[ExI] bikinis, was: RE: Enlightenment - was Re: statins

Adrian Tymes atymes at gmail.com
Sun Sep 11 19:37:41 UTC 2016


On Sun, Sep 11, 2016 at 9:45 AM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

> *“In my opinion it is impossible for them to obey a bunch of rules unless
> they understand how it works. So it's my opinion that it's only going to
> work if I tell them… Feynman*
>
>
>
> Feynman had never been in the military.  He injected his opinion that
> soldiers, (including the commander) wouldn’t follow rules unless they know
> why they are in place.
>

Err...there is a critical distinction that misses, that you as an engineer
should have picked up on.  This distinction completely breaks application
of this analogy to the email server issue you discuss.

That quote does not say "wouldn't".  It says "impossible for them to" - as
in "can't".

The former implies willing disobedience (which is what Hillary and company
are accused of).  The latter claims impossibility regardless of intent
(which does not appear to be the case for email servers, since most of the
classified portion of the government has been using secure servers - unless
exceptions like this are far more widespread than has been reported).

It's like an order to fly (absent any airplanes, jetpacks, or the like): it
doesn't matter whether the ordered person wants to or not, nor if they make
a best effort, they will fail to comply.

In this case, the quote states an opinion that the subject matter is
sufficiently complex that, without knowing how it works, orders for safe
preservation, no matter how detailed would fail in practice - which is
quite believable, especially since how to safely handle nuclear material
was less well understood back then.
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