Of course, I didn't read the article:), but several pop-sci books on AI/ET that I've read lately have quoted scientists who are beginning to speculate that perhaps we've already picked up alien signals. However, the pattern may be so complex (so alien!), that seti missed it.
So one guess is that seti wants imagination and innovation that comes from crowd sourcing to help analyze the data for patterns that the 'old schoolers' (long time seti researchers) have missed.
A more pessimistic guess would be that seti wants a bunch of amateurs to make media/blog noise by finding and reporting a metric ton of false positives. That gets the words "alien/seti" back in the public's minds, and helps come budget time.
It's the right-wingers in general that, apparently, are far more likely to get violent...
There have been plenty of left-wing extremists as well: the Black Panthers, Simbionese Liberation Army, Weathermen Underground, etc. Tendency toward violence is not a left/right thing, it's an asshat/non-asshat thing.
True... in general. But one difference I've seen is that the Right (especially in the last 10 years) seems to motivate its followers by scaring them. That tends to provoke stronger aggression as a defense against that fear.
Combine being afraid (or being told you should be very afraid) with a love of guns / self defense / take matters into your own hands, and you can see how the right is generally regarded as more violent in appearance, and sometimes in action.
In terms of organized funded right/left groups, the numbers might be pretty equal on the violence scale. But in terms of individual citizenry talking points, actions, and appearance, Right seems to be about Might much moreso than the Left.
India and Pakistan have drastically different resource levels and population levels though. So while culture and religion might play a part, I doubt they are the most important aspect. There are many factors that play into the rise of a nation/culture. You've probably read this, but if not, do so, great book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel
You also need to take into account meddling by other countries. Look around the world. Many of the unstable countries in modern times are countries that have been "regime changed" one or multiple times in the past for various reasons. That leads to distrust, disruption of business, broken ties with foreign business, and usually decades upon decades before any western/modern country would consider investing again.
Which leads to a poor country, less education, desperate people, acts of violence, regime change, rinse repeat.
"I believe that spending 10% of your life being assaulted by advertising is not a good way to live."
Wow, I wish it was only 10%. I was listening to talk radio this morning, and it is seriously 50% ad time now. 10 minutes of talk, 5 minutes of adds. And even during the talk time, the hosts often hock products or partners.
TV isn't 50% yet, but its getting close. A few channels, like MTV I bet are already at 50% ad time.
Between add blocking on the internet, DVR's for TV, and people switching the radio channel, you'd think that new funding models would start to creep up. Or advertisers would realize that sometimes less is more. Make your add funny, amusing, and short, and I might not change the channel!.
Hulu is a good example of this. 15-30 second add every 5-10 minutes is something I don't even bother to turn down or ignore. If it were 5 minutes of commercials, thats guaranteed to make me do something else for 5 minutes.
I tell ya, the first person that manages to create a real all encompassing media store (Internet site partners, TV, radio, clips, music, cable, etc..) and let you pick and choose an advertising free package for a single monthly price is going to be a billionaire.
I'd probably pay upwards of 200 dollars a month if I had access to parts of the internet, cable, tv, music, movies, etc.. for no additional cost, and no advertising. All the media store would have to do is split my 200 dollars amongst whatever sections of my selection I actually watched/listened to and give some percent to the producers.
It's not like being banned walking down the street for refusing to look at billboards. It's more like walking down the street, entering a bookstore, and being kicked out for reading all the books each afternoon without buying them.
I can see banning / slowing down / testing drugs and procedures that are FOR SALE. The problem though, is even free clinical trials are not allowed. If I were dying in a few months, I should be allowed to help further science by allowing my body to be used as a guinea pig for something like macroketone.
Libel (printing anonymous stories all over the internet about user X and his child porn collection (that you falsely made up)), slander (telling your boss that a co-worker was smoking pot in the bathroom, when he wasn't, and he gets fired)? Yelling "he's got a bomb! in a crowded stairwell/subway"?
Speech certainly should, and does, have limits and consequences.
Juries are in no way considered objective by competent legal scholars. While I'm not a lawyer, I did just attend a day long symposium on one common legal phrase that is widely subjective, "a reasonable person". (http://www.lclark.edu/law/law_reviews/lewis_and_clark_law_review/spring_symposium/2010_Schedule.php).
It was very fascinating listening to different professors/scholars describe how varied jury results can be depending on background. A completely balanced jury, some conservative, some liberal, some religious, etc.. an "average slice" of America, for instance, does not approach objectivity, but rather only approaches consistency in ruling. State by state, a case with fact set A, will always result in conclusion B by the jury. It doesn't mean that the ruling was "correct". To an all conservative jury, the ruling of the "balanced jury" would seem very wrong.
