The extensive history of the Sith and their organization practices is all on Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.com/wiki/SithThe Sith
Basically, the Sith used to be a larger order similar to the Jedi, until one of the many wars, after their loss of which they went underground and started the practice of existing two at a time - and yes, that is two in the entire galaxy. Vader would *never* have taken a Padawan while his master survived. Not to mention, Sith apprentices are not called Padawan Learners.
The problem with this statement is that there isn't a party or candidate that supports pro-information-freedom policies, or indeed any policies that interfere with the entrenched interests of major corporate and bureaucratic players. There's no electoral process or available choice of official that will change any of this, just like no electoral process can stop the rampant freedom-for-[supposed]-security exchanges occurring in the non-transparent bowels of federal law enforcement/defense. In both cases, policies that undermine our freedom to participate in an open political economy are being advanced without the consent or ability to influence of the people, because of undermining of their rights which has already occurred, both through the structure of the official/explicit political process, and the equally important accompanying ideological apparatus of the mass media and corporatocracy. The "democracy" of the United States is bankrupt.
Fortunately, "retroactive" laws are called ex post facto, and forbidden by the Constitution.
Not that that document has stopped lawmakers and Presidents in the past.
Too bad wind is extremely scale-limited and solar cell production is one of the most toxic manufacturing processes around...and that neither has anything even approaching the energy output or efficiency of nuclear fission. Care to do a cost/benefit analysis of paving hundreds of square miles and producing enormous amounts of toxic waste, versus building a 2-square-mile nuclear facility with a couple tons of waste, for the same energetic output? Wind isn't even worth counting...if you can eke a few megawatts and a profit out of the two or three locations in the continental US you can actually get significant functionality out of them, go ahead.
While interested in agalmic or left-libertarian solutions to the problem of scarcity, or rather to what awaits us when we abolish it, I think the statist-socialist "reasoning" in the last quote simply doesn't make sense. It's completely backwards - the only things we can reliably call rights, or fundamental aspects of human nature or interaction, are codifications of those things which individuals and groups do freely and naturally. For example, contract rights. Humans naturally arrange agreements and formalized associations with each other. No one has to tell us we can - no "government regulation" or "societal mandate" is required for us to do it. We just do, because it's useful and necessary. This is the same with everything we do - we aren't granted rights by others, we have them because they're things we do that benefit us and don't harm others, and there's nothing to stop us.
Property rights are substantially more problematic - of land, at least. While an object that you craft yourself, or is crafted using resources you created or extracted, in a simple and direct way belongs to you, a section of the landscape is a lot harder to determine a legitimate basis for the ownership of. Locke brought up the labor-mixing justification, but I'll be the first to admit it's tenuous. However, that's a different topic, really.
What is really mythological is the "government" itself. What is society, or the government, or the state? From what or whom does it derive its power? What logical, or functional, basis is there for the "right" of society to control or mandate or grant anything? Force is a legitimate, honest answer. The state can impose taxes because it has a standing army to physically coerce the noncompliant. But if that's true, than it is also true that individuals have an equally justified "right" to seize land for their own by force, etc. etc. Either way, it doesn't matter - society is a collection of individuals. Through individual action based on common ideological goals, they can exercise coercive force, just like they can exercise coercive force on their own, autonomous level. Society has no special powers or rights over individuals that somehow arise emergently only at a group level. And the state, of course, is at best just a more codified exertion of the ideological will of "society". And that's ideal - in reality, it's almost universally a system of control that gains power for individuals or small groups by distorting the free political economy - even in so-called democracies.
Re:perhaps it was too subtle.
on
The DRM Scorecard
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Does the abbreviation '2W' mean anything to you? If it doesn't, totally ignore this, it's my not-so-stealth way of inquiring as to whether you're the one person I've met (in the meat) whose pet peeve is misuse of that phrase, and who also reads/.
The problem with this is one of explicit user consent. Email is sent to your mailserver and shows up in your account without your foreknowledge of what you're getting; it's an essential feature of any message-based communication service.
