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V Putin does not want neighboring former Soviet states to be successful, as Ukraine was ( slowly ) on its way to become. It looks bad on his failed government, that the largest country in the world, with all of its natural resources, has an economy equivalent to Spain, and its people are suffering. He has destabilized Kazakhstan, Georgia and Belarus already, a successful, pro-Western Ukranian state on the Russian border might give the Russian people the idea that it is their Government's fault, and it's time for a change.

This may be an interesting idea to explore in another thread, but judgment is an act of interpretation. Our interpretations vary based on our own background and upbringing and even our genetics. You really do appear to think judges are 100% objective robots driven by one’s and zeroes absent any bias, but that’s not the reality anywhere around the planet, even in your own system in your own country, no matter how highly you think of them.

Summary: Putin is a failed leader presiding over a dysfunctional society. The rising success of former Soviet countries such as Estonia and Ukraine underscore Russia's shortcomings and would eventually lead to internal change. Thus, Russia's neighbors must be subjugated.

Just to add my tardy 2 cents to this discussion, the SCOTUS doesn't make laws nor necessarily interpret laws. The SCOTUS decides whether a new law or a lower court ruling conforms to our Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land. Laws are proposed by the Legislative branch of our government, which is the House of Representatives and Senate. These proposed laws or bills only become law when they are signed by the POTUS. New laws that change our Constitution must go through this process in addition to having a majority of our individual state governments ratify that change. The Supreme Court has no intercession in this process unless they are presented with a challenge to a law or ruling. The members of our Supreme Court decides whether a challenged law or court ruling conforms to their individual interpretation of our Constitution, which is not an interpretation of the new law or ruling but whether these legal instruments agree with the intent of our Constitution as paved by its original signers. In deciding whether some legal challenge is valid, the process can become partisan or political through the individual interpretations of our Constitution as held by the Justices on our Supreme Court.

The conflict is between two camps with different views of the Constitution, generally called Originalists and Living Document (aka loose constructionism). Originalists, who believe in strict adherence to a map laid out ca. 1790, tend to be conservative - Antonin Scalia was a prominent Originalist. Living Document justices, who believe that society has changed and evolved since 1790, and that our laws must be adaptive to those changes, tend towards more Liberal. The reality, for a long time, has been that loose constructionists guided a lot of seminal decisions and been influenced by changes in society such that some amendments have been seen as archaic and in need of clarification in a modern world. Their decisions, the so-called landmark cases, have done more than just confirm constitutionality. Roe v Wade, for example, defined and expanded a constitutional right to privacy that was never previously made explicit in the original document.

If victories were won on the basis of sense of humor, Ukraine would win handily. Not only did they elect a comedian as president, but they really know how to welcome invaders... https://twitter.com/christogrozev/status/1497570787557097476?s=20&t=OiOQpwFS3bBuDVqkvvuNcg

You guys are full of crap. If SCJ don't interpret/make law, then why all the hand-wringing over whether they are Conservative or Liberal. or, pro-life or pro-choice ? It shouldn't matter if all they do is confirm the constitutionality of laws passed by the Legislative branch of Government.

Planet of the Apes? War of the Worlds? Man of the Hour? I’ll stop, but will not be tamed.

Chess game. Every piece on the board is in check to one degree or another.

I think there are several aspects in which one could try to make this example more similar to what's going on in physics and, in particular, in computers. I'm no computer scientist, so don't take anything I say too seriously. I think interesting features are at play in thermodynamic systems that are not necessarily that relevant when it comes to computers. The most important one, IMO, is that computers are not generally set up in a way that they will end up being in a state of equilibrium. The other, perhaps equally important, is that the way in which circuits in a computer switch on and off is not ergodic, meaning that during a typical run of a program, the bit-states do not cover all possible configurations, let alone equally likely. I suppose --correct me if I'm wrong-- they will be more likely to run along some paths than others. And my intuition is that the sequence of configurations would have a strong dependence on initial conditions too, something that's not a characteristic of thermal-physics. Another feature that our toy example doesn't have, but both computers and thermodynamic systems share is, as @SuperSlim has been trying to tell us all along, evolution. So we would have to picture our system more like a table on which we're free to add and remove coins according to an updating law (evolution) that determines which square is occupied, and which is not, in an unpredictable way. If that's the case, I would find it easier to interpret Landauer's principle in the following --overly simplistic-- way. This would be a state frozen in time: Where you have to picture any number of coins compatible with available room as free to move about following an updating procedure. All squares are available to be "ocupied" with a microstate 0 or 1. At this point, the updating law (program) has yet to write a bit on a given square. Mind you, this concept could be applied to either RAM, ROM or SWAP memory. Now the program finally writes a bit. Whether it's midway during a calculation (for storing the value of a variable, for example), or to hard-disk memory, it takes some kind of process to hold the value there. It could be 0, or it could be 1. It's the holding that's important. I will denote this with a reddish hue: (Bit 0) Or: (Bit 1) At this point, the rest of the coins are free to occupy whatever other squares, as the case may be, except for that in position (D,4), which is occupied (whether it be 0 or 1 the bit that's occupying it), until it's freed again. This restricts lowers the entropy, because, for however long, the system has become more predictable. If I erase the bit, what does it mean? I think it means that I cease holding the value at (D,4) in position, the square being available again either for temporary use, or for more long-term one. I may be completely wrong, or perhaps oversimplifying too much, but please bear with me, as I'm groping towards understanding Landauer's principle on a physical basis. One final comment for the time being, I don't think you need evolution in order to define an entropy. Whenever you have a statistical system with a fixed number of states, as in @studiot frozen-in-time example, you can define an entropy as long as you have a way to asign probabilities to the different configurations.

