Erm... do you even know what SETI is ? Or the concept of a round-trip ?
1) If we had sent a signal, it would take 20 years to get there, and we could expect a reply in no less than 40 years. Twice your estimate. 2) That doesn't actually matter however since we didn't send a signal at all. All we did was listen for signals coming from there. In other words - we were hoping maybe they sent us a signal 20 years ago - or more likely just generally sent out a signal in case *anybody* answers, or even more likely that we could catch a listen-in on a signal that was never intended for outsiders to begin with. If an alien race has satelite television - then any of the beamed-up signals that don't quite hit the target keeps going through space - SETI is really about trying to pick up any that may have come our way.
The most likely result we could get from SETI would probably be accidental signals - on the basis that any aliens running a seti project is most likely to get such signals from us (we sent a lot of signals into space, none of it is actually intended for alien consumption). A signal intending to be picked up by other species (as in Sagan's Contact) would be a bonus.
That is actually the biggest problem I have with SETI. We're just listening hoping somebody else is bothering to talk or we pick up some stray signal. Truth is, we may well end up in a situation where half a dozen intelligent species are doing the same. All listening to space, waiting for the other one to actually say something.
>Those tyrants like Hitler, Stalin and Mao didn't build their regimes because atheism told them.
If your position is that religion is "evil" and must be eradicated by force - then that's so close to "atheism told me" as to make no difference whatsoever.
But the conclusion you're defending against is wrong, and I reject both sides of the "religion killed more/less people in wars than anything else" argument. The only thing you'll end up proving is that extremists - ESPECIALLY past extremists - are not representative of their belief system today. Suicide bombers are no more representative of mainstream Muslim faith than the crusades are of modern day mainstream Christian faith or Mao of mainstream atheism. That's why they are extremists. Where the shit invariably hits the fan is when the extremists gain power, it's happened in Christianity, it's happened in Islam, it's happened in Buddhism and it has indeed also happened in atheism. Extremism leads to evil, while tolerance promotes peace - so the lesson of history is that for a peaceful, progressive society where the sciences (for example) can flourish we need moderates in power, we need to promote tolerance between various systems of belief. This is the fundamental logic behind freedom of religion laws.
So the real question isn't what you think about a particular religion or non-religious view. The question that matters is - how much have you done to promote the holders of that views security and rights in maintaining their faith. Out of enlightened self-interest (which is really what the golden rule comes down to anyway), it's in your interest to defend every religion out there. Be an example of the tolerance you yourself want to experience.
>Being an anarchist (which has nothing to do with AMERICAN/CAPITALIST libertarianism)
FTFY. Proper libertarianism is non-state-socialist and has been for nearly 500 years before Ayn Rand was born and is very close to (and in many ways identical to) proper anarchism. I consider myself a socialist libertarian, but I put those words above the struck-through-A symbol of anarchism. Libertarianism as it ought to be is simply one form of anarchism.
>I agree with the Parent that Martin Luther King would not be as effective today hiding behind a pseudonym and a faceless blog as he was when he took the National Mall
As I stated in my other post, how effective anonymous speech may or may not be at any given goal is not relevant to the question of whether it is a valid and protected form of free speech. The claims by the OP that the first amendment does not apply to anonymous speech since it didn't exist at the time are ludicrous and easily disproven - so we must come to the conclusion that the 1st amendment IS intended to protect anonymous speech as well.
Firstly - that's not actually relevant to the point I was making. You stated that anonymous speech didn't EXIST when the first amendment was written, I clearly stated this to be absolutely and provably untrue.
But having said that - yes, they have. First example: anonymous letters to newspapers have gotten people jailed for crimes many times - indeed a lot of people who have information and evidence of crimes are more comfortable talking to newspapers than to the police if they fear for their own safety. This becomes MORE likely when the evidence is about a crime by a politician or other person in a position of power.
At other times anonymous letters have started debates, that inspired editorials that changed the outcomes of elections.
But none of that actually matters much. Whether anonymous speech is effective at any particular type of social impact is utterly irrelevant to the question of whether it is VALID speech that ought to be protected and free. The answer to the latter is a resounding yes. Indeed the framers of the constitution in the USA were very much aware of anonymous speech and it's power and almost certainly specifically intended for it to be protected - not long before many of them had been writing letters of dissent against the official government of the land, encouraging the criminal act of rebellion against the monarch and planning a revolution. You can bet your ass they didn't sign the ones that were outright incriminating.
>You could hand write everything, but making copies would be very troublesome and time consuming.