Websites, on the other hand, must be deliberately navigated to with some degree of foreknowledge of where you're going. There's a fundamental discontinuity between blocking packets the user did not solicit and will not want in his or her inbox, and preventing a user from navigating to a site as they freely and knowingly choose, using a navigation service they pay you to provide full, unfiltered access to.
Spammers don't pay you to give them access to someone else's server; customers do.
First of all, you really need to drop the nastiness in your tone. Ridicule is a means of attempting to control another through the attempted application of shame and guilt. It is hardly the embodiment of the scientific mind you appear to champion. While I believe emotions are important, ridicule is for those who do not know how to approach the unknown without fear. It speaks volumes about the perpetrator.
Hmm. There are people and situations for which/whom that's true, but this really isn't one of them. Rather, it's a result of history - the number of people who have used and believed in pseudoscientific mysticism to blow smoke across a real argument and win, not by rigorous logical and evidential means, but by confusing the issue with semantic smoke and mirrors, is really uncountable in my experience. This is in internet discussion forums, real life, etc. So, you'll forgive me if the time interval before I get fed up has gotten shorter over the years.
Secondly, no I am not a scientist. I do, however, have a fairly strong awareness of physics and I always maintain the kind of approach to life which allows me to ask enough of the right questions to understand those who are scientists. But no, I cannot debate in terms of high numbers and formulea. Can you? If I were to present the kind of maths you are requesting, could you make sense of them? In case you can, I can submit this fellow's work. . . I have had the opportunity to converse with him through email on the subject, and I believe him to be, for a variety of reasons, a man of sound mind and high intelligence.
Hmm. I know enough to get through at least some of the abstracts. The concepts are digestible, though most of the detailed math is beyond me. Thanks for the link, though - this is the physics that I really find interesting. But my question is not how this proves that other dimensions (n the scientific meaning of the term) exist, or that there are other universes - I already believe those things. The place I falter is where you jump from 'a theory that explains some questions about the observed universe posits the existence of a limited number of microdimensions' or 'there are multiple coexistent vacua or branes' to 'this universe includes some other "plane" which is inhabited by conscious entities of specific attributes that visit and interact with our "plane" on a regular basis'.
Good lord, I'm no Scientologist! The more you learn about this area of knowledge, the more you realize just how dangerous the Scientology movement is.
Heh. Trust me, no belief in the paranormal is necessary to understand that Scientology is a dangerous ideology incorporated into a fraudulent criminal scam that's led to multiple deaths under suspicious circumstances, invented by a late-20th-century scifi writer who died in a gutter while on the run from charges of grand larceny and fraud.
As per your question, entities channeled from the non-corporeal end of the existence spectrum offer a rich source of information with regard to the whole subject of how reality works beyond our own experience of it. But it is a source closed off to those who refuse to look at or acknowledge such things. Here's a link anyway to one such source, in case you are interested. . . There are several others.
Interestingly enough, the foreword actually involves a lot of stuff with which I am familiar - chronophysics and general relativity are two major areas of interest. And while I'll be the first to admit that there is nothing precluding the formation of CTCs (closed timelike curves) under extreme gravitational conditions or the effective simulation of superluminal-velocity movement, and that this has enormous implications for the causal structure and origins of the universe, a) these implications are so remote and higher-level that [observable] direct impact upon present-day humans in unlikely, and b) there remains no proof that these things, regardless of their theoretical possibility, actually ex
Bingo. Except you don't have to leave this universe to live in a reality where the physical laws of higher dimensions apply. Just wondering...do you actually know any physics? Because your meaningless pseudo-scientific quasimystical terminology is really quite entertaining. What are these higher dimensions? Can you describe them mathematically? Is there any theory (in the scientific meaning, not the hypothesis-synonymous one) or evidence to support their existence?
They're here to eat us. Pain and strong negative emotion is food. This is why psychopaths cause harm and chaos. It's why cats play with mice before they kill them. It's why the popular kids torment the unpopular kids. At higher levels of reality, this type of energetic transfer is the main system of feeding. We are a food source and our history has been engineered to create misery and fear. This explanation should satisfy both Fermi's Paradox and the alternative flavor of it which you provide. That is, "They have," and "They're hungry." Ah. I see. These higher-dimensional beings who don't obey the laws of physics are emotivores that have engineered human development to provide a source of negative vibes to feed on...this is interestingly reminiscent of Scientology. Once again, is this merely wild hypothesizing or is this back up by anything? And can you provide any scientific definition for this "higher reality" and how or why "feeding on pain" is the primary form of sustenance there?