Now I have reported your earlier post.

I don’t think Putin is either mad nor is using the madman strategy, he’s doing what he has been preparing for years - realizing his dream of an imperial Russia. He’s probably the richest man on the planet, he has absolute power in Russia, he’s turning 70 years old this year, he knows his time is running out and he’s playing war games which are the only „fun” he’s got left to do which he hasn’t done yet. The scary part is that his methods of destabilizing countries and regions are very effective, in the 24 hours after his initial attack on Ukraine thousands of trolls and bots on FB and Twitter started spreading missinformation that petrol and gas is going to run out in Poland. Result - all gas stations had long lines, people started to hord petrol and gas to a point in which stations started to raise prices and the government had to intervene yesterday - a few thousand accounts on social media is all it takes. Fun fact, this has been happening for years as Putin carefuly prepared by slowly destabilizing the eastern europe region through social media. My summary is: Putin will take Ukraine and Biden and the EU will let him to avoid WWIII. EU and NATO will grow stronger because of this war.

Buai has been suspended for 3 days for uncivil behavior. We attack ideas here, not people.

I detect a certain semantic dissonance in that paragraph. 1. Never have I denied you the right or opportunity to express your views - nor, for that matter been in any position to put any obstacle to your expressions of anything you like. I did not delete, censor, edit, obscure or complain to a higher authority about any of your five and half thousand posts. That, to me suggests that you have been expressing quite freely. 2. Explaining why you have failed to change my mind, explaining as many ways as I could think of, as many times as you asked the same questions, over and over, is not an accusation. 3. In any case, nobody can accuse you of doing in a debate exactly what a debate is designed to do: state your position in such a way as to convince your interlocutor and audience. That we have both failed is a result of different world-views, not of anybody being denied self-expression.

! Moderator Note Posting screenshots of a conversation you had somewhere else isn't going to work. You need to post the information here, per the rules. We want to be able to quote you in order to respond. So start again, if you want. But starting with your first image in this last post, "gravitons with different velocities" In mainstream physics, if gravitons exist, they are massless and thus travel at c. If you have different velocities, you need to have a model that explains this. You can't build anything on this idea without establishing it first. (this is what I mean by getting ahead of yourself.) You want to do that in a new thread, fine. Anything beyond that - speculation built on other speculation - will get immediately sent to the trash. Anything that is a series of screenshots from somewhere else will also get sent to the trash.

That is a superficially neat way of avoding my observation that your attitude contributes to the expansion of terrorism. The consequences of the war on terror demonstrates those consequences. I shall be happy to answer your question once you have addressed my assertion. In the meantime, declaring a war on terror was a short term, rhetorical victory, and a long term, ignorant disaster. That is a remarkable admission. You feel qualified to pontificate on terrorism without having the background knowledge to understand the source and maintenance of the most prominent form of terrorism, at least in regard to its impact on the West. The emotive tone of several of your posts gives the impression that you have been moved by the horror of terrorism and have latched on to a simplistic solution to one aspect of it. The desire to combat it is understandable, but disregarding its inherent immorality, its demonstrated ineffectiveness, and its long term effect of expanding terrorism, makes it a very poor choice. One that exacerbates the problem you wish to eliminate.