Oh and this line... guess those historians also got wrong the date of the invention of the printing press - since this event which changed the world forever is supposed to have happened a long time before the U.S. constitution got it's first amendment. Wait... didn't Benjamin Franklin use to run a newspaper ? With a printing press ?
If anything we have LESS anonymity now than we had back then. Nobody 400 years ago could actually prove beyond a reasonable doubt which printing press produced a copy, or where it was originally typeset.
So people in the 1700s didn't write anonymous letters ? These letters were not frequently circulated, published by newspapers and such ?
Strange how you seem to know something that every other historian on earth doesn't. I'll look forward to reading your published research paper which should earn you quite a few honorary PHDs at the very least !
Exactly. That's why I said technically they need a push to start - providing such a push is an engineering problem we've long since solved, but it wasn't solved back when Tessla invented 3-phase. The motor/generator he worked from still needed a manual push before it would get going.
And AC was originally practical exactly BECAUSE Tessla managed to invent three-phase... single-phase generators would probably need to be custom designed as I'm not aware of anybody building them en-masse for the non-existent market they may fill...
Three-phase generators/motors are fundamental to what made the modern electrical world possible in the first place. Technically a single-phase motor cannot even start without an outside push...
>This is especially true as long as you do not install any third party driver or software on it
And considering almost every network card in the known universe is unsupported under Windows XP without third-party drivers (dunno if this got better with newer versions, never used them) - it's probably a very good way to avoid viruses as well.
Yeah but the other 7 million don't count because they are expat white wimps from South Africa who couldn't stick it out in a continent that's not for sissies.:P
Some states in the USA have laws requiring that pigs be housed in an enclosure they can at least turn around in... that's bigger than most apartments in America and the pigs can't be charged rent !
>1) There's no good way to generate DC using a mechanical system. So while something like a solar cell will generate you DC, a mechanical generator won't, at least not without some fiddling and then not as efficiently as AC. These days, not a big deal, we have good devices to convert from one to the other quite efficiently. However when the current wars were happening, DC generation wasn't as good as AC generation. You see it to this day: Cars use alternators (as in alternating current) to generate power, despite being DC devices. The alternator then has a rectifier bridge to turn it in to (pulsed) DC power, which the battery helps clean up.
There is actually an interesting twist to this however which comes into play with very long power lines. The Cahora Bassa hydro-electric dam powers much of South Africa's Gauteng industrial region despite being in another country. Gauteng runs on AC, Cahora Bassa generates AC - but the line between them is DC. It gets rectified at the dam site and then reconverted to AC when it gets to the local grid. Obviously that equipment cost a pretty penny - but DC was still cheaper. The reason is that DC only requires as single cable - which can be supported by quite a thin little pole (the ground itself can be the return line). So if the line is long enough - running the power over DC can be more economical, you just need enough distance for the cable savings to start to get bigger than the converter costs.
Well I don't think anybody has done *that* study... but based on the studies I do know about, and the well-known fact that driver-fatique is the number one cause of accidents on long roads... I would probably feel safer with every other driver on meth than with every other driver asleep.
The article was clear yes, the discussion was pointing out a possible causation for one of the many things that correlated. Somebody discounted that causation on the basis that the effect seems to hold for decaf as well - I pointed out that placebo effect can cause the same causation to hold true even for those. Now if the placebo effect is weaker than the actual effect, then it would mean the correlation would be smaller over-all (reduces the average) but the correlation would still result, you would just find that if you were to single out the non-decaf drinkers the risk (in this particular case) would be reduced even further. However the study didn't do that, this is just speculation.
Your suggestion however is silly. That caffeine is a stimulant has long been proven beyond any reasonable scientific doubt. We know what it does and exactly how it does it (caffeine binds to the same neural receptors that Ritalin does). You are effectively suggesting that real caffeine's effect is just a placebo and we know for a fact that this is not true because we've seen it's effect in action chemically. That said - the most likely real difference between a real and placebo caffeine effect would be duration. If you take either one in the morning it will help you wake up - but the placebo will wear off sooner. Either way you'd be fully awake by the time it wore off - so the effect may not actually have a measureable impact on this particular study (accident risk) while it certainly does have a measureable impact on other studies that have been done.
The article didn't claim causation, just correlation. But I think it's a little more than you said. For those who DO drink a stimulant, the effect is real and can reduce accident risk. For those who just have the belief of drinking one, the placebo is strong enough to have a measurable effect, but quite likely not as effective as the real thing.