And the addendum should read: "But said explanation is STILL not automatically the right one given the fact that researchers might be unaware of important factors." --Which means that Occam's razor is merely a semi-useful rule of thumb which is entirely subjective. Yes, and once those other factors are known, they are added to the set of relevant observations, the question is reevaluated, and the new least-assumptive theory is formulated. This is merely the reapplication of the same principle given new evidence. What you can't do is assume the other factors exist with no reason to think so, and use this as a reason to believe that the current theory is false and propose an even wilder, more assumptive theory on the basis of evidence that isn't proven or specified.
I've known highly placed political family and highly placed military people. I've seen and experienced truth. Government conspiracy is quite real. And it's not even that well concealed. Very true. It's just that, generally, the things that people legitimately believe the government has covered up or been involved with don't require that you support the existence of hyperdimensional sadists from some bizarre hybrid mythos of Lovecraft and L. Ron Hubbard, and are based on some basic rational principles and a modicum of real evidence. For example: The allegation that administration proponents of the Iraq War were motivated by oil deposits and knew that their public justifications of the conflict were false before the actual invasion make perfect sense given available evidence about these individuals and their business entanglements, what records have come to light, and the current political and economic state of foreign relations.
Don't post? That's not very useful. It's good to encourage others to seek. My signal is just as valid a part of the orchestra as any other. You have more to go on now than you did before. I'll post as I do and as I must. If you don't like it, don't read. But you are reading, which means on some level you are benefitting. My point is that if you wish your position to be considered valid or to accepted by others, you can't expect those who disagree to make your argument for you. You have to make it yourself. Claiming you have evidence but refusing to provide it, instead telling your opponent to seek it out for himself, is similar to the child who claims that he can do something unbelievable, but responds to requests to demonstrate with, "I don't feel like it right now."
Yes, I do. I understand the concept perfectly, and I cry bullshit. There's more than enough space to lay cables. All you have to do is negotiate with property owners. In the current system, the state owns all of this property and chooses to only grant a limited number of corporations the right to lay cable in the thousands or millions of cubic feet of space above the bedrock along any given stretch of road, but that isn't a natural limit of the land. A single large pipe could contain anywhere from dozens to hundreds of different cables simultaneously - you would have to pay the pipe owner, though, instead of the government, and the state would have less power to control and overregulate the market. Gee, what a tragedy that would be.
The only true "monopolies" are those caused by superior competency as a producer or coercive interference in the market process.
I didn't say that deregulation would solve the net neutrality problem, though I don't discount that possibility, insofar as deregulation is an applicable concept - it just wasn't what I was talking about. I was merely saying that many of the problems that proponents of the state interference in the market throw out are caused by government regulation, and that the damage or at least failure to help of deregulation is more often caused by failure to deregulate.
No. You are doing it again. --You are assuming that alien beings have human limitations, human technology and exist in the same physical reality that we do. You are essentially assuming that you are dealing with humans, or at the most, Star Trek aliens, (humans in costumes). This is a very narrow view of the possibilities available, and indeed, the probable reality. UFO's are almost certainly not nuts and bolts technology, at least not in the sense a human engineer might grasp.
The conservation of mass-energy is not a 'human limitation.' The evolutionary utility of an observer-oriented goal system is not a 'human limitation.' The tendency of a species composed of such goal systems to seek to maximize the utility of available resources is not a human limitation, and the best way to accomplish this and the problems that entails are subject to the laws of physics, as is the difficulty of interstellar travel. Unless your proposition is that these aliens come not only from outside Earth, but from another universe, and somehow carry the differing laws of their universe with them, there are in fact certain requirements that all occupants of our vacuum are subject to.
