SLN, and MAlign playing catch up with Manticoran superiority

penny wrote:Both of you are beating around the bush. You're hammering away at the nail and totally missing it. Stop it before you crush your finger. Either a man is free or he isn't. West Germans, as human beings, were free. East Germans were not. Was it acceptable to say that it was morally right that there was a lack of freedom in East Germany since the entire country was imprisoned? Of course not! That is part of the reason that the wall came tumbling down. Ditto North Korea.

Incarceration. One man's claustrophobia, cannot and should not be measured by another's.

Since you have already said "The freedom to travel does not imply freedom to trespass", I do not understand what you are banging on about. No one has total freedom of movement or travel, but some are much more free than others. South Koreans have much more freedom than North Koreans, but there are restrictions on where they can go, both locally and internationally.

For example: going to another country usually requires a visa, but a visa need not be automatically granted. Whether a visa is needed or what restrictions are placed on visas depends on the laws of the country being visited. Also the country of origin can impose restrictions: it is not legal for a US citizen to travel to Cuba purely for tourism (but the Cuban government won't tell on you).

tlb wrote:

penny wrote:Both of you are beating around the bush. You're hammering away at the nail and totally missing it. Stop it before you crush your finger. Either a man is free or he isn't. West Germans, as human beings, were free. East Germans were not. Was it acceptable to say that it was morally right that there was a lack of freedom in East Germany since the entire country was imprisoned? Of course not! That is part of the reason that the wall came tumbling down. Ditto North Korea.

Incarceration. One man's claustrophobia, cannot and should not be measured by another's.

Since you have already said "The freedom to travel does not imply freedom to trespass", I do not understand what you are banging on about. No one has total freedom of movement or travel, but some are much more free than others. South Koreans have much more freedom than North Koreans, but there are restrictions on where they can go, both locally and internationally.

For example: going to another country usually requires a visa, but a visa need not be automatically granted. Whether a visa is needed or what restrictions are placed on visas depends on the laws of the country being visited. Also the country of origin can impose restrictions: it is not legal for a US citizen to travel to Cuba purely for tourism (but the Cuban government won't tell on you).

I keep "banging on" because the plot has not completely settled onto the truth. You keep interjecting non sequiturs. Bureaucratic red tape does not denote a lack of freedom. On the contrary, bureaucratic red tape could be viewed as an ally to freedom. It provides an avenue.

Take for instance the many people who agree that a wall should be built to stop all of the illegal immigrants from entering the US. OTOH, there are those who say the US should be open to all who wish to come here. Sure, but why should their citizenship not be pursued legally. For their safety and ours.

Sanctuarians cannot apply for a visa. They probably cannot even travel to Haven!

tlb wrote:Since you have already said "The freedom to travel does not imply freedom to trespass", I do not understand what you are banging on about. No one has total freedom of movement or travel, but some are much more free than others. South Koreans have much more freedom than North Koreans, but there are restrictions on where they can go, both locally and internationally.

For example: going to another country usually requires a visa, but a visa need not be automatically granted. Whether a visa is needed or what restrictions are placed on visas depends on the laws of the country being visited. Also the country of origin can impose restrictions: it is not legal for a US citizen to travel to Cuba purely for tourism (but the Cuban government won't tell on you).

penny wrote:I keep "banging on" because the plot has not completely settled onto the truth. You keep interjecting non sequiturs. Bureaucratic red tape does not denote a lack of freedom. On the contrary, bureaucratic red tape could be viewed as an ally to freedom. It provides an avenue.

Take for instance the many people who agree that a wall should be built to stop all of the illegal immigrants from entering the US. OTOH, there are those who say the US should be open to all who wish to come here. Sure, but why should their citizenship not be pursued legally. For their safety and ours.

Sanctuarians cannot apply for a visa. They probably cannot even travel to Haven!

You keep agreeing that there are legal barriers to travel; but when I mention them, you say those are "non sequiturs". Of course the people of Sanctuary cannot travel to Haven, it was Eloise Pritchart's promise to change that at some point which started this sub-thread.

Let me summarize:

We both agree that freedom to travel does not mean freedom to trespass; that is the clear meaning of what I posted. We both agree that there are many legal barriers to travel.

So it follows that freedom to travel is not a positive "right", but resides in what is left after all restrictions on travel are considered

Therefore no one has total freedom of movement or travel, but some are much more free than others.

tlb wrote:

tlb wrote:Since you have already said "The freedom to travel does not imply freedom to trespass", I do not understand what you are banging on about. No one has total freedom of movement or travel, but some are much more free than others. South Koreans have much more freedom than North Koreans, but there are restrictions on where they can go, both locally and internationally.

For example: going to another country usually requires a visa, but a visa need not be automatically granted. Whether a visa is needed or what restrictions are placed on visas depends on the laws of the country being visited. Also the country of origin can impose restrictions: it is not legal for a US citizen to travel to Cuba purely for tourism (but the Cuban government won't tell on you).

penny wrote:I keep "banging on" because the plot has not completely settled onto the truth. You keep interjecting non sequiturs. Bureaucratic red tape does not denote a lack of freedom. On the contrary, bureaucratic red tape could be viewed as an ally to freedom. It provides an avenue.