Objectivity is very hard for the legal system to build into a jury trial. Especially when you ask jury member A to answer a question like, "Was what Person A did reasonable?". It is mainly the responsibility of each juror to try to be objective, and that requires someone to be intelligent enough to know what is personal bias, what is objective fact, what the law is asking you to decide, etc..
Now, a good judge can explain very carefully what things, and what things only, matter to the decision at hand, but studies present in the symposium above showed that more detailed/explanatory jury instructions had ZERO effect on jury outcome. Personal bias based on self declared values was the primary factor.
What I took from the symposium, is that you better have a lawyer that knows how to pick a jury favorable to you.
Agree with most of what you said except "As to ag work... etc "no one wants to do it so they have to import workers"
The problem with ag work is that it is seasonal work. If you wanted to do it full time, you'd need to be nomadic. The second problem is it is a low wage job. Combine temporary/seasonal with low wage and that equals not being able to live in the US due to costs.
3 months of minimum wage isn't worth it to anyone that wants to live in the US. However, it is very much worth it to people who have a much lower cost of living, like residents of Mexico.
This is why Alaskan crab fishing, seasonal and temporary, is very attractive to hard working Americans. Few months of very high pay and basically the rest of the year off.
The massive numbers of harvest jobs required by the US can only be accomplished by people willing to live on 3-4 months of minimum wage. What we need are temporary worker visas, to make it legal, and to tax those workers in order to offset the cost of any services they might use while working here.
Or you could believe in neither a Jewish zombie master or a universe that created itself, and instead believe in something like http://www.biocosm.org/
Summary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biocosm (intelligence is hardwired into the fabric of space and time, we evolve and permeate the universe to the point that we can spawn child universes that are life friendly).
I have a feeling that once we know 'everything' about why we are here, purpose of life, yada yada, that it's going to be far more fascinating than any of the current prevailing views of religion or science.
Bad analogy. Thinking jobs are completely different from manual labor.
And even breaks aren't often real breaks. If I am working on a tough problem for 4 hours, coding, researching, analyzing results, etc... and then go to lunch, it's pretty much a guarantee that I will be thinking about the problem while eating.
"corporations don't make laws or form government you silly twit."
Where have you been living the last 50 years? Certainly not on Earth. Money is what elects candidates, and corporate money is thousands of times stronger than the population. Combine that with no term limits on Congress, and recent scotus decisions like:
Of course I didn't read the article, but I think this would be a great class, if it focused on the writings and speculations of all the well known scientists who have commented on the possibility of alien life.
For instance, the class could learn about the Fermi Paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox. In a nutshell, why the universe appears so silent given that billions of years should be plenty of time to have had thousands of alien civilizations completely colonize the galaxy, and most likely the universe.
If I were teaching it, I would also include books by authors such as James Gardner http://www.biocosm.org/about.htm, specifically "The Intelligent Universe". Great read for anyone interested in AI, ET, etc..
I imagine you could teach about UFO's, as long as it was in the context of historical impact, cultural psychology, astrophysics theories, etc.. I would personally love to take a class that objectively analyzed things like ttp://www.disclosureproject.org/, which has hundreds of former military folks, scientists, radar operators, and pilots who swear that they've seen alien craft.
I'm by no means a military expert, but wouldn't artillery need to be above/outside a bunker to actually fire? I mean, even if you had a 6 foot concrete roof, the front would need to be open to allow a 45 degree firing angle. And a 2,000 pound bomb dropped anywhere near the open front would surely kill everyone inside by way of shock wave, and most likely disable the artillery.
That sentence was meant to be a bit 'tongue in cheek', but not fully.
The entire internet, as information infrastructure, is quickly becoming as important as traditional infrastructure. There are most likely many different opinions about just how important information infrastructure is to the economic and social fabric of our society, but I don't think anyone could argue that the internet is going to become less important to the country over time.
At some point, the internet will become so valuable, and so fundamental to the country, that government control will be inevitable.
I think many conservatives are blaming the wrong organization when they say things like you did:
"superpower governments today are richer and more powerful than ever before in history"
It isn't so much the government, as it is corporate influence on the government. I tend to agree that government is becoming less and less 'for the people' and therefore it is less effective at solving problems than it was in the past. And rulings like the recent scotus citizens united (unlimited corporate spending on political ads) are only going to make things worse. (go to movetoamend.org and help stop it).
But that isn't the fault of government. It is the fault of corporate influence in government. I wish I saw tea party members yelling for campaign finance reform, and not yelling for total privatization and de-regulation.