Leave for a moment the question of arguing over what you should believe, (it makes little difference to anybody but you), and look over the logic again. There's no fallacy there. --All I'm saying is that if the alien presence is real then the aliens automatically know more than you do about their motivations in coming here. This is by no means an unreasonable assumption. Just because you can't imagine a reason does not mean there is no reason. In fact, there ARE reasons of which people are aware. You simply do not know what they are because you've limited yourself to your current logical bubble.
Then tell me it! I'd love to hear it. I'm not fundamentally opposed to the idea of UFOs-as-aliens; I just don't see it as likely or supported by evidence and known natural law. If you have an answer to the inverse of Fermi's Paradox (not "why haven't they?" but "why should they?") enlighten me.
Waving Occam around means little. Occam's logical razor is effective in convincing the user of pretty much anything they desire, depending on their starting assumptions. Occam was an 11th century monk who used it to prove the existence of god! His razor does offer some use in the sciences when one needs to come up with general avenues of further exploration, but the key to that is further exploration. No reputable scientist would state boldly what is real and what is not based on a handy (but flimsy) logical rule of thumb.
You clearly know little of the philosophy of science. Along with Hume's Dictum, Ockham's Razor is one of the two fundamental premises of all science. Now, you may be under the misapprehension that the principle is merely that 'the simplest explanation is usually the best'. Wrong. Most clearly put, it is that "when there are multiple logically coherent and uncontradicted explanations for a set of observations, the one that requires the fewest assumptions is the best."
Far smarter people than you have studied the problem and have organized the government and military accordingly, (using fear and secrecy and media control methods).
Ah, well that clears it up. I'm sure you can back that up by proving it, or at the very least pointing me towards some peer-reviewed scientific articles that attempt to prove it. And as far as the government-military conspiracy goes, wow do I love conspiracy theorists. It's so much fun: the government is part of a vast conspiracy, but there's no evidence because, of course, the government conspiracy controls or destroyed it all. So the lack of evidence is proof of the assertion!
The world is not a court room drama. Nobody owes you proof of anything and your level of awareness is entirely your problem. Considering that your life is being directly affected by the reality around you, it is a healthy idea to pay atte
"Natural physical monopolies?" I think it's you, rather than he, that is joking. The abusive monopolistic power of ISPs and similar telecommunications service providers is handed to them by the regulation of the government. Government effectively grants monopolies to these companies through exclusive rights to lay dark fiber in certain areas, etc., adds a pile of supposedly consumer-beneficial regulations on top of that, and wonders why barriers to entry are so high, industry oligopolies form, and the competitive forces of the market aren't working.
So since the "free market" isn't working, they add MORE regulations. When these fail to help, much less solve, the problem, someone comes up with the bright idea of actually rolling government interference back. Laudable, but when you do a half-assed job that only removes a few of the limitations on the market, you're left with an even more nonsensical regulatory structure. Which plays right into the hands of statists, who now get to claim that deregulation doesn't work and the "free market" is clearly a failure.
What are you basing this assumption on? Isn't it more likely that if said lifeform exists, and if they are here, then perhaps there is something that they know which you do not? You cannot use your human perspective to assume what an alien life form would think of as reasonable or desirable. In fact, there are many indicators that time and space do not exist in the same way for the UFO aliens as it does for us. A simple factor as that throws off all such assumptions as yours. While it's an absolutely valid claim that I cannot generalize my motivations to an alien psychology, in the solution space of the possible outcomes of life's evolution and development to a technologically advanced level, basic common strictures like the scarcity of material resources, the difficult of interstellar travel, the evolutionary superiority (or even necessity) of observer-oriented goal systems, and the trend towards maximization of informational 'thought-space' for minimal mass-energy budget is going to have generalized effects for the average civilization.
The second major logical fallacy here is that in support of a claim (that UFOs have visited Earth) I should assume that unknown other information exists that these hypothetical aliens know and which would cause them to seek to come to Earth, and that this is a reason to believe in these visitations in the first place! This is both circular and baselessly assumptive.
