Some old school geeks have issues with a technologies that an average joe can use. Makes them feel inadequate.
"Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it." -- attributed to George Bernard Shaw.
The problem is not with "technologies that an average joe can use", it's with technologies that restrict above-average Joes and Janes.
There are in fact a lot of "average joes" using GNU/Linux and other Free Software systems out there. The beauty is that when people who are not average Joes gets their hands on one, they can do above average things with them. This is not an option with walled-garden, information appliances of the sort marketed by Apple.
The public pays for gathering the data, the public should have access to that data. Kinda hard to find fault with that.
Except that in some countries, the data collection is funded by selling datasets; and those datasets are sold under license that does not permit re-distribution. So I wonder how this ruling squares with UK and international copyright law.
And sometimes, the data is archived on dead media (if it's available at all); recovering old data can be complex and expensive. Sure, for new data we can copy it to a website pretty easily (IP issues notwithstanding), but how much taxpayer money should be spent digging up old data, and the hardware to read it, to satisfy conspiracy-theory cranks?
Isn't this why countries such as France have completely abolished juries, and judgments are rendered solely by Judges...Of course, that has its own problems, like the fact that one crappy judge will make a lot of bad verdicts
It seems that government would certainly like to abolish trial by jury, as it has this annoying tendency to slightly slow the growth of the prison-industrial complex. In blatant contradiction to the Constitutional requirement, SCOTUS has somehow become illiterate regarding the phrase "all criminal prosecutions" and ruled that you don't have a right to a jury trial if the sentence is less than six months -- even if you're facing multiple counts and could spend years in jail. And the state continually tries to keep juries ignorant of their right to judge questions of law as well as of fact.
If change is slow enough, yes. The current human-caused mass extinction is not slow enough.
Of course life on this ball of rock will continue, but when mass extinctions occur the biosphere that results after recovery is very different, enough that we might say that the original was destroyed and a new one has taken its place.
The animals (including us) come and go, and change and adapt to the circumstances of thousands and millions of years, but there's no "wrong" or "right", there's only "right now".
I would prefer it if our species -- and our civilization -- didn't go anytime soon. Call me sentimental about this wacky bunch of monkeys, but I think it would be sad if they spoiled their nest to the point of wiping themselves out, or even to the point of needlessly killing billions of themselves but still surviving.
I'm also sentimental about non-human sentient beings, and would point out that ethical anthrocentrism is part of the problem that's got our species fouling the nest, but that's a rant for another time.
There's a sort of universal guilt among the ecologically-friendly people that attempts to repent for their lifestyle.
Guilt? No, I hang around with lots of ecologically-friendly people and haven't seen any such guilt. It's no more "guilt" that drives people to purchase carbon credits, or to purchase sustainably-grown produce, than it's "guilt" that makes me crap in the toilet rather than in the middle of the street, and put my trash in the can rather then throwing it into my neighbor's yard. It's called cleaning up after yourself, and it's what grown-ups do.
While there may be plenty of reasons why it could be dangerous, the Atkins diet very much proves this. While in ketosis, you do not store any fat.
What the Atkins diet proves, is that you can make a lot of money telling people what they want to hear.
A little Googling will show low-carb diet boards where people are complaining about how they're in ketosis but still gaining weight. It is not the case that you can take in unlimited calories on a low carbohydrate diet and not gain weight. The difference that ketosis makes, by excreting ketones in urine and in the breath, is minimal, on the order of 45 kcal a day at most.
He finally went on Atkins and was able to shed enough weight that he was able to start walking around the house, then around the block, etc until he was back down to near his original weight. It's one of the few instances where I'd advocate Atkins.
Of course, if they want spyware on every computer, then you can no longer have control of your computer. Software development will have to be heavily regulated.
RMS saw it coming over a decade ago; go read his little parable The Right to Read, if you don't know it already.
Ok so now you're being even more sensational with your hypothetical pure situations.
An "e-cigarette" is a device for the delivery of small amounts of pure nicotine. There is nothing "hypothetical" under discussion here.
Do you honestly believe cocaine is safer than nicotine?
