets with a real sword, and forgot that scene in the movie with the non-lethal zapper doohicky. It was a long time ago, OK?
A sword/lightsabre offers the user more options too.
You can choose to just defend with it - protect yourself without threatening your opponent.
You can also selectively wound with it as well, giving you the ability to disarm (heh, literally) your opponent without killing him. As a lightsabre cauterizes as it cuts, the opponent won't bleed to death (although I bet he goes into shock pretty hard...)
It can also be used as a general purpose cutting tool - good for cutting through doors, cables, or whatnot.
By comparison, a gun (or blaster) is an all-or-nothing deal. You can kill with it by blowing a hole in someone... and that's about it. You cannot parry with a gun. It's nearly impossible to selectively wound with a gun. And aside from its intended purpose, a gun can't do anything else.
The gun's big advantages are ease of use (a gun does not rely on the strength or size of its wielder, at least not for reasonable calibres), its ability to kill at an extended range, and its near-unblockability. But given that Jedi can parry gunfire with their lightsabres (neat trick, that - how do you practice?) and are trained enough that "ease of use" isn't a factor... the lightsabre starts to look pretty good.
In real life, sword loses to gun at all except close quarters - especially if the gun wielder doesn't know the sword is there. But against all other weapons, the sword's ability to parry and defend without necessarily inflicting lethal damage make it pretty attractive.
I remember being SO geeked that a new Highlander movie was coming out. I dragged my then-girlfriend to it, telling her how amazing the first movie had been, and how much she was going to love this......and then sat through 90-odd minutes of the worst tripe I could possibly imagine. I was gobsmacked throughout the movie. I could not believe that anything I was watching had ANYTHING to do with the Highlander movie I loved so much.
That sequel is so heinous, so putrid, so amazingly BAD that it deserves some sort of warning label on the dust jacket of the DVD.
It makes the Matrix sequels seem brilliant. It's THAT bad.
OK, I'm not a Star Wars geek. Really. I'm not. I just happen to be playing KOTOR right now, and saw a couple of "Clone Wars" episodes on Teletoon last night. Pure coincidence. Honest.
But I *am* a little bit of a sword/fencing geek, in no small part due to my former profession. I actually own an 1899 pattern calvary sabre from the Boer War that was my personal sword... and.. well.. I got married in it. Military wedding, OK?
Anyway, I'm willing to suspend disbelief for a couple of things without much trouble. The beam goes out a couple of feet and then stops - OK, that's impossible, but who cares; it's cool. The blade can cut through anything save another lighsabre - well, it makes no sense that a lightsabre can block another lightsabre, but without that, there are no sabre duels, and the duels look cool. So fine, I'll buy that too. Never mind the physics. Nevermind the power consumption. Nevermind the inherent imbalance in the weapon due to the weightless blade - and nevermind that anything that can cut like that in any direction (there is no "edge" to a lightsabre) is going to be VERY hazardous and most of one's attention is going to be focused on not injuring one's own self with a casual brush of the blade.
It's fiction. It's a story. And it looks cool. So I'll buy it.
But from both the KOTOR game that I've been playing and the 'Clone Wars" shorts, it seems like its Star Wars canon that a LOT of other things can block lightsabres too.
Uh... isn't the fact that only a lightsabre can block another lightsabre the whole POINT? It's the unstoppable weapon, a devestating weapon, and one that requires a great deal of finesse and control to use correctly without lopping off your own limbs. If anybody with a chunk of pipe or an old stick can parry a lightsabre, why bother?
It just doesn't seem like a lightsabre is anywhere near lethal enough to non-Jedi.
I postulate that anything that *could* occur via a natural process *or* via divine intervention *must* have taken place via the natural process - the alternative is a micro-managing God who makes everything work via an expression of divine will.
Eg, sometime today I will get hungry. Am I hungry because of some natural process that triggers the feeling of "hungry", or am I hungry because God decided it was time to make me hungry?
I postulate that God does not take direct action to make everything in the world happen - that the world functions according to natural law without God's constant intervention.
That being the case then, it follows logically that if you can find any occurance that cannot be explained by natural law - which means in turn "occurs *contrary* to natural law, not "occurs and we don't know a natural law that could explain it yet" then you have de facto proof of divine intervention.