No, it does not stand to reason. If it is happening as people report, and there are many excellent reasons to believe that it is, then is it not more logical to think that there is something you are overlooking than it is to think that the entirety of the last sixty years of observation and research is mistaken? If you dig enough, you will indeed, find many reasonable answers which will fit into your questions like puzzle pieces. No, assuming unspecified evidence that I don't have a) exists, and b) proves your claim, is NOT more logical. Look at it like a scientific claim, or a legal case: The vast majority of UFO reports are based solely on unverified eyewitness accounts, frequently by highly unreliable individuals. Those that aren't, or that are based on larger numbers of witnesses, have equally coherent explanations that require fewer assumptive leaps - natural phenomena and military testing, primarily. Ockham's Razor. Moreover, most of the particularly major or famous examples have been shown to be hoaxes. And this doesn't even begin to cover the issue of totally baseless derivative conspiracy theories...
Simply put, using a string of unspecified assumptions to conclude from limited evidence of low reliability that lifeforms of unknown origin and evolution used ridiculously advanced technology to travel to a world self-evidently beneath them for unknown reasons or motivations is ludicrous.
Hmm. That's fairly reasonable, but I'd still contend that there's a fundamental divide of sapience, awareness, and technology between humans and most lower animals that makes fully direct analogies to our treatment of them not totally accurate.
I think the distinction is that while intelligent, civilization-forming extraterrestrial life may be not only real but abundant on cosmic scales, the likelihood that any intelligent lifeform smart enough to develop an economical method of traveling interstellar distances within a reasonable timeframe would have any desire to come to Earth is exceedingly low.
And even if they did, it further stands to reason that they would either interfere with us outright, or be completely undetectable, that any experiments they performed would not be half-assed jobs that left people running around with partial memories chatting about it, and they would certainly not be allied with, much less occasionally overpowered by, the US government/military.
How interesting. You do realize that all methods of information transmission that don't use cables (and even some that do) utilize the radio spectrum of light, I assume? So what you of course support is that all information transferred over all wireless networks of any kind is now public domain, including the contents of your email or even intranetwork file movements. Is listening in on your cellphone also fair game for everyone now, too? Do we require people not to use encryption on the airwaves?
What about people who can't afford to have a computer at home? You've applied regressive censorship - only the poor are prevented from accessing certain information.
Apparently, the bulk of American Protestantism is the most of immature of immature religions, by your standards. Not to mention both Shi'ite and Sunni Islam; and I wouldn't exempt Roman Catholicism either - you'd be shocked at the sheer degree of influence they have over Italian politics, and on a larger scale on the sociopolitical trends and climates of Latin American countries.
Slashdot Mirror
Stephen King: Wow, my place on the quality scale of literature was just compared to Brittney Spears' in music. I think I'm going to go kill myself.
The extensive history of the Sith and their organization practices is all on Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.com/wiki/SithThe Sith Basically, the Sith used to be a larger order similar to the Jedi, until one of the many wars, after their loss of which they went underground and started the practice of existing two at a time - and yes, that is two in the entire galaxy. Vader would *never* have taken a Padawan while his master survived. Not to mention, Sith apprentices are not called Padawan Learners.
The problem with this statement is that there isn't a party or candidate that supports pro-information-freedom policies, or indeed any policies that interfere with the entrenched interests of major corporate and bureaucratic players. There's no electoral process or available choice of official that will change any of this, just like no electoral process can stop the rampant freedom-for-[supposed]-security exchanges occurring in the non-transparent bowels of federal law enforcement/defense. In both cases, policies that undermine our freedom to participate in an open political economy are being advanced without the consent or ability to influence of the people, because of undermining of their rights which has already occurred, both through the structure of the official/explicit political process, and the equally important accompanying ideological apparatus of the mass media and corporatocracy. The "democracy" of the United States is bankrupt.
Fortunately, "retroactive" laws are called ex post facto, and forbidden by the Constitution. Not that that document has stopped lawmakers and Presidents in the past.
Too bad wind is extremely scale-limited and solar cell production is one of the most toxic manufacturing processes around...and that neither has anything even approaching the energy output or efficiency of nuclear fission. Care to do a cost/benefit analysis of paving hundreds of square miles and producing enormous amounts of toxic waste, versus building a 2-square-mile nuclear facility with a couple tons of waste, for the same energetic output? Wind isn't even worth counting...if you can eke a few megawatts and a profit out of the two or three locations in the continental US you can actually get significant functionality out of them, go ahead.