Cocaine is less toxic than nicotine. That is not a matter of belief, it is a matter of well-established fact.
Whether one thing is "safer" than another, depends largely on circumstance. Reading a book is safer than bungee jumping -- but reading a book while you're driving is more dangerous than bungee jumping. So if you're going to ask "is cocaine safer than nicotine", I need to ask, in what circumstance?
If you mean cocaine administered by chewing coca versus nicotine administered by smoking or chewing tobacco, or if you mean an device that administers very small controlled amounts of pure nicotine -- an nicotine gum, perhaps, or an e-cigarette -- versus a similar device that might administer very small controlled amounts of pure cocaine (like, say, cocaine chewing gum), yes, based on the available evidence, cocaine is safer than nicotine in either of these scenarios.
The point is that 2+2=4 and describing the area under a curve is a fairly intuitive image to get across when showing maths to a sufficiently advanced technological society.
2+2=1, in mod-3 arithmetic.
The appeal to "fairly intuitive" is exactly the problem -- who knows what's "intuitive" to intelligent semiconductor crystalline entities living in a methane lake on a frozen moon of a gas giant? Maybe mod-3 arithmetic is intuitive to them.
Math is also based on the laws of physics (or more accurately help describe the laws of physics,)
Math is most definitely not "based on the laws of physics". It's closer to say that they "help describe the laws of physics" -- which is a very different statement -- but "the laws of physics" are a patterning of our observations of the world. Creatures with different sense organs and different computational apparatus may very well pattern their observations of the world differently, and their equivalent of the "laws of physics" might unrecognizable to us.
We many find that our grasp of physics is like one of the famous blind guy's grasp of an elephant, and that a culture with a different biology, different sensorium, different environment, and different history, ends up with a physics rather different than our own, yet still useful. What would that look like? I'm too stuck in the human perspective to guess.
Wow twice as dangerous as cocaine! Way to be sensational.
I didn't say twice as dangerous. I said twice as toxic. And I was wrong: the correct figure is that nicotine is about 30 to 100 times as toxic as cocaine.
Nicotine has a lower LD50 than cocaine.
Incorrect. The LD50 for nicotine is 3 mg/kg for mice, and estimated at 0.5-1.0 mg/kg for humans; the LD50 for cocaine is 95 mg/kg for mice.
Nicotine can't kill through normal usage. Cocaine can.
The "normal" use of cocaine, the pattern of use for most of human history, would be chewing coca leaves. That can't kill.
If you extracted nicotine from tobacco the way cocaine is extracted from coca, it sure as hell could kill.
Which is more dangerous?
Chewing coca is certainly less dangerous than smoking cigarettes, and probably less dangerous than chewing tobacco.
Pure cocaine is certainly less dangerous than pure nicotine.
Prohibition, of course, makes either more dangerous than it is based on the inherent biochemistry, and is a massive failure.
Spoken like a true self rightous twit, in fact it is likely you yourself are addicted to caffine.
Knowing that caffeine is addictive, I take steps to control my caffeine use, so that it does not become addictive or habitual. (Or, I should say, does not again become addictive or habitual.) I drink about three cups of coffee a week.
And caffeine is about 100 times less toxic that nicotine.
I misspoke above when I said nicotine was twice as toxic as cocaine -- it's about 100 times, by LD50. Here's the LD50s, in mg/kg: nicotine, 0.5-1.0 (human, estimated); caffeine, 150 to 200 (human, estimated); cocaine, 95 (in mice).
I am addicted to nicotine, so what I don't see why it should really bother you
"Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind," as ol' Johny Donne put it. I prefer to promote health; and I'm saddened that your addiction is corrosive enough to your mental health that you feel the need to insult someone who points out that the chemical to which you are addicted is highly addictive and significantly toxic.
Those are simply the facts. If you choose to use nicotine, you should be aware of them so that you can control your use appropriately; if you cannot control your use, perhaps having them brought to your attention will help motivate you to seek treatment.