Total private control over X means 100% corporate influence over X, and zero public influence, unless aspects of X can be affected by our wallets. I'd argue that things like healthcare and internet access cannot be changed via the wallet as easily as other services, and therefore are something either deserving of heavy regulation or outright government ownership.
If we had strict campaign finance laws, advertising laws, and some ability to sue or stop misinformation concerning scientific and/or political issues, I think you'd see the government behaving much more in line with what people want.
Once the internet is completely metered and locked down, with corporate traffic given huge priority over private traffic, I wonder if all the "free market solves everything" libertarian types will still be so anti-regulation....
Slashdot seems to have a fairly large amount of 'free market solves all' people. Maybe strangling the internet is the thing that will make some of them realize that certain things do deserve either heavy regulation or government ownership:)
Since this is the "information super highway", maybe it should get the same level of government control as the Federal Highway System.
Oh no doubt, I'd defend Coulter's right to free speech without hesitation.
'"It's hateful" is not a reason to be taken before a court.'
But inciting to violence is indeed a crime. And some of the hate speech coming from the right, I'd argue, is bordering on inciting violence.
I don't agree with how those college students handled their frustration with her viewpoints (they should have just not attended and left her an empty auditorium to speak to).
But you can't honestly compare "left-wing mobbing" and "right-wing mobbing" as if the two happen with the same rate, or the same viciousness.
To the average low information voter, I can see them making the argument that Fox/CNN/Talk Shows are about the only thing they can comprehend, so I tend to go easy on lower educated person when they buy into the fake debate over AGW. (And subsequently become increasingly pissed at the horrible quality of journalism today).
However, I really hope that as a law student you aren't making the claim that you don't have the time to buy an issue of Nature, Scientific American, or watch a Discovery show and realize just how one sided the debate is.....(in favor of AGW). I'm pretty sure you'd be able to understand a Discovery article...
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, I didn't read the article:), but several pop-sci books on AI/ET that I've read lately have quoted scientists who are beginning to speculate that perhaps we've already picked up alien signals. However, the pattern may be so complex (so alien!), that seti missed it.
So one guess is that seti wants imagination and innovation that comes from crowd sourcing to help analyze the data for patterns that the 'old schoolers' (long time seti researchers) have missed.
A more pessimistic guess would be that seti wants a bunch of amateurs to make media/blog noise by finding and reporting a metric ton of false positives. That gets the words "alien/seti" back in the public's minds, and helps come budget time.
There have been plenty of left-wing extremists as well: the Black Panthers, Simbionese Liberation Army, Weathermen Underground, etc. Tendency toward violence is not a left/right thing, it's an asshat/non-asshat thing.
True... in general. But one difference I've seen is that the Right (especially in the last 10 years) seems to motivate its followers by scaring them. That tends to provoke stronger aggression as a defense against that fear.
Combine being afraid (or being told you should be very afraid) with a love of guns / self defense / take matters into your own hands, and you can see how the right is generally regarded as more violent in appearance, and sometimes in action.
In terms of organized funded right/left groups, the numbers might be pretty equal on the violence scale. But in terms of individual citizenry talking points, actions, and appearance, Right seems to be about Might much moreso than the Left.
India and Pakistan have drastically different resource levels and population levels though. So while culture and religion might play a part, I doubt they are the most important aspect. There are many factors that play into the rise of a nation/culture. You've probably read this, but if not, do so, great book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel
You also need to take into account meddling by other countries. Look around the world. Many of the unstable countries in modern times are countries that have been "regime changed" one or multiple times in the past for various reasons. That leads to distrust, disruption of business, broken ties with foreign business, and usually decades upon decades before any western/modern country would consider investing again.
Which leads to a poor country, less education, desperate people, acts of violence, regime change, rinse repeat.
"I believe that spending 10% of your life being assaulted by advertising is not a good way to live."
Wow, I wish it was only 10%. I was listening to talk radio this morning, and it is seriously 50% ad time now. 10 minutes of talk, 5 minutes of adds. And even during the talk time, the hosts often hock products or partners.
TV isn't 50% yet, but its getting close. A few channels, like MTV I bet are already at 50% ad time.
Between add blocking on the internet, DVR's for TV, and people switching the radio channel, you'd think that new funding models would start to creep up. Or advertisers would realize that sometimes less is more. Make your add funny, amusing, and short, and I might not change the channel!.
Hulu is a good example of this. 15-30 second add every 5-10 minutes is something I don't even bother to turn down or ignore. If it were 5 minutes of commercials, thats guaranteed to make me do something else for 5 minutes.
I tell ya, the first person that manages to create a real all encompassing media store (Internet site partners, TV, radio, clips, music, cable, etc..) and let you pick and choose an advertising free package for a single monthly price is going to be a billionaire.