..and this is how people get placed on watchlists and become ECHELON targets.
While interested in agalmic or left-libertarian solutions to the problem of scarcity, or rather to what awaits us when we abolish it, I think the statist-socialist "reasoning" in the last quote simply doesn't make sense. It's completely backwards - the only things we can reliably call rights, or fundamental aspects of human nature or interaction, are codifications of those things which individuals and groups do freely and naturally. For example, contract rights. Humans naturally arrange agreements and formalized associations with each other. No one has to tell us we can - no "government regulation" or "societal mandate" is required for us to do it. We just do, because it's useful and necessary. This is the same with everything we do - we aren't granted rights by others, we have them because they're things we do that benefit us and don't harm others, and there's nothing to stop us.
Property rights are substantially more problematic - of land, at least. While an object that you craft yourself, or is crafted using resources you created or extracted, in a simple and direct way belongs to you, a section of the landscape is a lot harder to determine a legitimate basis for the ownership of. Locke brought up the labor-mixing justification, but I'll be the first to admit it's tenuous. However, that's a different topic, really.
What is really mythological is the "government" itself. What is society, or the government, or the state? From what or whom does it derive its power? What logical, or functional, basis is there for the "right" of society to control or mandate or grant anything? Force is a legitimate, honest answer. The state can impose taxes because it has a standing army to physically coerce the noncompliant. But if that's true, than it is also true that individuals have an equally justified "right" to seize land for their own by force, etc. etc. Either way, it doesn't matter - society is a collection of individuals. Through individual action based on common ideological goals, they can exercise coercive force, just like they can exercise coercive force on their own, autonomous level. Society has no special powers or rights over individuals that somehow arise emergently only at a group level. And the state, of course, is at best just a more codified exertion of the ideological will of "society". And that's ideal - in reality, it's almost universally a system of control that gains power for individuals or small groups by distorting the free political economy - even in so-called democracies.
Does the abbreviation '2W' mean anything to you? If it doesn't, totally ignore this, it's my not-so-stealth way of inquiring as to whether you're the one person I've met (in the meat) whose pet peeve is misuse of that phrase, and who also reads /.
--CJ--
The problem with this is one of explicit user consent. Email is sent to your mailserver and shows up in your account without your foreknowledge of what you're getting; it's an essential feature of any message-based communication service.
Websites, on the other hand, must be deliberately navigated to with some degree of foreknowledge of where you're going. There's a fundamental discontinuity between blocking packets the user did not solicit and will not want in his or her inbox, and preventing a user from navigating to a site as they freely and knowingly choose, using a navigation service they pay you to provide full, unfiltered access to.
Spammers don't pay you to give them access to someone else's server; customers do.
First of all, you really need to drop the nastiness in your tone. Ridicule is a means of attempting to control another through the attempted application of shame and guilt. It is hardly the embodiment of the scientific mind you appear to champion. While I believe emotions are important, ridicule is for those who do not know how to approach the unknown without fear. It speaks volumes about the perpetrator.
Hmm. There are people and situations for which/whom that's true, but this really isn't one of them. Rather, it's a result of history - the number of people who have used and believed in pseudoscientific mysticism to blow smoke across a real argument and win, not by rigorous logical and evidential means, but by confusing the issue with semantic smoke and mirrors, is really uncountable in my experience. This is in internet discussion forums, real life, etc. So, you'll forgive me if the time interval before I get fed up has gotten shorter over the years.
Secondly, no I am not a scientist. I do, however, have a fairly strong awareness of physics and I always maintain the kind of approach to life which allows me to ask enough of the right questions to understand those who are scientists. But no, I cannot debate in terms of high numbers and formulea. Can you? If I were to present the kind of maths you are requesting, could you make sense of them? In case you can, I can submit this fellow's work. . . I have had the opportunity to converse with him through email on the subject, and I believe him to be, for a variety of reasons, a man of sound mind and high intelligence.