Chemically no, but since it (supposedly) tastes just like the real thing, I would be incredibly surprized if the association of that taste with caffeine's real effect didn't have a fairly powerful placebo effect. It may not rival the real thing but I am sure it beats nothing. Brains are quite complicated things, which sometimes have cause/effect patterns that appear to violate the laws of physics (note that I say "appear to" ) - they don't actually do so, but they are sufficiently complicated that we have to up our game. Think of "I must go to work or I'll get fired" - this seems to be a future event causing something in the present. In reality the causality is fine - but only if you expand your thinking to a broader range (the firing isn't causing the trip - the FEAR of firing is - and that's a present event). Same goes here. The drinking of coffee has a known effect and the brain is well aware of that effect on itself. Now if you simulate the conditions of the cause without the actual cause being present, you find that the brain may recreate the same effect anyway - it will simply use other materials to do so....and that whole long bloody tangent just to say that at least a significant portion of decaf drinkers probably do feel sharper and more awake after drinking their cup than non-coffee drinkers.
Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty ? The burden of proof is on the accuser - we shouldn't HAVE to proof that most use is legitimate, they do HAVE to prove otherwise if they are going to claim it.
>Anyone who claims that BitTorrent has plenty of legitimate uses should be fine with the arrest and conviction of those who use it for illegal purposes.
Most of us are. We don't want our legitimate uses harmed by people angry at the illegitimate uses and we are all for the justice system doing it's job as far as criminals are concerned. Most of us also believe in things like habeus corpus, due process and that the punishment should fit the crime - so we'll shout about ridiculous fines for sharing too. Those two points of view are complementary not contradictory. Then there are many of us who believe the majority of the illegitimate uses actually OUGHT to be legal and want the law to be CHANGED there. Again this is a complementary not a contradictory position.
Even if you believe "piracy" should be legal, there is nothing intellectually dishonest about ALSO knowing that bittorrent has significant legal uses and those should not be harmed for the sake of preventing the illegal ones (while they remain illegal).
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But that had nothing to do with the SETI project now did it ? And these Australian dishes in question weren't involved in that either.
Erm... do you even know what SETI is ? Or the concept of a round-trip ?
1) If we had sent a signal, it would take 20 years to get there, and we could expect a reply in no less than 40 years. Twice your estimate.
2) That doesn't actually matter however since we didn't send a signal at all. All we did was listen for signals coming from there. In other words - we were hoping maybe they sent us a signal 20 years ago - or more likely just generally sent out a signal in case *anybody* answers, or even more likely that we could catch a listen-in on a signal that was never intended for outsiders to begin with. If an alien race has satelite television - then any of the beamed-up signals that don't quite hit the target keeps going through space - SETI is really about trying to pick up any that may have come our way.
The most likely result we could get from SETI would probably be accidental signals - on the basis that any aliens running a seti project is most likely to get such signals from us (we sent a lot of signals into space, none of it is actually intended for alien consumption).
A signal intending to be picked up by other species (as in Sagan's Contact) would be a bonus.
That is actually the biggest problem I have with SETI. We're just listening hoping somebody else is bothering to talk or we pick up some stray signal. Truth is, we may well end up in a situation where half a dozen intelligent species are doing the same. All listening to space, waiting for the other one to actually say something.
>Those tyrants like Hitler, Stalin and Mao didn't build their regimes because atheism told them.
If your position is that religion is "evil" and must be eradicated by force - then that's so close to "atheism told me" as to make no difference whatsoever.
But the conclusion you're defending against is wrong, and I reject both sides of the "religion killed more/less people in wars than anything else" argument. The only thing you'll end up proving is that extremists - ESPECIALLY past extremists - are not representative of their belief system today. Suicide bombers are no more representative of mainstream Muslim faith than the crusades are of modern day mainstream Christian faith or Mao of mainstream atheism.
That's why they are extremists. Where the shit invariably hits the fan is when the extremists gain power, it's happened in Christianity, it's happened in Islam, it's happened in Buddhism and it has indeed also happened in atheism. Extremism leads to evil, while tolerance promotes peace - so the lesson of history is that for a peaceful, progressive society where the sciences (for example) can flourish we need moderates in power, we need to promote tolerance between various systems of belief.
This is the fundamental logic behind freedom of religion laws.
So the real question isn't what you think about a particular religion or non-religious view. The question that matters is - how much have you done to promote the holders of that views security and rights in maintaining their faith. Out of enlightened self-interest (which is really what the golden rule comes down to anyway), it's in your interest to defend every religion out there. Be an example of the tolerance you yourself want to experience.