There's a nifty side-effect of this.
As we discover natural processes that explain various events, we reduce the space in which one could find a divine cause for it. If event X takes place, and we don't know why, then it might be natural, but it might also be God. Once a natural cause is found, it can no longer be an expression of divine will.
So far, the space in which God could play has only been reduced. At no point has anyone been able to conclusively determine that *anything* has had a divine origin.
If this continues, we wind up with a God who is left with only one action availible to him - the triggering of the Big Bang. All else that occurs after that is an expression of natural law, and so occurs without divine involvement.
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The problem comes in when you try and take a generality (valid or no) and start to apply it to specific individuals. There's usually enough variation individual to individual to counteract the genralities, because the magnitude of the generalities tends to be small.
Let's accept your premise that Etheopians, in general, run faster than Europeans (by which I take you mean that blacks run faster than whites) Yes, this may not be true at all yadda yadda (I'm with you there - we just need a postulate to discuss and this is nice and harmless.)
So after a huge study with lots and lots of checks and balances and tons of attention to correcting all mitigating factors, we determine that, on average, blacks run faster than whites.
Now its time for the Olympics. Should white runners be given a head start? For that matter, does it make any sense (given that nationality and ethnicity are almost never completely linked anymore) for any country to even field a white runner, given that (using this example, not necassarily true in real life etc) blacks run faster than whites?
Well, Olympic runners are the cream of their crop. Whatever genetics affect their particular metier, they came out on the high side (most likely) so it is entirely possible that a given white runner has genetics the equal or maybe even superior to his black counterparts. There's enough variation within populations to counteract the trend of the general population.
For a more real-world example, black people tend to be taller than asian people (at least in my experience - I wonder if there is any hard data on this) But if we assume that is true, that doesn't preclude the existance of short black people (Gary Coleman) or tall asian people (that chinese basketball player - Yao Ming)
Height at least we can see and measure objectively. But as soon as we start talking intangibles "who can run faster" or "who is more intelligent" applying generalities (which might be true in some sense) to individuals (where they almost certainly are untrue) opens up the very real possibility of unfairly punishing (or rewarding) an individual, for the supposed shortcomings or advantages of his genetic group.
It is further complicated by the fact that "nature" isn't the whole story; that "nurture" plays an equal or greater part in the ultimate performance of an individual than his or her genes. "Talent" is a very, very small predictor of success.
DG
I just finished reading Stephen J Gould's "Mismeasure of Man" http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0393 314251/
which discusses exactly this. Plus I have some real-life experience.
The biggest problem is that, independant of what point you wish to argue (group X is abnormally intelligent, group Y is sub-par) it's so bloody hard (if not well-nigh impossible) to actually measure intelligence. Even something as simple as measuring brain size turns out to be fraught with difficulties.
But IQ tests in particular suffer from no end of problems, especially on the lower end of the scale. Did person X score low because they lack intelligence, or because they lack education (not the same thing) or because of other factors.
I went to a Canadian Military College, which had very high standards of admission. Part of the admissions process was an IQ test of sorts (I don't know if it attempted to generate a classic IQ number, but the questions on it were of the classic "IQ" type)
As you can imagine, given that 1) I didn't know how much weight this test had on my admission and 2) my whole future depended on getting admitted, taking this test was pretty stressful. I did not do well at all, came close to panic several times during the test, and didn't come close to finishing.
Happily, I was admitted after all. About a month or two after arriving, we were given the test again. (The local psych department LOVED to give us tests; we were a population tailor-made for testing all sorts of theories) This time, we were told that we were being retested as a way of checking the validity of the test.
Well after two months of military boot camp, my stress tolerence was much higher. Furthermore, I knew that the results of the test would have no impact on my career. And taking the test was a lot more relaxing than marching around the parade square.
End result? I aced it. Finished with time to spare. No problem at all. And my peers all reported the same thing.
Now one could look at the "before" and "after" scores on this test, and conclude that military boot camp raised intelligence, often spectacularly. And you'd be wrong. I and my peers didn't get more intelligent; we got better at handling the stress associated with the test.
I have serious doubts that intelligence can ever be successfully measured in a rigourous, scientific manner - and that means ANY theory of genetic intelligence, be it high or low, pro or con, can ever be proven out.