In neither case, however, is it useful or reasonable for the government to use force to control your use. (Assuming no externalities, and that you're not on parole or probation or otherwise "within the system".)
If you have any significant doubt at all as to your understanding of the terms, the right choice is to refuse to sign.
In which case, you become completely incapable of doing business. That is not the "right" choice.
If enough people make that choice then the contracts will be rewritten in clearer language.
The fact that this has not happened, shows the problem with your thesis. Everyone acknowledges that contracts are indecipherable; and yet very seldom does one have the freedom to negotiate.
All we're asking is that you tell the truth. How can you possibly object to that?
People in positions of authority or power or privilege never hear the truth. Communication is only possible between equals; those in a position of disadvantage are coerced by circumstance into saying whatever the advantaged party wants to hear.
Oh, and about your sig: "Rights, unlike entitlements, do not impose positive obligations on others." So you don't believe in a right to trial by jury, or to compel testimony from witnesses in one's defense? No right to due process?
nicotine is relatively harmless and comparable to caffeine
Nicotine is one of the most addictive drugs known, and is twice as toxic (in terms of LD50) as cocaine. And the use of nicotine gum and patches during pregnancy causes an increase in the risk of birth defects.
I call bullshit on TFA. I smell either a shill or an addict trying to justify their behavior.
That said: it's your body, and so long as you keep the fumes to yourself, I support your right to make your own decisions. But regularly and habitually using nicotine, in burning plant matter or in any other form, is a dammed dumb decision.
That's like saying people think you drive badly because you're a woman, and that makes your life hell.. others peoples opinion of you make that much of a difference? Paranoid much?
Yes, others people's opinion of you can make a difference, because it affects how they treat you. If you ever move out of your mom's basement, you might learn that, you festering lump of smegma. Socially inept much?
Gods, what a pathetic excuse for a human being. I'll bet you're one of those self-proclaimed "aspies" who think their lack of empathy is something to crow about, rather than an indication of brain damage. What? Hey, sorry if that offended you. Didn't think my opinion of you would make a difference. (Insults withdrawn, but hope that the point may have been made in that second or two between.)
However, it is typical for the signature line on a contract to explicitly state that you have read it and understand the terms. Why should anyone doubt your own word on the matter?
You should doubt my word on the matter because we know that, as this case demonstrates, people will sign things without full understanding. They have to; it's an artifact of the power imbalance that occurs when one side has a prior opportunity to have paid experts craft a legal instrument, and the other is faced with an immediate decision without the benefit of counsel.
No person in a modern industrial society can keep track of all the contractual obligations that they have supposedly fully understood and bound themselves to. The way that the state continues to treat the contracts as some sort of voluntary meaningful agreement, is just another method of ensuring privilege to the powerful.
Maths don't change no matter what the culture behind it.
We don't know that at all. All of mathematics rests on axioms and definitions; who knows what axioms might seem obvious to a creature based on a different biology?
I don't think you've studied the history of this planet very well if you've concluded that this is the most rapid phase of extinction in history.
In a precise sense, "history" only goes back to the development of writing -- everything else being "pre-history". So, yes, in the precise sense this is the most rapid phase of extinction in history, and the whole period of history falls within one of the six mass extinctions that the planet has gone through overall.
How many times in history have we heard some variant of this prediction? We are still here.
Every day, you should say to yourself, "This is the last day of my life. How do I want to spend it?" Because one day, you'll be right.
This is where the Fermi Paradox comes from. Our galaxy is only about 100,000 light years across. Sending something at 1% of the speed of light is not too far off our current capability. Sending something at 10% is not difficult to conceive.
Bollocks. The fastest man-made object had a velocity of about 150,000 mph -- 42 mps. That's.0002c,.02% of lightspeed. 22,000 years to Alpha C at that rate.
Until we do it, we have no firm evidence that it is possible -- not just physically possible, but socioeconomically and politically possible -- for a civilization to build anything faster.
A single Von Neumann probe...
Which is also something that we have no evidence is a practical project for a civilization to build.