Edit: I x-posted with @studiot, I may have to edit my response after reading the post above. In this post I’ll separate my thoughts in different sections to clarify. Binary encoding of the location vs the questions Studiots questions lead to the string 0101. The same string could also be found by square by square questions if the squares are numbered 0-15. "Is the coin in square 1,A?", "Is the coin in square 2,A?" and so on. The sixth square has number 5 decimal = 0101 binary. This way of doing it does not encode the yes/no answers into 1/0 as Studiot initially required but it happens to result in the same string. This was one of the things that confused me initially. Illustration: Zero entropy @joigus calculations results in entropy=0. We also initially have the information that the coin is in the grid; there is no option “not in the grid”. Confirming that the coin is in the grid does not add information as far as I can tell; so entropy=0. I think we we could claim that entropy=0 for any question since no question can change the information; the coin is in the grid and hence it will be found. Note that in this case we can not answer where the coin is from the end result alone, zero information entropy does not allow for storage of a grid identifier. Different paths and questions resulting in 0101 To arrive at the string 0101 while using binary search I think of something like this*: 1. Is the coin in the lower half of the grid? No (0) 2. Is the coin in the top left quadrant of the grid? yes (1) 3. Is the coin in the first row of the top left quadrant? No (0) 4. Is the coin in the lower right corner of the top left quadrant? Yes (1) Illustration, red entries correspond to "no"=0 and green means "yes"=1 The resulting string 0101 translates into a grid position. But it has a different meaning than the 0101 that results from studiots initial questions. Just as in studiots case, we need some additional information to be able to interpret 0101 into a grid square. As far as I can tell the questions in this binary search example follows the same pattern of decreasing entropy if we apply joigus calculations. But the numbers will be different since a different number of options may be rejected. *) Note that I deliberately construct the questions so that it results in the correct yes/no sequence. The approach though is general and could find the coin in any position of the grid.

Maybe the problem studiot posted would be easier to use if it was reformulated as a position/momentum problem. So it's like you know a particle is in one of N partitions. You know a particle can have one, and only one momentum (if it's classical). You have a two-parameter addressing mechanism that "reads" the contents of row i, column j. So it's like searching a memory for a "1" amongst a lot of "0"s. So it's down to what you can record, and how you record it. What does an algorithm that searches randomly need to do when it finds the particle? Is a brute-force, sequential search easier, since then you don't need to store information about empty partitions, just use a loop control. There's even a loop invariant! Also notice how it illustrates the difference between stored information, and an algorithm that searches for it (and changes local and global entropy). That seems kind of unavoidable (strong hint).

Modern Ukraine was created peacefully in 1991 by the Russian leadership. On it's creation, it declared itself a neutral state. Since the current leadership has repeatedly stated it's desire to join a military alliance whose only reason for existence is to fight Russia, I can see why the Russians should take exception to it. Ukraine was part of the empire of the Russian Czars for hundreds of years, and part of the USSR for about seventy years. It's been a country for just thirty years. Since they are keen to abandon their agreed neutrality, I don't blame Putin for kicking off.

Turkey is a NATO member, the only one to have shot down a Russian jet in the last 6 years, opposes Russian actions in Syria, has condemned the Crimean annex and increasingly sells weapons to Ukraine - especially drones proven effective against Russian artillery. True that Turkey also cooperates with Russia on some fronts, even in Syria at times, but to present this situation as binary is an over-simplification.

Portraying Russia as a bully, keen on attacking it's neighbours, shows incredible ignorance of history. Russia saved Europe from the Nazis. There was a history in lots of Europe of enthusiastic cooperation with the Nazis. Ukraine had a lot of it's own Nazis. Some of the European Nazis were worse than the German ones. Once the WW2 was over, Churchill was urging the Americans to continue the war by attacking Russia, the country that save his bacon. It's with that sort of history that the Russians understandably have a real distrust of the West. Stalin made that mistake, of trusting Hitler, and they learned a bitter lesson. Since the war, rather than attacking their neighbours, the Russians have cut loads of countries loose, and what did they all do? Joined up to a military alliance whose only reason for existence is to fight Russia. Russia has only taken action against neighbours when the ethnic Russian people in those countries were being attacked, as in Georgia and Ukraine. Describing it as bullying is really just buying into the story you are fed by the western media. It's beyond dumb not to question it, just because the BBC reports it. If you have a minority of any sort, they should be treated identically to everyone else. That didn't happen in Georgia, and Russia took action. There's no way Russia would have bothered, without the opressive treatment of the ethnic Russians. They could have easily taken all of Georgia if they wanted. So they obviously didn't want. Ukraine has an awful lot of ethnic Russians. Elections were very close between Russian leaning parties, and West leaning. Pretty much fifty fifty, till the current gang took over. Now, the elections get bent in their favour, just as they were probably bent the other way previously. Like I said, the politics of Ukraine is rotten. To portray Ukraine as democratic is laughable. Ironically, the Russians have shot themselves in the foot election-wise, becuse Crimea was more than 90% russian leaning, and so are the disputed areas on the Russian border. So now, those areas don't vote in elections, swaying the Ukraine electoral balance towards the West.