DG
It looks like it's sold out through until 2006. Playing with an online ticket broker (me an' the missus have been toying with the idea of a trip out to New Yawk to see it) the earliest show I could find open was Jan 06 2006.
Prices seem to run $120-$250 depending on seats. What is the going scalped price?
Niner downloaded (from iTunes, piss off) the soundtrack, and the new material rocks. I just about fell out of my chair at "We'll Never Succeed on Broadway".
I wonder if the original cast will make it to Toronto....
DG
Yes, actually I do - look in any history textbook that discusses American foreign policy around the end of WW2.
Patton in particular was VERY keen to go after the Russians immediately after WW2 - the men and materiel for war was already on the ground, and the Russians (so he thought) were exhausted.
And don't forget that the 50's was the time of the "great Red scare", senator McCarthy and friends.
If you imagine a world where Russia did not get the bomb right away, and where Patton was not killed in a car accident immediately after the war (and so was able to keep up pressure to go after the Russians) it's entirely possible - I won't go so far as "probable" - that the US would have invaded Russia.
I certainly know this - I got to read a lot of US policy and nuclear strategy white papers during the cold war. The US think tanks were working HARD to come up with a way to circumvent MAD; a way to employ nuclear weapons in a limited, "tactical" way, without triggering the MAD schenario. To me, it always looked like they were trying to find a way to make a "safe" first strike, and I know a lot of Russian generals got the same impression. I saw Reagan's "Star Wars" initiative as an *offensive* weapon, not a defensive one.
I honestly don't know if this reflected an American desire to be able to attack the Soviet Union specifically, if they were just wargaming out in public (which was stupid because of the diplomatic damage it did) or if it just rankled that they had all this weaponry and couldn't use it and they were looking for a way (on general principles, not for specific operations) to be able to, at least on paper, execute a first strike without triggering MAD.
As far as "psuedo-deterrant" goes, I don't agree. If you have operational nuclear weapons and a functional delivery system, that's a POWERFUL deterrent against a conventional force. The use of nuclear weapons against conventional forces has been a keystone of NATO policy since inception (to the point where I still remember the list of the 21 things you were supposed to do upon reciveing warning of an incoming FRIENDLY nuke strike - and the radio codename for an incipient stike is still jammed in my memory as well.
If Iran or North Korea had a credible nuclear force, they'd be pretty much immune from Iraq-style invasion. And I think they know it.
I agree that I don't think that either one of these states is crazy enough to attempt a nuclear first strike. They might bluster a lot (especially North Korea) but I don't think, especially given their limited stratigic range and (even more so) accuracy, having nukes doesn't give them much of an offensive lever at all. But defensive is another story. If the US pushed into North Korea, I'd expect to see nuclear strikes on the troop formations almost immediately - after all, that was NATO's plan as well.
DG
It occurs to me that there may be a large percentage of Slashdot readers to whom nuclear war may not have the... relevance it did for my generation.
I guess I'm getting old....
Oddly enough, it turns out that nuclear weapons are a profoundly *stabilizing* influence on the countries that have them, if their immediate neighbours (and "neighbor" is defined by the reach of the delivery system, not so much geographic proximity)
The strategy is called "Mutually Assured Destruction" and boils down to this: if you nuke me, I'll nuke you, and enough of my weapons and delivery systems will survive such that I can ensure the complete destruction of your country, even if you achieve complete suprise"
Ever wonder why there are nuclear bombers, missiles, and submarines? That's the "nuclear triad" - you might take out any two of the legs, but the third will survive, and each carries enough destrctive power on its own to see MAD through, if required.
MAD ensures that there is no way to carry out a nuclear first strike without yourself being utterly immolated in the process. Any attack is thus an act of suicide.
This is so crazy that it works. It has kept the nuclear genie firmly imprisoned in its bottle since 1945, and I think that the threat of potential escelation of non-nuclear conflict amongst nuclear-armed nations to nuclear exchange has drastically limited the scope and intensity of wars since.
It hasn't been a perfect ride (Vietnam in particular was a mess largely created through one nuclear power misunderstanding the motives of another - see the documentary "Fog of War" for more on this) but consider the death tolls due to war from 1900-1945 to the same from 1946-2005. Not even close.