As usually interpreted, the "Fermi paradox" is a load of dingo's kidneys, which essentially boils down to "We don't see advanced alien civilizations doing what we imagine advanced alien civilizations would do. Therefore, there are no alien civilizations." I hope you see the leap in logic there.
There are quite a few other possibilities besides either being little green men from outer space or just hallucinations.
First "just hallucinations" introduces a value judgment. The ability of the human mind to create things out of whole cloth is an amazing thing. Understanding these experiences as a product of mind alone is far more interesting that ideas about aliens or about hidden technological civilizations on Earth.
But, yes, there are other possibilities...in the same sense that it's a "possibility" that you are actually a brain in a vat being fed signals, or that there is an invisible Elvis Presley clone in the room with you. (Can't see him? That proves he's invisible.) My favorite alternative UFO explanation is that they are telepathic projections from a civilization around the star Sirius -- not extraterrestrial visitors, mind you, but extraterrestrial broadcasts.
However, these "explanations" do not explain the ways in which such observations have clearly been shaped by culture. One guy described the UFOs he saw as "flying saucers", and then for a while everyone saw saucers -- an effect that faded with time. Back before the mid 70s, people saw a variety of aliens -- then Close Encounters came out, and everyone started seeing Greys that look an awful lot like the critters in the UFOs in that movie.
I think it was Asimov who said that claims can be divided into three categories: mundane, interesting, and bullshit. If you say you've got 50 kg of salt, that's mundane, and no reason I shouldn't take your word for it. If you say you've got 50 kg of gold, that's interesting, and I'm going to want to see it and maybe test it a bit before I believe you.
But if you say you've got 50 kg of ununoctiumastatine, that's bullshit. We can't say it's completely impossible -- there's that brain-in-a-jar level of probability that you're a particle physics genius who's figured out a loophole -- but it's not a proposition worth entertaining seriously.
It's mainly a thought experiment examining what's left of the UFO phenomenon after you take away the unlikely notion that we're being visited by beings from distant planets.
What's left is the likely notion that the interesting "UFO phenomenon" -- the ones that aren't reflections, weather balloon, aircraft, etc. -- are subjective experiences without external, objective reference. They are in the same category as dreams, visions, hallucinations, "imaginary friends", apparitions of various deities, and so on.
Is studying these experiences a worthwhile thing to do? Sure. It can tell us a lot about how we build the subjective universes that each of us inhabits. But these studies belong under psychology or philosophy, not under physics or astronomy or exobiology.
However, I would feel happy if I had it, and people are willing to pay for happiness.
Of course Apple wants you to believe that you would feel happy if you had it. And perhaps you would feel a shallow sort of sham happiness (mostly a placebo marketing effect) for a few days, or even a few weeks, if you had one.
But no material thing -- not an iPad, not a brand new sports car, not an official Red Ryder, carbine action, two-hundred shot range model air rifle -- will make you truly happy. Nor will other people, who have this annoying tendency to change, to disappoint your expectations, to get old and sick and to die.
The good news is that, knowing this, you can stop wasting so much time and energy looking for the things and relationships that are finally going to make you happy. Nothing outside yourself will do it.
Meanwhile, while neither is going to bring me happiness, when looking for tools I prefer actual general-purpose computers to information appliances designed for passive consumers. Fsck the iPad and all the other gilded cages that come out of Apple.
It is not expensive to teach most children who want to learn, through high school level. A teacher, a schoolroom, books. Yet this, which ought not to cost more than $2500 per student-year in the US, now costs about $8000.
And you pull this number of what it "ought" to cost from where, exactly?
Slashdot Mirror
"Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it." -- attributed to George Bernard Shaw.
The problem is not with "technologies that an average joe can use", it's with technologies that restrict above-average Joes and Janes.
There are in fact a lot of "average joes" using GNU/Linux and other Free Software systems out there. The beauty is that when people who are not average Joes gets their hands on one, they can do above average things with them. This is not an option with walled-garden, information appliances of the sort marketed by Apple.
Except that in some countries, the data collection is funded by selling datasets; and those datasets are sold under license that does not permit re-distribution. So I wonder how this ruling squares with UK and international copyright law.