Hmm. I know enough to get through at least some of the abstracts. The concepts are digestible, though most of the detailed math is beyond me. Thanks for the link, though - this is the physics that I really find interesting. But my question is not how this proves that other dimensions (n the scientific meaning of the term) exist, or that there are other universes - I already believe those things. The place I falter is where you jump from 'a theory that explains some questions about the observed universe posits the existence of a limited number of microdimensions' or 'there are multiple coexistent vacua or branes' to 'this universe includes some other "plane" which is inhabited by conscious entities of specific attributes that visit and interact with our "plane" on a regular basis'.
Good lord, I'm no Scientologist! The more you learn about this area of knowledge, the more you realize just how dangerous the Scientology movement is.
Heh. Trust me, no belief in the paranormal is necessary to understand that Scientology is a dangerous ideology incorporated into a fraudulent criminal scam that's led to multiple deaths under suspicious circumstances, invented by a late-20th-century scifi writer who died in a gutter while on the run from charges of grand larceny and fraud.
As per your question, entities channeled from the non-corporeal end of the existence spectrum offer a rich source of information with regard to the whole subject of how reality works beyond our own experience of it. But it is a source closed off to those who refuse to look at or acknowledge such things. Here's a link anyway to one such source, in case you are interested. . . There are several others.
Interestingly enough, the foreword actually involves a lot of stuff with which I am familiar - chronophysics and general relativity are two major areas of interest. And while I'll be the first to admit that there is nothing precluding the formation of CTCs (closed timelike curves) under extreme gravitational conditions or the effective simulation of superluminal-velocity movement, and that this has enormous implications for the causal structure and origins of the universe, a) these implications are so remote and higher-level that [observable] direct impact upon present-day humans in unlikely, and b) there remains no proof that these things, regardless of their theoretical possibility, actually ex
Yes, I do. I understand the concept perfectly, and I cry bullshit. There's more than enough space to lay cables. All you have to do is negotiate with property owners. In the current system, the state owns all of this property and chooses to only grant a limited number of corporations the right to lay cable in the thousands or millions of cubic feet of space above the bedrock along any given stretch of road, but that isn't a natural limit of the land. A single large pipe could contain anywhere from dozens to hundreds of different cables simultaneously - you would have to pay the pipe owner, though, instead of the government, and the state would have less power to control and overregulate the market. Gee, what a tragedy that would be. The only true "monopolies" are those caused by superior competency as a producer or coercive interference in the market process.
I didn't say that deregulation would solve the net neutrality problem, though I don't discount that possibility, insofar as deregulation is an applicable concept - it just wasn't what I was talking about. I was merely saying that many of the problems that proponents of the state interference in the market throw out are caused by government regulation, and that the damage or at least failure to help of deregulation is more often caused by failure to deregulate.
No. You are doing it again. --You are assuming that alien beings have human limitations, human technology and exist in the same physical reality that we do. You are essentially assuming that you are dealing with humans, or at the most, Star Trek aliens, (humans in costumes). This is a very narrow view of the possibilities available, and indeed, the probable reality. UFO's are almost certainly not nuts and bolts technology, at least not in the sense a human engineer might grasp.
The conservation of mass-energy is not a 'human limitation.' The evolutionary utility of an observer-oriented goal system is not a 'human limitation.' The tendency of a species composed of such goal systems to seek to maximize the utility of available resources is not a human limitation, and the best way to accomplish this and the problems that entails are subject to the laws of physics, as is the difficulty of interstellar travel. Unless your proposition is that these aliens come not only from outside Earth, but from another universe, and somehow carry the differing laws of their universe with them, there are in fact certain requirements that all occupants of our vacuum are subject to.
Leave for a moment the question of arguing over what you should believe, (it makes little difference to anybody but you), and look over the logic again. There's no fallacy there. --All I'm saying is that if the alien presence is real then the aliens automatically know more than you do about their motivations in coming here. This is by no means an unreasonable assumption. Just because you can't imagine a reason does not mean there is no reason. In fact, there ARE reasons of which people are aware. You simply do not know what they are because you've limited yourself to your current logical bubble.