I predict, for example, that if the Soviet Union had not gotten nuclear weapons as quickly as they did, that there was a nontrivial probability that the US would have attacked the Soviet Union in the '50s. Both potential combatants having nuclear weapons almost certainly avoided another ground war in Europe.
Which brings us to the case of Iran and North Korea.
When more states gain access to nuclear weapons, that increases the probability that these weapons may actually get used; that is true. When these weapons are in the hands of leaders who may not be entirely stable (North Korea in particular) the situation becomes even more troublesome.
But consider this - I doubt that either state sees nukes as an offensive weapon. They know full well that any use of a nuke will almost certainly result in the obliteration of their own country. It is unlikely that either nation is that suicidal.
Instead, having nukes gives them the deterrant against invasion. Both states have the example of Iraq in front of them. If the US chose to invade conventionally, neither nation is likely to be able to stand for long. If, however, they have nukes, then they can do enough damage in a short enough time that perhaps they can make invasion too costly to consider; a deterrent.
The US, of course, opposes this, because they are the ones being deterred. A North Korea or Iran with nukes may be immunne from invasion (where now they are merely resistant) and the US would likely prefer to retain its freedom to invade if it felt it were to become necessary.
So while I'm opposed to the idea of more countries getting access to nukes, on the principle that that increases the number of people who could potentially use them, I am forced to admit that stability might *increase* if more countries were capable of utilizing nuclear force.
DG
...cliched joke overlords welcome YOU!
(with a statue of Natalie Portman, of course)
DG
Dude, I've got bad news for you about the Easter Bunny....
DG
Yeesh....
I ran a major Netscape Directory server installation at a major US automaker. As far as I know, it's still running there. Started at 3.0, and was on 5.x when I left.
Netscape's internal replication did indeed suck for a while, where the biggest failure was the inability to emancipate a slave directory and make it a master if the master puked.
I got around that through the brilliantly elegant feature that Netscape had the OpenLDAP did not - the replication ChangeLog was availible via LDAP. I actually wrote a program called replicator.pl - that's right, in PERL! - that handled all our replication and made multi-master happen. Later on, when we bought this upstart young German automaker, that program did real-time replication with real-time schema translation between their directory inrastructure and ours.
An early version of that program is availible online - it was GPLed - and I have the code for the most up-to-date version if anybody wants it.
Later on, the internal Netscape->Netscape replication got solid enough to the point where it could be relied on, and replicator.pl was phased out except for where schema translation was required.
As for the plugin interface, we actually wound up using this. I'm not going to say what for... but it had to do with the way a certain bit of very important information from the mainframe systems got tied into the directory. We had a "oh shit!" moment, I dove into the plugin documentation, and less than an hour later we had a working solution that solved the problem COLD. Saved our collective asses. You might think it horrible, but it solved the problem.
And as far as speed goes, Netscape handled everything we threw at it. Where eDirectory would just give up and cry, Netscape would go blasting through serving data. It was an awesome bit of work. The Java console sucked, but the server itself was awesome, and Netscape's support was pretty good.
Now I wanted to try OpenLDAP, but the configuration and installation was a PITA, it didn't support Netscape's ACL syntax, nor would it support ACL updates over LDAP, the replication changelog wasn't availible over LDAP, and whenever I breached these subjects on the OpenLDAP lists, all I ever got was aggressive and nasty grief. People tellling me how what I wanted OpenLDAP to do was stupid.
Whatever. Good on RedHat. I fully expect those speed improvements will migrate into Netscape's server (God Bless the GPL!) and then the world will have speed, ease of use, and hopefully, a more polite developer base all rolled into one place.
DG
I ran the Corporate Directory for a major US automaker for a number of years.
We used Netscape's Directory Server. There were hundreds of apps pointing at it, and the main Internet proxy server used it as the authentication service.
Over a million objects, hundreds of thousands of searches per day. It might crash once or twice per year, and never corrupted anything.
The management GUI sucked, but it was an outstanding product in all other respects.
DG
That might have been true once upon a time, but the phishers are getting VERY good at hiding their phish.
I've seen a PayPal phish that was very sophisticated, doing things like putting bogus info into the URL bar, duplicating the layout of PayPal's site EXACTLY... it turned out to be very difficult to spot the smoking gun - I had to go look at the raw HTML to find it.