And sometimes, the data is archived on dead media (if it's available at all); recovering old data can be complex and expensive. Sure, for new data we can copy it to a website pretty easily (IP issues notwithstanding), but how much taxpayer money should be spent digging up old data, and the hardware to read it, to satisfy conspiracy-theory cranks?
Generally, defendants can waive their right to a jury trial and have the case go before a judge, they think that is to their benefit.
It seems that government would certainly like to abolish trial by jury, as it has this annoying tendency to slightly slow the growth of the prison-industrial complex. In blatant contradiction to the Constitutional requirement, SCOTUS has somehow become illiterate regarding the phrase "all criminal prosecutions" and ruled that you don't have a right to a jury trial if the sentence is less than six months -- even if you're facing multiple counts and could spend years in jail. And the state continually tries to keep juries ignorant of their right to judge questions of law as well as of fact.
If change is slow enough, yes. The current human-caused mass extinction is not slow enough.
Of course life on this ball of rock will continue, but when mass extinctions occur the biosphere that results after recovery is very different, enough that we might say that the original was destroyed and a new one has taken its place.
I would prefer it if our species -- and our civilization -- didn't go anytime soon. Call me sentimental about this wacky bunch of monkeys, but I think it would be sad if they spoiled their nest to the point of wiping themselves out, or even to the point of needlessly killing billions of themselves but still surviving.
I'm also sentimental about non-human sentient beings, and would point out that ethical anthrocentrism is part of the problem that's got our species fouling the nest, but that's a rant for another time.
Guilt? No, I hang around with lots of ecologically-friendly people and haven't seen any such guilt. It's no more "guilt" that drives people to purchase carbon credits, or to purchase sustainably-grown produce, than it's "guilt" that makes me crap in the toilet rather than in the middle of the street, and put my trash in the can rather then throwing it into my neighbor's yard. It's called cleaning up after yourself, and it's what grown-ups do.
What the Atkins diet proves, is that you can make a lot of money telling people what they want to hear.
A little Googling will show low-carb diet boards where people are complaining about how they're in ketosis but still gaining weight. It is not the case that you can take in unlimited calories on a low carbohydrate diet and not gain weight. The difference that ketosis makes, by excreting ketones in urine and in the breath, is minimal, on the order of 45 kcal a day at most.
Even people with impaired glucose tolerance will lose weight on a caloricaly appropriate diet based on complex carbohydrates -- and in so doing, will avoid the negative health effects of a high protein Atkins-style diet.
Exactly. These bastards do not want you to have general-purpose computers; they want you to only have locked-down information appliances.
And, judging from all the cooing and fawning over the latest shiny piece of crap from Apple, most people will be quite happy accept infopliances.
Of course, if they want spyware on every computer, then you can no longer have control of your computer. Software development will have to be heavily regulated.
RMS saw it coming over a decade ago; go read his little parable The Right to Read , if you don't know it already.
An "e-cigarette" is a device for the delivery of small amounts of pure nicotine. There is nothing "hypothetical" under discussion here.
Cocaine is less toxic than nicotine. That is not a matter of belief, it is a matter of well-established fact.
Whether one thing is "safer" than another, depends largely on circumstance. Reading a book is safer than bungee jumping -- but reading a book while you're driving is more dangerous than bungee jumping. So if you're going to ask "is cocaine safer than nicotine", I need to ask, in what circumstance?
If you mean cocaine administered by chewing coca versus nicotine administered by smoking or chewing tobacco, or if you mean an device that administers very small controlled amounts of pure nicotine -- an nicotine gum, perhaps, or an e-cigarette -- versus a similar device that might administer very small controlled amounts of pure cocaine (like, say, cocaine chewing gum), yes, based on the available evidence, cocaine is safer than nicotine in either of these scenarios.
2+2=1, in mod-3 arithmetic.
The appeal to "fairly intuitive" is exactly the problem -- who knows what's "intuitive" to intelligent semiconductor crystalline entities living in a methane lake on a frozen moon of a gas giant? Maybe mod-3 arithmetic is intuitive to them.
