Comment Re:Dust? (Score 1) 133
In summary, all the space theories that are still just space theories, include:
All space theories.
In summary, all the space theories that are still just space theories, include:
All space theories.
LoL.
Moon landing take 2: Ok Neil, but this time you need to say, "One step for A man... one giant leap for mankind." Don't flub your line or "One small step fur man" will be in the history books.
Producer: No! Leave it in - a minor human slip will make it more believable.
911 Conspiracy take 2: The first take was Ok but we need to swap out the Saudis and Egyptian hijackers. You guys are supposed to be our allies. Can we get at least one Iranian, Iraqi or Afghani hijackers? How the heck are we gonna start a war? How about a North Korean?
Turns out that the demographics didn't have much effect on where the war was started.
Your wife, like all other scientists and amateurs with sufficiently powerful telescopes, is in on the conspiracy.
(Is she evil, or did they threaten to kill her cat if she didn't cooperate?)
I see conspiracy theorists as an example of believing in a very unlikely scenario to boost your ego.
I recently saw an article (here?) about a study that found that subscribing to conspiracy theories correlates strongly with a low self-image.
The next logical step is to research the story-telling of people drinking heavily at a bar.
But you've got to research it while drinking heavily, so you'll understand the stories from the perspective of the intended audience.
I could introduce you to a couple of blind people that I know...
Though I think that for one of them, staring intently into a campfire might have been a contributor.
I have a little scar in one eyebrow where my younger brother poked me with a hot coathanger while toasting marshmallows at the beach. I'm about half an inch from being blind in one eye due to a campfire.
Many, many tales in many religious traditions are simply oral histories, eventually written down. There's quite a bit of good history there, both in stories at least "inspired by real events", and fairly accurate representations of customs and values of ancient peoples.
They also tend to contain a lot of superstition, prejudice, ignorance, outright nonsense, and religious/social/political spin.
(Just like secular literature.)
That second link has been posted here recently enough that my browser still shows it as visited. It *uttterly* failed to support the claims of the person who posted it, leaving the impression that they hadn't actually read it. Or maybe read it and didn't understand it. Or maybe read it and understood it, but thought they could get away with misrepresenting it. Who knows...
In your case... uhm... what claim about history, religion, or ghost stores do you think it supports? Merely posting a link doens't win a vague argument, nor does it make your personal beliefs real.
MAD prevented WWIII. I don't care whether the people who build them or the people who authorize their construction are corrupt, or worship a giant statue of a sexually aroused Beelzebub, the fact is that we are kept largely secure from would be Napoleons, Hitlers and Stalins by the mere fact that these weapons exist.
Hitler would have pushed the button just before he pulled the trigger.
MAD only works when all the owners of knukes are reasonably sane.
Logic is a binary function. Something is in a logical set - or it is not. Being illogical is not a synonym for being mistaken. Degrees of precision are irrelevant for set inclusion. Fuzzy logic is not logic.
Fuzzy logic is logic. So are linear logic, intuitionistic logic, temporal logic, modal logic, and categorical logic. Just because you only learned Boolean logic doesn't mean there aren't well developed consistent logics beyond that. In practice bivalent logics are the exceptions.
... a lot of people respond to this by saying the criticisms are stupid, that "if you know what you're doing" then you'll understand what's really going on, etc.
Yes; "if you're just willing to get your hands a little dirty and muck in and learn then you can bend the hugely complicated interface to your needs" they'll say; they'll complain that your just not willing to learn things, and thus it is your fault. Such people will inevitably state that they are "power users" who need ultimate configurability and are (unlike you) willing to learn what they need to to get that.
They will inevitably deride GNOME3 for it's complete lack of configurability. Of course they'll gloss over the fact that GNOME3 actually exposes pretty much everything via a javascript interface and makes adding/changing/extending functionality via javascript extensions trivial (GNOME3 even has a javascript console to let you do such things interactively). Apparently actually learning an API and coding completely custom interfacdes from myriad building blocks is "too much work". They are "power users" who require a pointy-clicky interface to actually configure anything. Even dconf is "too complicated".
For those of us who learned to "customize our desktop" back in the days of FVWM via scriptable config files calling perl scripts etc. it seems clear that "power users" are really just posers who want to play at being "super-customised". Almost all the modern DEs do have complete customisation available and accessible; some of them just use a richer (scripting) interface to get such things done.
An oversimplification. The US, UK, and allies variously broke many cipher systems throughout WWII. Still the US benefitted from this.
What if the Germans were using, say, Windows, Android phones, SSL, Gmail, Yahoo, and Skype, instead of Enigma machines?
I presume you wouldn't say it was "wrong" of the United States to crack the German and Japanese codes in WWII...
This isn't so much a law enforcement question as a question of how to do SIGINT in the modern digital world, but given the above, and given that intelligence requires secrecy in order to be effective, how would you suggest the United States go after legitimate targets? Or should we not be able to, because that power "might" be able to be abused -- as can any/all government powers, by definition?
This simplistic view that the only purpose of the government in a free and democratic society must be to somehow subjugate, spy on, and violate the rights of its citizens is insane, while actual totalitarian and non-free states, to say nothing of myriad terrorist and other groups, press their advantage. And why wouldn't they? The US and its ever-imperfect system of law is not the great villain in the world.
Take a step back and get some perspective. And this is not a rhetorical question: if someone can tell me their solution for how we should be able to target technologies that are fundamentally shared with innocent Americans and foreigners everywhere while still keeping such sources, methods, capabilities, and techniques secret, I'm all ears. And if you believe the second a technology is shared it should become magically off-limits because power might be abused, you are insane -- or, more to the point, you believe you have some moral high ground which, ironically, would actually result in severe disadvantages for the system of free society you would claim to support.
Well, actually it's the Supreme Judicial Court, or SJC.
egrep -n '^[a-z].*\(' $ | sort -t':' +2.0