Had I not been as paranoid as I am, it could have easily suckered me.
Read the article, and follow some of the links to the actual attacks. It's amazing how good they are. (It's equally amazing that a web browser would do anything on link mouseover EXCEPT show the real target of a link!)
Yes, there are plenty of stupid people - some people actually buy products from spam, or send money to Nigeria, etc etc. But the quality of the phishers is getting so good that it is hard to tell (in some cases) what is valid or what is not.
DG
"Extrordinary claims require extrordinary evidence"
My read is that Linus thinks that it might be a problem, but isn't convinced of the real-world seriousness of the problem - yet.
If you're going to claim that the sky is falling, you'd better bring evidence - like a reproduceable exploit. If you have one of those, you'll get the attention the problem deserves. And if you can't... then a problem that isn't a problem isn't a problem, isn't it?
DG
I remember USENET very well. Hell, I was on comp.sys.amiga back before the big split into comp.sys.amiga.*
1988 or so?
And man... as bad as it can get, Slashdot is heads and shoulders better than USENET at its worst.
Mind you, USENET at its best was head and shoulders better than Slashdot.... but those tight-knit newsgroups were tough to find.
DG
See, you made my point. If you Picard-lovers weren't so busy having those staff meetings and finding out how every junior officer *felt* about each potential course of action, then you wouldn't be engaging the enemy at *close* range.
:P
You would have, like Kirk, figured out that they were the enemy, made the immediate decision to engage NOW, and engaged at LONG range.
Thppppt!
DG
No, I don't.
A gun's sole purpose is to kill. That is its only function. If you had ANY experience with them at all, you would understand that.
DG
Ol "let's have a staff meeting" Picard a better leader than Kirk, the man of action?
:P
Pish tosh!
That's what I'd expect from somebody who thinks a hole in the ground is a good place to be.
Those of us in the Armoured Corps know better. You guys sit in your holes and have a touchy-feely staff meeting. We'll take Kirk and go on ahead.
DG
Man, you STILL don't get this.
I'm telling you that *I*, trained in combat pistol shooting, which emphasized speed over almost all else, could not reliably shoot to wound in all but the most artificial of circumstances.
A novice with a pistol is not going to be any better than that. If they *try* to shoot to wound, they will most likely miss - with the end result being either a clean miss if they miss outboard, or a lethal body hit if they miss inboard.
Two novices with pistols who encounter each other will blaze away at each other and have a high miss rate (you see this all the time in security camara videos) It's not uncommon for novices - even trained police officers, for that matter - to empty a pistol without scoring a hit, especially at longer ranges.
If they do hit, they have a good chance of it being lethal, because it is the nature of guns to be lethal. You cannot "pull" a bullet. You cannot shoot someone "softly". You either hit him or you don't, and the amount of lethal area is a good proportion of the total area.
Novice vs expert, the expert will put a couple of rounds centre of mass, and the novice will go down.
Novice pistol vs novice sword, my money is on the pistol. A novice with a sword is more of a danger to himself than anybody else, because it is the nature of swords to require skill to use effectively. The swordman is in great danger though, because the pistol shooter is highly unlikely to have enough control to be able to effectively shoot to wound, given that even experts find that very difficult to pull off.
Novice pistol vs expert sword raises the odds of success for the swordsman, but probably not enough to tip the balance, unless the range is VERY close and the swordsman VERY good. Woe to the mugger who suprises an Iado expert wearing his sword at close range!
Finally, pistol/blaster vs Jedi (and keep in mind please that the Jedi are FICTIONAL) The Jedi is by definition a supreme swordsman, such that he is actually capable of deflecting bullets with his sword, and one assumes undestands the likely result of cutting up the opponant's weapon mid-swing. With that extreme level of skill, the Jedi now has a defense against the gun (where another gunner has no defense save to hit first and hard) and thus has the ability to choose a more nonlethal response if he deems it appropriate.
Get it now?
DG
OK, if you have a gun, and I have a sword, and we assume the aha! scenario where we bump into each other at 10-25m, then I'm in deep poodoo. My *only* chance is to try and rapidly close the distance and get inside your gun hand before you can get on line and start firing.
:) But at that kind of speed, there's no time for selectively wounding. Gun comes up on the sight line, the sights hit the centre of the target and the weapon fires.