I'd probably pay upwards of 200 dollars a month if I had access to parts of the internet, cable, tv, music, movies, etc.. for no additional cost, and no advertising. All the media store would have to do is split my 200 dollars amongst whatever sections of my selection I actually watched/listened to and give some percent to the producers.
It's not like being banned walking down the street for refusing to look at billboards. It's more like walking down the street, entering a bookstore, and being kicked out for reading all the books each afternoon without buying them.
I can see banning / slowing down / testing drugs and procedures that are FOR SALE. The problem though, is even free clinical trials are not allowed. If I were dying in a few months, I should be allowed to help further science by allowing my body to be used as a guinea pig for something like macroketone.
Now that Google is getting into hardware, it's only a matter of before we see:
The Google Search (and destroy) Robot. ;)
Libel (printing anonymous stories all over the internet about user X and his child porn collection (that you falsely made up)), slander (telling your boss that a co-worker was smoking pot in the bathroom, when he wasn't, and he gets fired)? Yelling "he's got a bomb! in a crowded stairwell/subway"?
Speech certainly should, and does, have limits and consequences.
Juries are in no way considered objective by competent legal scholars. While I'm not a lawyer, I did just attend a day long symposium on one common legal phrase that is widely subjective, "a reasonable person". (http://www.lclark.edu/law/law_reviews/lewis_and_clark_law_review/spring_symposium/2010_Schedule.php).
It was very fascinating listening to different professors/scholars describe how varied jury results can be depending on background. A completely balanced jury, some conservative, some liberal, some religious, etc.. an "average slice" of America, for instance, does not approach objectivity, but rather only approaches consistency in ruling. State by state, a case with fact set A, will always result in conclusion B by the jury. It doesn't mean that the ruling was "correct". To an all conservative jury, the ruling of the "balanced jury" would seem very wrong.
Objectivity is very hard for the legal system to build into a jury trial. Especially when you ask jury member A to answer a question like, "Was what Person A did reasonable?". It is mainly the responsibility of each juror to try to be objective, and that requires someone to be intelligent enough to know what is personal bias, what is objective fact, what the law is asking you to decide, etc..
Now, a good judge can explain very carefully what things, and what things only, matter to the decision at hand, but studies present in the symposium above showed that more detailed/explanatory jury instructions had ZERO effect on jury outcome. Personal bias based on self declared values was the primary factor.
What I took from the symposium, is that you better have a lawyer that knows how to pick a jury favorable to you.
Even if the facts are not in dispute, different juries can reach widely varying conclusions. Law is not equations.
I can only find articles saying the exact opposite of what you just said, like:
http://www.mit.edu/people/jeffrey/House_Testimony_Nov_1993.html
Do you have a link to a study/report backing up that smokers contribute more money than they use in health care related costs and secondary damage?
Agree with most of what you said except "As to ag work ... etc "no one wants to do it so they have to import workers"
The problem with ag work is that it is seasonal work. If you wanted to do it full time, you'd need to be nomadic. The second problem is it is a low wage job. Combine temporary/seasonal with low wage and that equals not being able to live in the US due to costs.
3 months of minimum wage isn't worth it to anyone that wants to live in the US. However, it is very much worth it to people who have a much lower cost of living, like residents of Mexico.
This is why Alaskan crab fishing, seasonal and temporary, is very attractive to hard working Americans. Few months of very high pay and basically the rest of the year off.
The massive numbers of harvest jobs required by the US can only be accomplished by people willing to live on 3-4 months of minimum wage. What we need are temporary worker visas, to make it legal, and to tax those workers in order to offset the cost of any services they might use while working here.
Or you could believe in neither a Jewish zombie master or a universe that created itself, and instead believe in something like http://www.biocosm.org/
Summary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biocosm (intelligence is hardwired into the fabric of space and time, we evolve and permeate the universe to the point that we can spawn child universes that are life friendly).
I have a feeling that once we know 'everything' about why we are here, purpose of life, yada yada, that it's going to be far more fascinating than any of the current prevailing views of religion or science.
Bad analogy. Thinking jobs are completely different from manual labor.
And even breaks aren't often real breaks. If I am working on a tough problem for 4 hours, coding, researching, analyzing results, etc... and then go to lunch, it's pretty much a guarantee that I will be thinking about the problem while eating.
The goals of the party are essentially dictated centrally from Sweden
I'm curious as to why you think your fantasies are of interest to the rest of us? :)
I was under the impression that there's a lucrative market for Swedish fantasies? ;)
"corporations don't make laws or form government you silly twit."