Like somebody said earlier, I think Putin is just holding back for the winter olympics, to be nice to China. He really doesn't have much to lose, invading Ukraine. Russia already has sanctions imposed, and to go much further would severely damage the European energy market. Sanctions or Russia in the past have given a boost to some home industries, and damaged foreign ones, as well as hurting Russia. I don't know why they don't make concessions on Ukraine. Ukraine would be a ticking time bomb, if it ever joined NATO, so giving Russia an assurance wouldn't actually cost anybody anything, it would be better all round. It's all about maintaining face. The west doesn't want to do a deal under duress, they would lose face. Kennedy did a secret deal with the Russians over the Cuban Missile Crisis. He made concessions, but he did it secretly, so he didn't lose face. In fact, the world media bought it, and the headlines were that Kennedy stared out Kruschev. In reality, he caved in. I personally admire him for caving in, I might not be here, if he hadn't. And the world was a better place for it all. Cuba and Turkey ended up with no nukes, which was better for everybody. In WW2, the US had a strategy of squeezing Japan, just like they are trying to squeeze Russia. Then they looked on in amazement, when the Japs blasted Pearl Harbour. They don't seem to have learned anything.

I don't like the way that the Uknainian problem is reported. There are two sides to it, but none of our media even adresses the Russian side. Russia gave up control of Ukraine voluntarily. It was part of the USSR. Would the USA do the same for Alaska, or Hawaii? Not a chance. But instead of getting credit for that, they get villified. Crimea was historically part of Russia, till a rather drunk Nikita Krushchev (a Ukranian) signed it over to Ukraine on his birthday. (from memory) When Ukraine was given independence, the understanding was free access to Crimea for Russia. When it became obvious that the West was doing all it could to gain control of Ukraine, and hence severely damage the Russian Black See fleet, Putin did the obvious, and took Crimea back. In hindsight, Russia should have retained Crimea, when Ukraine was cut loose. In even better hindsight, Ukraine should have been made to sign up to neutrality agreements as a price for independence, but that was done by Boris Yeltzin who was drunk most of the time. The west has been interfering in Ukrainian politics from the word go, with money and encouragement for anti-russian factions, all with the intention of denying Russia a base on Crimea for the Black Sea Fleet. When Putin put an end to that, it caused major rage in the US and CIA, they didn't like being thwarted. In view of all that, it's hardly surprising that Putin would object to Ukraine joining NATO. NATO is just an anti-russian military alliance, it has no other purpose. Why would Putin just roll over and accept all that? The politics of Ukraine is just about the most rotten in all Europe, they've never run a free and fair election. Both sides are as bad as each other. The idea of Ukraine being a member of Nato is pretty much an invitation to world war 3. If everyone could forget their egoes, the best way to progress would be for NATO to agree to Ukraine not being eligible to becoming a member, and for the West to stop trying to squeeze the pips out of Russia. The Russians lost nearly thirty million people in WW2. They have a right to be paranoid. What if Russia and China formed their own version of NATO ? Where one committed to fight alongside the other, in any conflict? That would be a nightmare, but it's not exactly impossible if we keep pushing.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is ready to warn Vladimir Putin during a video call Tuesday that Russia will face economy-jarring sanctions if it invades neighboring Ukraine as Biden seeks a diplomatic solution to deal with the tens of thousands of Russian troops massed near the Ukraine border. Biden aims to make clear that his administration stands ready to take actions against the Kremlin that would exact “a very real cost” on the Russian economy, according to White House officials. Putin, for his part, is expected to demand guarantees from Biden that the NATO military alliance will never expand to include Ukraine, which has long sought membership. That’s a non-starter for the Americans and their NATO allies. Hard to see what anyone can concede on. We can do sanctions, which haven't really done all that much in the past. Russian has watched NATO swallow up a lot of their old Soviet satellites in E. Europe in the past 25 years or so, so I think Ukraine with all its gas, minerals, and grain, as well as strategic location, would be viewed as the last straw. While the US and NATO see Ukraine as a natural additon to all the recent added satellites. There is also the chance that Putin could fight for Ukraine and have it turn into another Afghan debacle, where the invasion turns into a giant budget-buster for Russia. That might give him pause. If any of this was really up to Russian citizens (i.e. on Earth 2), then I think they would be saying, hell no, not another insane land war.

My take on this subject is that Russia was not happy when the US declared a change of military focus from them to China., hence the posturing on the Russia's borders. Ultimately, I think it is worried about NATO getting a strike advantage in a conflict by arming up in neghbouring countries. China is much more the empire-builder than Russia, I think, and has better resources to fulfill its expansionist objectives. China seems to be playing the war-by-attrition game, with constant incursions of Taiwanese airspace and island-building BS to claim stakes in geographical continuity with the artificial islands. If NATO states publicly that it has no intention of military build-up in the neighbouring countries , Russian forces will probably disperse. I feel this issue is more to do with pragmatism than ideology. China is ideologically driven, so conflict is more likely. China is trying to win by capturing inches of territory quietly, until it has it all... it is implacably and slowly wedging its way foward.

Are you referring too Mosques in a negative connotations? Like the Synagogue?