That's low percentage if you have any sort of draw at all. Just for grins, I tried this out - I have an air pistol that can be fired indoors, safely, and that does a pretty good job of simulating a Browning Hi-Power in all but the need to rack the slide. If we assume a round up the spout, the hammer forward, and the safety on, I was able to get a round centre of mass on a man-sized target at 10m from a cold draw in about a second.
Not bad for an old man of 35
There's no time for much more than reflex, because the target is closing quickly, and if he gets withing lunge distance, you're hosed. It's hard to parry well with a pistol.... not more than once, anyway.
Someone less practiced will be slower, but could probably still be counted on to get at least one round off before the distance was closed. And that round is going to be centre of mass, and taking a hit centre of mass is likely to be lethal.
Keep in mind we're talking about fairly low-power handgun rounds here too. Step it up to rifle or assault weapon calibres, and the damage gets MUCH worse. A 5.56 NATO round hits very, very hard out to about 600m. At 25m, its practically a cannon. A shot to a leg is liable to take the leg off. A centre of mass shot will have a little teeny entry hole, and a great big honkin' exit hole. You would be hard pressed to just "wound" even a willing target.
The downside to a rifle is that it takes longer to sweep the same arc as a pisol, and the muzzle is farther away from the body, meaning that the arc a swordsman needs to get inside is longer, meaning he has a bit better chance.
Anyway, try this one on - we both have pistols. You have yours out; mine is holstered. We encounter each other AHA! and you have a second in which to act before I shoot you.
You ain't shooting the gun out of my hand there Tex, so pretty much the only nonlethal shot left open to you is leg or hip. Let's say you get that shot off. If you miss, you die, because I'm shooting centre of mass because I ain't letting you get off a follow-up shot. If you hit, I'm going down, but I have a decent chance of still hitting you as I fall over, and if we assume no freak accidents like me banging my head on the way down, *I can still shoot at you while I'm down*
For that matter, if you manage to hit an arm or a shoulder, I can still shoot at you with the off hand (with reduced accuracy)
Somebody armed with a firearm is still dangerous until the weapon is out of ammunition or they are incapacitated - and an extemity hit probably won't do the job. If you shoot to wound, firstly you stand an excellent chance at missing entirely, and secondly, you stand an excellent chance of being killed by your (wounded) target's follow-on shot.
I am a very good pistol shot, trained specifically to shoot accurately very quickly. If you oblige me by standing still 25m away, I'll hit whatever extemity you like. At 10-15meters, I could probably shoot individual fingers off a stationary target. But moving? No way. Running at me, carrying a weapon? Centre of mass, baby.
As far as longer weapons... you ever have an axe head fly off when you are chopping wood? It doesn't fly at the tree; it takes off at the tangent point to the arc of the swing when the connection is broken. If I parry a swinging halbard or whatever with a lightsabre, taking the head of the weapon off, it will fly outboard of me, not at me.
DG
OK, let's make this a little clearer.
:) But all else being equal, *because my weapon has a defence as well as an attack function*, I can elect to attempt to withold lethal force if I choose not to kill you. Plus I have the opportunity to communicate with you while we are sparring, and perhaps you can be dissuaded verbally.
.22 rimfire will kill a person stone dead with one shot, and other times somebody will take a dozen 9mm rounds and still keep coming. So it behooves me, if I want to survive, to get as many bullets into you as I can.
Let's examine the (hypothetical of course) case where you and I come across each other, and we're both armed.
In most non-open-battlefield encounters, the distance between us is going to be somewhere between 10 to 25 metres.
Let's start with swords. Could be epee, could be sabre, could be katana, could be lightsabre - it doesn't really matter.
Barring misfortune, both of us should be able to unsheath our swords and come en garde before the other could close the distance. At 10m maybe if one of us is an iado expert perhaps that's close enough to attack straight out of the draw.... but in any case, odds are that we we be able to come en garde before closing the distance.
And that means that we will have the opportunity to defend against an attack made by the other. And in swordfighting, defense is stronger than attack - more points are made on the riposte than on the initial attack, as you tend to be more open during the attack than while defending.