>Being an anarchist (which has nothing to do with AMERICAN/CAPITALIST libertarianism)
FTFY. Proper libertarianism is non-state-socialist and has been for nearly 500 years before Ayn Rand was born and is very close to (and in many ways identical to) proper anarchism.
I consider myself a socialist libertarian, but I put those words above the struck-through-A symbol of anarchism. Libertarianism as it ought to be is simply one form of anarchism.
>I agree with the Parent that Martin Luther King would not be as effective today hiding behind a pseudonym and a faceless blog as he was when he took the National Mall
As I stated in my other post, how effective anonymous speech may or may not be at any given goal is not relevant to the question of whether it is a valid and protected form of free speech. The claims by the OP that the first amendment does not apply to anonymous speech since it didn't exist at the time are ludicrous and easily disproven - so we must come to the conclusion that the 1st amendment IS intended to protect anonymous speech as well.
Firstly - that's not actually relevant to the point I was making. You stated that anonymous speech didn't EXIST when the first amendment was written, I clearly stated this to be absolutely and provably untrue.
But having said that - yes, they have. First example: anonymous letters to newspapers have gotten people jailed for crimes many times - indeed a lot of people who have information and evidence of crimes are more comfortable talking to newspapers than to the police if they fear for their own safety. This becomes MORE likely when the evidence is about a crime by a politician or other person in a position of power.
At other times anonymous letters have started debates, that inspired editorials that changed the outcomes of elections.
But none of that actually matters much. Whether anonymous speech is effective at any particular type of social impact is utterly irrelevant to the question of whether it is VALID speech that ought to be protected and free. The answer to the latter is a resounding yes.
Indeed the framers of the constitution in the USA were very much aware of anonymous speech and it's power and almost certainly specifically intended for it to be protected - not long before many of them had been writing letters of dissent against the official government of the land, encouraging the criminal act of rebellion against the monarch and planning a revolution.
You can bet your ass they didn't sign the ones that were outright incriminating.
>You could hand write everything, but making copies would be very troublesome and time consuming.
Oh and this line... guess those historians also got wrong the date of the invention of the printing press - since this event which changed the world forever is supposed to have happened a long time before the U.S. constitution got it's first amendment.
Wait... didn't Benjamin Franklin use to run a newspaper ? With a printing press ?
If anything we have LESS anonymity now than we had back then. Nobody 400 years ago could actually prove beyond a reasonable doubt which printing press produced a copy, or where it was originally typeset.
So people in the 1700s didn't write anonymous letters ? These letters were not frequently circulated, published by newspapers and such ?
Strange how you seem to know something that every other historian on earth doesn't. I'll look forward to reading your published research paper which should earn you quite a few honorary PHDs at the very least !
>>> running around like an over-caffeinated teabagger
>Why the hate on gay love?
Not all teabaggers are gay... some of them are women ;)
>But unless that's 67 of her [wikipedia.org] I'm pretty sure that's trillion with an o...
I would be happy to trade that in for 69 WITH her...
Exactly. That's why I said technically they need a push to start - providing such a push is an engineering problem we've long since solved, but it wasn't solved back when Tessla invented 3-phase. The motor/generator he worked from still needed a manual push before it would get going.
All true, I was talking modern-setting. A century ago, AC was the only viable technology.
And AC was originally practical exactly BECAUSE Tessla managed to invent three-phase... single-phase generators would probably need to be custom designed as I'm not aware of anybody building them en-masse for the non-existent market they may fill...
Three-phase generators/motors are fundamental to what made the modern electrical world possible in the first place. Technically a single-phase motor cannot even start without an outside push...
>This is especially true as long as you do not install any third party driver or software on it
And considering almost every network card in the known universe is unsupported under Windows XP without third-party drivers (dunno if this got better with newer versions, never used them) - it's probably a very good way to avoid viruses as well.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1077368/ ...
>There's 22 million people in Australia.
Yeah but the other 7 million don't count because they are expat white wimps from South Africa who couldn't stick it out in a continent that's not for sissies. :P
Some states in the USA have laws requiring that pigs be housed in an enclosure they can at least turn around in... that's bigger than most apartments in America and the pigs can't be charged rent !
>1) There's no good way to generate DC using a mechanical system. So while something like a solar cell will generate you DC, a mechanical generator won't, at least not without some fiddling and then not as efficiently as AC. These days, not a big deal, we have good devices to convert from one to the other quite efficiently. However when the current wars were happening, DC generation wasn't as good as AC generation. You see it to this day: Cars use alternators (as in alternating current) to generate power, despite being DC devices. The alternator then has a rectifier bridge to turn it in to (pulsed) DC power, which the battery helps clean up.