Math is most definitely not "based on the laws of physics". It's closer to say that they "help describe the laws of physics" -- which is a very different statement -- but "the laws of physics" are a patterning of our observations of the world. Creatures with different sense organs and different computational apparatus may very well pattern their observations of the world differently, and their equivalent of the "laws of physics" might unrecognizable to us.
We many find that our grasp of physics is like one of the famous blind guy's grasp of an elephant, and that a culture with a different biology, different sensorium, different environment, and different history, ends up with a physics rather different than our own, yet still useful. What would that look like? I'm too stuck in the human perspective to guess.
I didn't say twice as dangerous. I said twice as toxic. And I was wrong: the correct figure is that nicotine is about 30 to 100 times as toxic as cocaine.
Incorrect. The LD50 for nicotine is 3 mg/kg for mice, and estimated at 0.5-1.0 mg/kg for humans; the LD50 for cocaine is 95 mg/kg for mice.
The "normal" use of cocaine, the pattern of use for most of human history, would be chewing coca leaves. That can't kill.
If you extracted nicotine from tobacco the way cocaine is extracted from coca, it sure as hell could kill.
Chewing coca is certainly less dangerous than smoking cigarettes, and probably less dangerous than chewing tobacco.
Pure cocaine is certainly less dangerous than pure nicotine.
Prohibition, of course, makes either more dangerous than it is based on the inherent biochemistry, and is a massive failure.
Knowing that caffeine is addictive, I take steps to control my caffeine use, so that it does not become addictive or habitual. (Or, I should say, does not again become addictive or habitual.) I drink about three cups of coffee a week.
And caffeine is about 100 times less toxic that nicotine.
I misspoke above when I said nicotine was twice as toxic as cocaine -- it's about 100 times, by LD50. Here's the LD50s, in mg/kg: nicotine, 0.5-1.0 (human, estimated); caffeine, 150 to 200 (human, estimated); cocaine, 95 (in mice).
"Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind," as ol' Johny Donne put it. I prefer to promote health; and I'm saddened that your addiction is corrosive enough to your mental health that you feel the need to insult someone who points out that the chemical to which you are addicted is highly addictive and significantly toxic.
Those are simply the facts. If you choose to use nicotine, you should be aware of them so that you can control your use appropriately; if you cannot control your use, perhaps having them brought to your attention will help motivate you to seek treatment.
In neither case, however, is it useful or reasonable for the government to use force to control your use. (Assuming no externalities, and that you're not on parole or probation or otherwise "within the system".)
In which case, you become completely incapable of doing business. That is not the "right" choice.
The fact that this has not happened, shows the problem with your thesis. Everyone acknowledges that contracts are indecipherable; and yet very seldom does one have the freedom to negotiate.
People in positions of authority or power or privilege never hear the truth. Communication is only possible between equals; those in a position of disadvantage are coerced by circumstance into saying whatever the advantaged party wants to hear.
Oh, and about your sig: "Rights, unlike entitlements, do not impose positive obligations on others." So you don't believe in a right to trial by jury, or to compel testimony from witnesses in one's defense? No right to due process?
Nicotine is one of the most addictive drugs known, and is twice as toxic (in terms of LD50) as cocaine. And the use of nicotine gum and patches during pregnancy causes an increase in the risk of birth defects.
I call bullshit on TFA. I smell either a shill or an addict trying to justify their behavior.
That said: it's your body, and so long as you keep the fumes to yourself, I support your right to make your own decisions. But regularly and habitually using nicotine, in burning plant matter or in any other form, is a dammed dumb decision.
Yes, others people's opinion of you can make a difference, because it affects how they treat you. If you ever move out of your mom's basement, you might learn that, you festering lump of smegma. Socially inept much?
Gods, what a pathetic excuse for a human being. I'll bet you're one of those self-proclaimed "aspies" who think their lack of empathy is something to crow about, rather than an indication of brain damage. What? Hey, sorry if that offended you. Didn't think my opinion of you would make a difference. (Insults withdrawn, but hope that the point may have been made in that second or two between.)