That means we are going to have the opportunity to size each other up, come up with a plan, perhaps even *talk* to each other before commiting ourselves to a plan of action. A lot depends on relative skill of course; but if we are similarly skilled and I don't plan on making an attack, I can probably hold you off for quite some time if I restrict myself to defence only. Accordingly, if I decide to wound or disable only, I can withold the attack until such time as an opportunity to wound/disarm presents itself.
If your skill level is higher than mine, perhaps that opportunity will never come. Perhaps my clumsy defence will open up an avenue, and I wind up skewered.
Now same scenario, but we have pistols instead of swords.
This is a different story. There is NO way for me to parry a pistol shot. There is NO need to close distance - at 10m, I can fire 5 shots in 3 seconds and keep all 5 rounds in an 1" circle (at least, I could once upon a time...) At 25m, that circle expands to about 3" - which still fits nicely on your chest. Plus the only physical effort you need to plug me is to point the gun at me and sucessfully pull the trigger - unlike the sword, which requires more physical effort and skill to execute a successful attack.
In this scenario, my only hope is to get my gun on line and firing before you can do the same, and do devestating, incapacitating damage that puts you down and keeps you down, without having the ability to get a shot off at me.
In real-world terms, that means shooting you centre of mass as many times as I can as soon as I can. Bullets are funny; sometimes a little
Now I do have a few other shots availible to me other than just centre of mass. I can shoot for kneecap, hip, head, and the old Western standby, gun.
Shooting at the gun is a ridiculously low percentage shot. I might be able to make that shot if you struck a Charlie's Angels pose and held it for a second or two, but there's no way I'm hitting your gun if it is coming out of a holster and being pointed at me. That only happens in the movies.
Hip and kneecap are attactive because a solid hit on either drops you - and you won't be running after me any time soon. But neither option stops you from shooting me once you are on the floor - or even on the way down to the ground.
And head is lethal, and a lower percentage shot than centre of mass.
That (if you'll pardon the pun) is the double-edge of the gun.
Speaking as one of those Canadian Forces Recce guys, the bayonet IS INDEED intended for use in combat.
Firstly, it's silent - or at least a whole lot quieter than gunfire. So it has use when you are infiltrating enemy areas and trying not to alert the whole world to where you are the way gunfire and muzzle flashes do.
Secondly, if you study infantry combat, you'll be suprised at just how often fighting reverts to bashing each other's brains out. Once you get into close quarters, it gets suprisingly hard to shoot somebody. Put a bayonet on the rifle, and now you have a short spear which is a VERY effective close-quarters weapon.
Thirdly, it has been shown time and again that there is a psychological effect to hearing the enemy fix bayonets. It scares the shit out of people. For some reason, being shot is OK, but the idea of somebody jamming a blade into you is much more frightening. There are reports from WW2 of units, holed up in a stong point and awaiting assault, surrendering when they heard the bayonets being fixed - and you can hear that very well, by the way.
We didn't spend a tremendous amount of time training in the use of the bayonet, but we DID train with it.
*thrust* and step and *thrust* and step and *jab* and *buttstroke* and move to next target....
DG
Ok, OK, uncle!
I was thinking about parrying real bullets with a real sword, and forgot that scene in the movie with the non-lethal zapper doohicky. It was a long time ago, OK?
DG
Never held a gun?
Dude, 11 years in the Army. Unit small arms precision shooting team coach, a 2-time member of the Area pistol shooting team.
I've put tens of thousands of rounds downrange and taught hundreds of soldiers how to shoot.
And I'm telling you now that you never shoot to selectively wound. Centre of mass, squeeze the trigger, bad guy fall down.
Oh, while we're at it - college fencing team too. Epee, where the whole baody is a target, and we routinely aimed at wrists, toes, upper arms, etc.
Care to try again?
DG
A sword/lightsabre offers the user more options too.
You can choose to just defend with it - protect yourself without threatening your opponent.
You can also selectively wound with it as well, giving you the ability to disarm (heh, literally) your opponent without killing him. As a lightsabre cauterizes as it cuts, the opponent won't bleed to death (although I bet he goes into shock pretty hard...)
It can also be used as a general purpose cutting tool - good for cutting through doors, cables, or whatnot.
By comparison, a gun (or blaster) is an all-or-nothing deal. You can kill with it by blowing a hole in someone... and that's about it. You cannot parry with a gun. It's nearly impossible to selectively wound with a gun. And aside from its intended purpose, a gun can't do anything else.