Where have you been living the last 50 years? Certainly not on Earth. Money is what elects candidates, and corporate money is thousands of times stronger than the population. Combine that with no term limits on Congress, and recent scotus decisions like:
http://www.scotuswiki.com/index.php?title=Citizens_United_v._Federal_Election_Commission
The US is as close to fascism as you can get without actually officially declaring itself fascist.
Of course I didn't read the article, but I think this would be a great class, if it focused on the writings and speculations of all the well known scientists who have commented on the possibility of alien life.
For instance, the class could learn about the Fermi Paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox. In a nutshell, why the universe appears so silent given that billions of years should be plenty of time to have had thousands of alien civilizations completely colonize the galaxy, and most likely the universe.
If I were teaching it, I would also include books by authors such as James Gardner http://www.biocosm.org/about.htm, specifically "The Intelligent Universe". Great read for anyone interested in AI, ET, etc..
I imagine you could teach about UFO's, as long as it was in the context of historical impact, cultural psychology, astrophysics theories, etc.. I would personally love to take a class that objectively analyzed things like ttp://www.disclosureproject.org/, which has hundreds of former military folks, scientists, radar operators, and pilots who swear that they've seen alien craft.
Exactly, like the recent port of quake to a browser by google staff. http://code.google.com/p/quake2-gwt-port/
I'm by no means a military expert, but wouldn't artillery need to be above/outside a bunker to actually fire? I mean, even if you had a 6 foot concrete roof, the front would need to be open to allow a 45 degree firing angle. And a 2,000 pound bomb dropped anywhere near the open front would surely kill everyone inside by way of shock wave, and most likely disable the artillery.
Nuclear weapons have turned into something of a penis waving contest.
have turned? Haven't they always been about M.A.D. which is the ultimate form of said 'waving'?
That sentence was meant to be a bit 'tongue in cheek', but not fully.
The entire internet, as information infrastructure, is quickly becoming as important as traditional infrastructure. There are most likely many different opinions about just how important information infrastructure is to the economic and social fabric of our society, but I don't think anyone could argue that the internet is going to become less important to the country over time.
At some point, the internet will become so valuable, and so fundamental to the country, that government control will be inevitable.
getting offtopic, but oh well:)
I think many conservatives are blaming the wrong organization when they say things like you did:
"superpower governments today are richer and more powerful than ever before in history"
It isn't so much the government, as it is corporate influence on the government. I tend to agree that government is becoming less and less 'for the people' and therefore it is less effective at solving problems than it was in the past. And rulings like the recent scotus citizens united (unlimited corporate spending on political ads) are only going to make things worse. (go to movetoamend.org and help stop it).
But that isn't the fault of government. It is the fault of corporate influence in government. I wish I saw tea party members yelling for campaign finance reform, and not yelling for total privatization and de-regulation.
Total private control over X means 100% corporate influence over X, and zero public influence, unless aspects of X can be affected by our wallets. I'd argue that things like healthcare and internet access cannot be changed via the wallet as easily as other services, and therefore are something either deserving of heavy regulation or outright government ownership.
If we had strict campaign finance laws, advertising laws, and some ability to sue or stop misinformation concerning scientific and/or political issues, I think you'd see the government behaving much more in line with what people want.
Once the internet is completely metered and locked down, with corporate traffic given huge priority over private traffic, I wonder if all the "free market solves everything" libertarian types will still be so anti-regulation....
Slashdot seems to have a fairly large amount of 'free market solves all' people. Maybe strangling the internet is the thing that will make some of them realize that certain things do deserve either heavy regulation or government ownership:)
Since this is the "information super highway", maybe it should get the same level of government control as the Federal Highway System.
Oh no doubt, I'd defend Coulter's right to free speech without hesitation.
'"It's hateful" is not a reason to be taken before a court.'
But inciting to violence is indeed a crime. And some of the hate speech coming from the right, I'd argue, is bordering on inciting violence.
I don't agree with how those college students handled their frustration with her viewpoints (they should have just not attended and left her an empty auditorium to speak to).
But you can't honestly compare "left-wing mobbing" and "right-wing mobbing" as if the two happen with the same rate, or the same viciousness.
To the average low information voter, I can see them making the argument that Fox/CNN/Talk Shows are about the only thing they can comprehend, so I tend to go easy on lower educated person when they buy into the fake debate over AGW. (And subsequently become increasingly pissed at the horrible quality of journalism today).
However, I really hope that as a law student you aren't making the claim that you don't have the time to buy an issue of Nature, Scientific American, or watch a Discovery show and realize just how one sided the debate is.....(in favor of AGW). I'm pretty sure you'd be able to understand a Discovery article...