There is actually an interesting twist to this however which comes into play with very long power lines. The Cahora Bassa hydro-electric dam powers much of South Africa's Gauteng industrial region despite being in another country. Gauteng runs on AC, Cahora Bassa generates AC - but the line between them is DC. It gets rectified at the dam site and then reconverted to AC when it gets to the local grid.
Obviously that equipment cost a pretty penny - but DC was still cheaper. The reason is that DC only requires as single cable - which can be supported by quite a thin little pole (the ground itself can be the return line).
So if the line is long enough - running the power over DC can be more economical, you just need enough distance for the cable savings to start to get bigger than the converter costs.
Well I don't think anybody has done *that* study... but based on the studies I do know about, and the well-known fact that driver-fatique is the number one cause of accidents on long roads... I would probably feel safer with every other driver on meth than with every other driver asleep.
I think it's practically axiomatic that *any* stimulant would at least somewhat reduce the risk of preventable accidents.
The article was clear yes, the discussion was pointing out a possible causation for one of the many things that correlated. Somebody discounted that causation on the basis that the effect seems to hold for decaf as well - I pointed out that placebo effect can cause the same causation to hold true even for those.
Now if the placebo effect is weaker than the actual effect, then it would mean the correlation would be smaller over-all (reduces the average) but the correlation would still result, you would just find that if you were to single out the non-decaf drinkers the risk (in this particular case) would be reduced even further.
However the study didn't do that, this is just speculation.
Your suggestion however is silly. That caffeine is a stimulant has long been proven beyond any reasonable scientific doubt. We know what it does and exactly how it does it (caffeine binds to the same neural receptors that Ritalin does). You are effectively suggesting that real caffeine's effect is just a placebo and we know for a fact that this is not true because we've seen it's effect in action chemically.
That said - the most likely real difference between a real and placebo caffeine effect would be duration. If you take either one in the morning it will help you wake up - but the placebo will wear off sooner. Either way you'd be fully awake by the time it wore off - so the effect may not actually have a measureable impact on this particular study (accident risk) while it certainly does have a measureable impact on other studies that have been done.
The article didn't claim causation, just correlation. But I think it's a little more than you said. For those who DO drink a stimulant, the effect is real and can reduce accident risk. For those who just have the belief of drinking one, the placebo is strong enough to have a measurable effect, but quite likely not as effective as the real thing.
Chemically no, but since it (supposedly) tastes just like the real thing, I would be incredibly surprized if the association of that taste with caffeine's real effect didn't have a fairly powerful placebo effect. It may not rival the real thing but I am sure it beats nothing. Brains are quite complicated things, which sometimes have cause/effect patterns that appear to violate the laws of physics (note that I say "appear to" ) - they don't actually do so, but they are sufficiently complicated that we have to up our game. ...and that whole long bloody tangent just to say that at least a significant portion of decaf drinkers probably do feel sharper and more awake after drinking their cup than non-coffee drinkers.
Think of "I must go to work or I'll get fired" - this seems to be a future event causing something in the present. In reality the causality is fine - but only if you expand your thinking to a broader range (the firing isn't causing the trip - the FEAR of firing is - and that's a present event).
Same goes here. The drinking of coffee has a known effect and the brain is well aware of that effect on itself. Now if you simulate the conditions of the cause without the actual cause being present, you find that the brain may recreate the same effect anyway - it will simply use other materials to do so.
Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty ?
The burden of proof is on the accuser - we shouldn't HAVE to proof that most use is legitimate, they do HAVE to prove otherwise if they are going to claim it.
>Anyone who claims that BitTorrent has plenty of legitimate uses should be fine with the arrest and conviction of those who use it for illegal purposes.
Most of us are. We don't want our legitimate uses harmed by people angry at the illegitimate uses and we are all for the justice system doing it's job as far as criminals are concerned.
Most of us also believe in things like habeus corpus, due process and that the punishment should fit the crime - so we'll shout about ridiculous fines for sharing too.
Those two points of view are complementary not contradictory.
Then there are many of us who believe the majority of the illegitimate uses actually OUGHT to be legal and want the law to be CHANGED there.
Again this is a complementary not a contradictory position.
Even if you believe "piracy" should be legal, there is nothing intellectually dishonest about ALSO knowing that bittorrent has significant legal uses and those should not be harmed for the sake of preventing the illegal ones (while they remain illegal).