Take for instance the many people who agree that a wall should be built to stop all of the illegal immigrants from entering the US. OTOH, there are those who say the US should be open to all who wish to come here. Sure, but why should their citizenship not be pursued legally. For their safety and ours.

Sanctuarians cannot apply for a visa. They probably cannot even travel to Haven!

You keep agreeing that there are legal barriers to travel; but when I mention them, you say those are "non sequiturs". Of course the people of Sanctuary cannot travel to Haven, it was Eloise Pritchart's promise to change that at some point which started this sub-thread.

Let me summarize:

We both agree that freedom to travel does not mean freedom to trespass; that is the clear meaning of what I posted. We both agree that there are many legal barriers to travel.

So it follows that freedom to travel is not a positive "right", but resides in what is left after all restrictions on travel are considered

Therefore no one has total freedom of movement or travel, but some are much more free than others.

The legal barriers that you keep harping on are not legal barriers, they are filed under bureaucratic red tape; inconveniences if you will. You started on that tangent when you brought up trespassing. Requiring a Visa is also simply an inconvenience and does not belong in the discussion.

Another non sequitur is the silly notion of not having total freedom. It was never about having total freedom. It was about having NO freedom within the context of the discussion of being able to leave the planet or system and seeing the galaxy.

Perhaps something that should be mentioned is the error of identifying the plight of the citizens of Sanctuary with the plight of the citizens of Darius and Gallon.

penny wrote:Perhaps something that should be mentioned is the error of identifying the plight of the citizens of Sanctuary with the plight of the citizens of Darius and Gallon.

What a surprise; we have reached an impasse again. So we might leave it there, since you think the crime of trespass is mere bureaucratic red tape.

There is one strange thing about this last statement, since you were the first person to make this equivalence:

penny wrote:And that Haven has a moral responsibility to do. Anything else would be considered inhumane, irresponsible, selfish and self-serving. Something I mentioned several times in the past. And that should read 'as any other citizen of the galaxy.'

Anything less reminds me of ... of ... hmmm Darius and Galton! Aka, the MAlign.

Since Haven cannot act on that responsibility for the foreseeable future.

penny wrote:I keep "banging on" because the plot has not completely settled onto the truth. You keep interjecting non sequiturs. Bureaucratic red tape does not denote a lack of freedom. On the contrary, bureaucratic red tape could be viewed as an ally to freedom. It provides an avenue.

Um, but you previously said that East Germans were not free. Yet they had a bureaucratic process, with its red tape, to apply to visit West Berlin, West Germany, or other international locations.

What rejection rate from the bureaucracy make a people unfree?

Apparently East Germans at IIRC >50% rejection were unfree. But over 2% of US residents are apparently barred from entering Canada due to prior DUI convictions, and virtually no US residents are permitted (by the US) to travel to Cuba but I presume you view US residents as free. So where's the cut-off?

Jonathan_S wrote:For example keeping sidewalls active over the yards at all times; having block ships constantly putting up mazes of wedges outside of that, leaving PDLCs on automatic computer control (which could blunt the short range launches of stealthed pods of cataphracts), etc. Those are all expensive, in terms of burning through component lifetimes and maintenance requirements (and leaving people out of the loop on the PDLCs carries some risk of friendly fire) -- but they're something that could have been done without any new technological breakthroughs once it was apparent that weapons might strike with near-zero warning.

None of those will stop an attack -- but they probably up the number of weapons needed to kill a yard by 50 to 100 times.

If they did that. Is there any actual evidence that they have taken any serious countermeasures? We see them having entire fleets with all the wedgrs down past OB and parking in one place and daring the enemy to approach.

Jonathan_S wrote:[

(Kind of like how it would have been hard to learn of the Manhattan project during WWII because the bars the scientists and techs were hanging out at and possibly talking too freely in were almost exclusively within the high security compounds at Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Hanford. If the spies had access to those bars they already knew of the project and had access into its secure enclaves. Of course there were spies; but they were scientists, who'd been recruited into the project, and who for ideological reasons were sharing technical details with the Soviets)

According to the guy running the soviet operation against the Manhattan project, they had more than a few. Including the chief scientist.

tlb wrote:The nanites only know what they have been taught or programmed; they cannot use someone's password, for example. So you will need to supply an example of what you mean, since they cannot be used to force an email to a handler giving all passwords and key personal information.

The only thing that I see immediately is making it easier to capture and torture some specific person.

Well, they can only gain information that the person they are planted in hears, or reads, or says, or writes down. So to protect from that you need to not tell anyone anything or keep them from encountering bad people. Like say taxi drivers.

markusschaber wrote:But there are still enough unconnected strings that should point the intelligence guys to the fact that there must be something else.

You know what happened before the Pearl Harbor attacks? A DD on patrol encountered a Japanese sub trying to sneak into the Harbor. So of course everyone went to full alert, right?

Hah!

The was after FDR fired Admiral Richardson over his opposition to putting the Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor because Richardson felt it was very vulnerable to a sneak attack, and the Japanese were masters of the sneak attack.