Then tell me it! I'd love to hear it. I'm not fundamentally opposed to the idea of UFOs-as-aliens; I just don't see it as likely or supported by evidence and known natural law. If you have an answer to the inverse of Fermi's Paradox (not "why haven't they?" but "why should they?") enlighten me.
Waving Occam around means little. Occam's logical razor is effective in convincing the user of pretty much anything they desire, depending on their starting assumptions. Occam was an 11th century monk who used it to prove the existence of god! His razor does offer some use in the sciences when one needs to come up with general avenues of further exploration, but the key to that is further exploration. No reputable scientist would state boldly what is real and what is not based on a handy (but flimsy) logical rule of thumb.
You clearly know little of the philosophy of science. Along with Hume's Dictum, Ockham's Razor is one of the two fundamental premises of all science. Now, you may be under the misapprehension that the principle is merely that 'the simplest explanation is usually the best'. Wrong. Most clearly put, it is that "when there are multiple logically coherent and uncontradicted explanations for a set of observations, the one that requires the fewest assumptions is the best."
Far smarter people than you have studied the problem and have organized the government and military accordingly, (using fear and secrecy and media control methods).
Ah, well that clears it up. I'm sure you can back that up by proving it, or at the very least pointing me towards some peer-reviewed scientific articles that attempt to prove it. And as far as the government-military conspiracy goes, wow do I love conspiracy theorists. It's so much fun: the government is part of a vast conspiracy, but there's no evidence because, of course, the government conspiracy controls or destroyed it all. So the lack of evidence is proof of the assertion!
The world is not a court room drama. Nobody owes you proof of anything and your level of awareness is entirely your problem. Considering that your life is being directly affected by the reality around you, it is a healthy idea to pay atte
"Natural physical monopolies?" I think it's you, rather than he, that is joking. The abusive monopolistic power of ISPs and similar telecommunications service providers is handed to them by the regulation of the government. Government effectively grants monopolies to these companies through exclusive rights to lay dark fiber in certain areas, etc., adds a pile of supposedly consumer-beneficial regulations on top of that, and wonders why barriers to entry are so high, industry oligopolies form, and the competitive forces of the market aren't working. So since the "free market" isn't working, they add MORE regulations. When these fail to help, much less solve, the problem, someone comes up with the bright idea of actually rolling government interference back. Laudable, but when you do a half-assed job that only removes a few of the limitations on the market, you're left with an even more nonsensical regulatory structure. Which plays right into the hands of statists, who now get to claim that deregulation doesn't work and the "free market" is clearly a failure.
Hmm. That's fairly reasonable, but I'd still contend that there's a fundamental divide of sapience, awareness, and technology between humans and most lower animals that makes fully direct analogies to our treatment of them not totally accurate.
I think the distinction is that while intelligent, civilization-forming extraterrestrial life may be not only real but abundant on cosmic scales, the likelihood that any intelligent lifeform smart enough to develop an economical method of traveling interstellar distances within a reasonable timeframe would have any desire to come to Earth is exceedingly low. And even if they did, it further stands to reason that they would either interfere with us outright, or be completely undetectable, that any experiments they performed would not be half-assed jobs that left people running around with partial memories chatting about it, and they would certainly not be allied with, much less occasionally overpowered by, the US government/military.
How interesting. You do realize that all methods of information transmission that don't use cables (and even some that do) utilize the radio spectrum of light, I assume? So what you of course support is that all information transferred over all wireless networks of any kind is now public domain, including the contents of your email or even intranetwork file movements. Is listening in on your cellphone also fair game for everyone now, too? Do we require people not to use encryption on the airwaves?
What about people who can't afford to have a computer at home? You've applied regressive censorship - only the poor are prevented from accessing certain information.
Apparently, the bulk of American Protestantism is the most of immature of immature religions, by your standards. Not to mention both Shi'ite and Sunni Islam; and I wouldn't exempt Roman Catholicism either - you'd be shocked at the sheer degree of influence they have over Italian politics, and on a larger scale on the sociopolitical trends and climates of Latin American countries.