Topics created by Mary

It’s a documentary about Robert McNamara. Very good.

Thanks for noticing the pre-print version of the paper.  Its only 5 pages and surprisingly not too terribly difficult to follow.  From the article:

How does information get out of a black hole? My work with Hartle[8] showed the radiation could be thought of as
tunnelling out from inside the black hole. It was therefore not unreasonable to suppose that it could carry information
out of the black hole. This explains how a black hole can form and then give out the information about what is inside
it while remaining topologically trivial. There is no baby universe branching off, as I once thought. The information
remains firmly in our universe. I’m sorry to disappoint science fiction fans, but if information is preserved, there is
no possibility of using black holes to travel to other universes. If you jump into a black hole, your mass energy will
be returned to our universe but in a mangled form which contains the information about what you were like but in a
state where it can not be easily recognized. It is like burning an encyclopedia. Information is not lost, if one keeps the
smoke and the ashes. But it is difficult to read. In practice, it would be too difficult to re-build a macroscopic object
like an encyclopedia that fell inside a black hole from information in the radiation, but the information preserving
result is important for microscopic processes involving virtual black holes. If these had not been unitary, there would
have been observable effects, like the decay of baryons.
…
I gave John an encyclopedia of baseball, but maybe I should just have given him the ashes.

Falk wrote:

i doubt that passing something through a singularity is a unitary process

Hawking basically states this is a unitary process by what isn’t observed in other quantum effects…i.e. the decay of baryons.  I’m not sure if that is really proof or just a strong indication however.

that is so screwed up, its funny.

The same applies for non-VPs.

@221B:

Well, if you want to be that precise then you are correct.  As I have stated earlier I view this clause with an attempt to determine its intent.

If you compare that text to other text of the UN, then i think it really is that precise. I mean, treaties are written by lawyers usually, so i rather stick to the letters when interpreting it. :)

And Chengora, i find it laudable that you tried to understand RB concept of logic.

I don’t think “too liberal” has really been an issue for a very long time. A Democratic president (not necessarily a liberal president) hasn’t had a choice for quite some time now, and that’s probably why the issue hasn’t come up.

In addition, I tend to think on the real hot button social issues, “liberal” causes are generally less intrusive. Pro-choice doesn’t actually impact people who don’t want to get an abortion for example. Neither does gay marriage, although a possible exception would be racial quotas, but that is in many ways recognized as being offset by preferential treatment of other groups in, say, college admissions, etc. This is probably not true for things like economic issues, but then again after Clinton’s centrist swing on trade policy, I’m not sure how much of a concern that is anyway. After all, sound economic policy has much stronger guidelines than “sound” social policy.

As for justices making law, well, they’ve done that since the Marshall court. I find the concern from the US right somewhat disingenuous, in that “no judicial activism” appears to be a cover word for advancement of socially conservative causes. Any act of judgment, even one to uphold precedent, is an act of judicial action, refining and redefining the parameters of the law. Whether a judge upholds the finding in Griswold, say, or does not, it still impacts the parameters of legal behavior in the United States and is in that sense, activist.

@Zooey72:

What happened that made Germany so strategic, the cold war. And you know that. It was also in our best intrest to have Germany rebuild its military to help with the Warsaw pact/Nato arms race

You think that was the reason why the US entered the war? AFAIK only Churchill was “wise” enough to look into the future and see this upcoming conflict. The US gov’t did not, thus it can not be the reason for invasion. (Remember that is what we are talking about)

You also know that democracy failed in Germany because of the stab in the back mentality of the German people.

I know, but you know that your point of the last post was "If the US had wanted democracy after WWI, you would have ‘gone in’ ". My answer was: there was no need for you to go in. I don’t argue what you wrote in this post, but this here does not really relate to your earier post.

3rd point. Have we destroyed Iraq the way we did Germany? Think before you knee jerk reaction of “yes” …

Think and remember this should not be a flame war, before you warn me of a knee jerk reaction, especially when you are not long enough a member here on the board to know that i often enough disapproved of this comparison. Germany was bleeded out by the war, Iraq was not. The German population suffered from a year long war, Iraq did not (they suffered from a year long trade-ban, but that is not the same than having bombs fall on your regularly).

Mien kamph… if you are going to study Nazi Germany you should read the autobiography of the man who ran it all. Some of the refrences I used was to show what a dumb a** Stalin was for thinking he could trust Hitler when the book clearly states that he was going to attack.

Like the “dumb” jews who stayed?
Anyway … the book was written in prison, before 1933. If you want to study the regime, then yes, it is interesting to compare what happened to what was proposed in the book. But, it is more important to study what really happened.

Darn! you found me out! :lol:

@Yanny:

His opponent was John Kerry.

A monkey in a suit could beat John Kerry.

Wait! I thought John Kerry WAS a monkey in a suit! Now I’m all confused. pout

(a joke)

certainly. its entirely a matter of interpretation, so fair enough. but clearly, we disagree

ummm . . . EJ - are you serious?

just curious - this seems like another one of your sarcastic moments.