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Comment Re:Global warming is only the start (Score 0) 265

Oil a'int fossil in origin. The Russians know that, and have capitalized magnificently on technologies that exploit this. This is actually the REAL story behind the Donetsk basin.

False scarcity is a wealth creator and a method of social control. UAE will be destroyed not by petrochemical scarcity, but by its comparative plenitude.

Comment Re:Life on Mars? (Score 1, Interesting) 265

No one will EVER live in a permanent space colony. Sorry.

This fantasy was promoted in an age where achieving terrestrial dominance through orbital trajectory of warheads was under intense and competitive development. It did its job.

Rockwell rode on the tail-end of this era, for the final boondoggle of the US Shuttle Program, in the 1970's. You won't see anything like that again.

Comment Re:Probable cause (Score 1) 223

There is still an instrument for guiding one's evaluation of claims and conundrums: Cui Bono?

In matters of human affairs, it is generally less erring than application of Occam's razor.

"Someone" is interested in getting you to think that the biggest potential for catastrophe, in your daily life and for your way of living, is impending Muslim ideological violence. They wish you to believe an absurdity.

What group or party benefits from this? Why have they chosen this from other possible alternatives? What other possible real threats and risks are diverted from attention by this condition?

Those are the basic questions for the truly inquisitive, not those merely questioning from a habit of personality.

Comment "Crunchy Frog" (Score 1) 9

"Dew-picked and flown from Iraq, cleansed in finest-quality spring water, lightly killed, and then sealed in a succulent Swiss quintuple smooth treble cream milk chocolate envelope, and lovingly frosted with glucose."

Comment Re:Probable cause (Score 2) 223

OK. To de-escalate, and in the interest of trying an educational dialogue, I will attempt to clarify what appears to be an assumption in the posting to which I responded.

You mention "taqiyya" as a point of doctrine, or an approved mode for action, by those who profess a "witnessing" of Islam ("tashud").

This is in most was incorrect. Certainly, it is misleading, as a generalization. Al-Taqiyya is usually translated as "dissimulation". There are numerous arguments about the permissibility of this specific shading of deceit or "lying" in the history of Islamic discourse. The most common, and widely known usage was for Shi'ite partisans of 'Ali and his descendants, immediately in the time of their political schism. This was during the lifetimes of the original 3 Imams. The purpose thereof was defensive - used to deflect persecution or compulsion by "Sunni" adherents.

It is important to note this: In the first few centuries, Shi'a were a political distinction for legitimate leadership of the 'Ummah or community. Doctrinally there was not a separate school of theology or jurisprudence. Thusly, the term "Sunni" as a contrasting group is often a more modern anachronism when applied to the period - up to about the time of Jaffar Al-Siddiq, or so... "Shi'a" of that time - and indeed probably today - consider themselves to be following in the "Sunnah" of the prophet.

All of this aside, dissimulation is a means to defensively avoid harm and persecution, without giving up or rejecting articles of belief. This is true of Shi'a or of Sunni jurisprudence. There is no corresponding school of thinking that has authorized Al-Taqiyya for means of "deception" versus "dissimulation" in pursuing acts of war or other hostility.

There is in fact another term "Al-Makr" for "deception" that relates to concealment of intention. There are a number of debates about the use of this term in the Q'ran, as applied to God. Most of that discussion is quasi-theological for political ends and beyond the scope of discussion here. Let us only say that the message of the book is roughly "Those who try to trick God, have in the end only tricked themselves - for God is master over all things, including their trickery." Parse as you will.

Let us conclude that Al-Makr, as a doctrine to promote the faith, is haram.

To suggest that the existence of Al-Taqiyya provides a doctrinal basis under which one may make generalized assumptions about the threatening character of any Muslim believer is ignorant or provocative, at the least.

Comment Re:Come now. (Score 1) 104

Let's not make a big deal out of this. 640kg of reactor-grade plutonium is only enough for a bit over 100 fission bombs / fusion bomb first stages, merely enough to make the recipient roughly tied for being the world's sixth most armed nuclear power.

Nothing to see here.

Clearly, you have never built a fission device, if you think you could get that many of them out of 640kg of even weapons grade Plutonium. You need to probably go back and read "The Curve of Binding Energy" and recalculate the neutron numbers to determine critical mass, assuming a pareto optimal design, because you are more than a bit high with "100"...

You could build a lot of dirty bombs with something like that, but you are likely better off just robbing a radiomedicine unit at a large research hospital to get the materials, or stealing a truck out of a fast food restaurant in Mexico City...

Comment The web is not a runtime environment. (Score 0) 608

You are right of course it is similar to the 80's and 90's in that companies that wanted to steal the sales of other companies simply created new fangled languages and marketed the hell out of them instead of embracing what works and adapting it to the new paradigms. The only reason you can't use Turbo Pascal to make web pages is the compiler was never updated for the functionality but it very well could have been. In fact its progeny Delphi is alive and well and building apps for almost every popular platform out there today including the web. As long as there is competition there will be someone who chooses to create from scratch rather than use someone else's tool.

The web is not a runtime environment.

The reason you can't use TurboPascal is because web pages run in the browser virtual machine, and TurboPascal code runs in the TurboPascal runtime environment linked into the native code TurboPascal application.

You could target TurboPascal to NACL/PiNACL in Chrome as a target runtime environment, but effectively to run it, you'd be doing a JavaScript call into a JavaScript extension that then ran as native code in a sandbox within Chome. You'd, as a result, lose most of the TurboPascal runtime libraries supplied by the compiler vendor, and you'd lose all third party libraries and components, if the third parties weren't willing to port them (I assume you realize that you don't have all the Photoshop plugins on Windows that are available on Mac, right?).

Web languages, n the other hand, are predominantly for programming code on a server to generate markup, which is then interpreted by the browser to render output, or they are intended to run in a really limited environment in the browser itself, usually as unextended JavaScript (and, in the case of things like iPad/iPhone/etc., they are *definitely* NOT extended, since a UIView extension is not allowed under the terms and conditions for interpreting web content, since it's a huge security hole that's easily exploited with a DNS hijack).

Basically, if you are thinking your browser is a "platform", or you are thinking "the web" is "a platform" in the traditional programming sense, as the OP obvious is, then you are an idiot.

Comment Better add DARPA and Jon Postel as codefendants (Score 2) 311

Better add DARPA and Jon Postel as codefendants. I hear they came up with this thing called TCP/IP, which aids and abets people like Tor putting together anonymous networks in the first place; it's a clear case of collusion...

Bonus Points: I hear DARPA has deep pockets...

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