Originally Posted by
RatherBeFlying
Reminds me of theologians arguing over how many angels can dance on a pinhead
I'm tired of this slander. The problem concerns what it means to be in a place. If something's place is, as the Philosopher says, the innermost surface of the containing object ("Where is Bob? In the house), this works because the stuff in that place -- the matter -- can only belong to one thing. But angels are immaterial, and therefore, this definition can't hold. So, in arguing about angelic co-location, as well as things like motion through a void, these theologians arrived at notions of space independent of the Aristotelian model.
Certainly, words matter, and, in an emergent situation, the right words at the right time matter. But that terminology can't exist outside of the institutions that teach and promote their use. I'm sure there are plenty of studies that show that "Not invented here" isn't just arrogant ignorance, but a whole bureaucratic apparatus behind it designed to resist exoteric influence. It's a miracle that we've got the level of international R/T standardization that we have. Sure, in an ideal world, we'd all be using PAN PAN PAN and MAYDAY, LAHSO would be forbidden, and "Cleared to Land" would mean a clear runway too.
So, unlike those theologians, who were using ideal cases to get to real-world solutions to explace how you could be in a place (and how things could fly through the air), here, we've got people using a real-world case to point to how an ideal world should function. The only commonality is that at some point, Ockham comes into the pattern.