The gun's big advantages are ease of use (a gun does not rely on the strength or size of its wielder, at least not for reasonable calibres), its ability to kill at an extended range, and its near-unblockability. But given that Jedi can parry gunfire with their lightsabres (neat trick, that - how do you practice?) and are trained enough that "ease of use" isn't a factor... the lightsabre starts to look pretty good.
In real life, sword loses to gun at all except close quarters - especially if the gun wielder doesn't know the sword is there. But against all other weapons, the sword's ability to parry and defend without necessarily inflicting lethal damage make it pretty attractive.
DG
Good Lord 'n' butter you got that right!
...and then sat through 90-odd minutes of the worst tripe I could possibly imagine. I was gobsmacked throughout the movie. I could not believe that anything I was watching had ANYTHING to do with the Highlander movie I loved so much.
I remember being SO geeked that a new Highlander movie was coming out. I dragged my then-girlfriend to it, telling her how amazing the first movie had been, and how much she was going to love this...
That sequel is so heinous, so putrid, so amazingly BAD that it deserves some sort of warning label on the dust jacket of the DVD.
It makes the Matrix sequels seem brilliant. It's THAT bad.
DG
OK, I'm not a Star Wars geek. Really. I'm not. I just happen to be playing KOTOR right now, and saw a couple of "Clone Wars" episodes on Teletoon last night. Pure coincidence. Honest.
But I *am* a little bit of a sword/fencing geek, in no small part due to my former profession. I actually own an 1899 pattern calvary sabre from the Boer War that was my personal sword... and.. well.. I got married in it. Military wedding, OK?
Anyway, I'm willing to suspend disbelief for a couple of things without much trouble. The beam goes out a couple of feet and then stops - OK, that's impossible, but who cares; it's cool. The blade can cut through anything save another lighsabre - well, it makes no sense that a lightsabre can block another lightsabre, but without that, there are no sabre duels, and the duels look cool. So fine, I'll buy that too. Never mind the physics. Nevermind the power consumption. Nevermind the inherent imbalance in the weapon due to the weightless blade - and nevermind that anything that can cut like that in any direction (there is no "edge" to a lightsabre) is going to be VERY hazardous and most of one's attention is going to be focused on not injuring one's own self with a casual brush of the blade.
It's fiction. It's a story. And it looks cool. So I'll buy it.
But from both the KOTOR game that I've been playing and the 'Clone Wars" shorts, it seems like its Star Wars canon that a LOT of other things can block lightsabres too.
Uh... isn't the fact that only a lightsabre can block another lightsabre the whole POINT? It's the unstoppable weapon, a devestating weapon, and one that requires a great deal of finesse and control to use correctly without lopping off your own limbs. If anybody with a chunk of pipe or an old stick can parry a lightsabre, why bother?
It just doesn't seem like a lightsabre is anywhere near lethal enough to non-Jedi.
DG
There's another test that one could do:
I postulate that anything that *could* occur via a natural process *or* via divine intervention *must* have taken place via the natural process - the alternative is a micro-managing God who makes everything work via an expression of divine will.
Eg, sometime today I will get hungry. Am I hungry because of some natural process that triggers the feeling of "hungry", or am I hungry because God decided it was time to make me hungry?
I postulate that God does not take direct action to make everything in the world happen - that the world functions according to natural law without God's constant intervention.
That being the case then, it follows logically that if you can find any occurance that cannot be explained by natural law - which means in turn "occurs *contrary* to natural law, not "occurs and we don't know a natural law that could explain it yet" then you have de facto proof of divine intervention.
There's a nifty side-effect of this.
As we discover natural processes that explain various events, we reduce the space in which one could find a divine cause for it. If event X takes place, and we don't know why, then it might be natural, but it might also be God. Once a natural cause is found, it can no longer be an expression of divine will.
So far, the space in which God could play has only been reduced. At no point has anyone been able to conclusively determine that *anything* has had a divine origin.
If this continues, we wind up with a God who is left with only one action availible to him - the triggering of the Big Bang. All else that occurs after that is an expression of natural law, and so occurs without divine involvement.
If that is the case, then God is irrelevant.
DG