You should doubt my word on the matter because we know that, as this case demonstrates, people will sign things without full understanding. They have to; it's an artifact of the power imbalance that occurs when one side has a prior opportunity to have paid experts craft a legal instrument, and the other is faced with an immediate decision without the benefit of counsel.
No person in a modern industrial society can keep track of all the contractual obligations that they have supposedly fully understood and bound themselves to. The way that the state continues to treat the contracts as some sort of voluntary meaningful agreement, is just another method of ensuring privilege to the powerful.
We don't know that at all. All of mathematics rests on axioms and definitions; who knows what axioms might seem obvious to a creature based on a different biology?
In a precise sense, "history" only goes back to the development of writing -- everything else being "pre-history". So, yes, in the precise sense this is the most rapid phase of extinction in history, and the whole period of history falls within one of the six mass extinctions that the planet has gone through overall.
Every day, you should say to yourself, "This is the last day of my life. How do I want to spend it?" Because one day, you'll be right.
Bollocks. The fastest man-made object had a velocity of about 150,000 mph -- 42 mps. That's .0002c, .02% of lightspeed. 22,000 years to Alpha C at that rate.
Until we do it, we have no firm evidence that it is possible -- not just physically possible, but socioeconomically and politically possible -- for a civilization to build anything faster.
Which is also something that we have no evidence is a practical project for a civilization to build.
As usually interpreted, the "Fermi paradox" is a load of dingo's kidneys, which essentially boils down to "We don't see advanced alien civilizations doing what we imagine advanced alien civilizations would do. Therefore, there are no alien civilizations." I hope you see the leap in logic there.
That, of course, depends on a self-serving definition of "well-developed".
First "just hallucinations" introduces a value judgment. The ability of the human mind to create things out of whole cloth is an amazing thing. Understanding these experiences as a product of mind alone is far more interesting that ideas about aliens or about hidden technological civilizations on Earth.
But, yes, there are other possibilities...in the same sense that it's a "possibility" that you are actually a brain in a vat being fed signals, or that there is an invisible Elvis Presley clone in the room with you. (Can't see him? That proves he's invisible.) My favorite alternative UFO explanation is that they are telepathic projections from a civilization around the star Sirius -- not extraterrestrial visitors, mind you, but extraterrestrial broadcasts.
However, these "explanations" do not explain the ways in which such observations have clearly been shaped by culture. One guy described the UFOs he saw as "flying saucers", and then for a while everyone saw saucers -- an effect that faded with time. Back before the mid 70s, people saw a variety of aliens -- then Close Encounters came out, and everyone started seeing Greys that look an awful lot like the critters in the UFOs in that movie.
I think it was Asimov who said that claims can be divided into three categories: mundane, interesting, and bullshit. If you say you've got 50 kg of salt, that's mundane, and no reason I shouldn't take your word for it. If you say you've got 50 kg of gold, that's interesting, and I'm going to want to see it and maybe test it a bit before I believe you.
But if you say you've got 50 kg of ununoctiumastatine, that's bullshit. We can't say it's completely impossible -- there's that brain-in-a-jar level of probability that you're a particle physics genius who's figured out a loophole -- but it's not a proposition worth entertaining seriously.
What's left is the likely notion that the interesting "UFO phenomenon" -- the ones that aren't reflections, weather balloon, aircraft, etc. -- are subjective experiences without external, objective reference. They are in the same category as dreams, visions, hallucinations, "imaginary friends", apparitions of various deities, and so on.
Is studying these experiences a worthwhile thing to do? Sure. It can tell us a lot about how we build the subjective universes that each of us inhabits. But these studies belong under psychology or philosophy, not under physics or astronomy or exobiology.
No. Apple makes "information appliances", not PCs. The hallmark of a personal computer is that it was personal -- the owner, not the manufacturer, had control.
The iPad is all Jobs, no Woz; it's marketroid, not hacker.
Of course Apple wants you to believe that you would feel happy if you had it. And perhaps you would feel a shallow sort of sham happiness (mostly a placebo marketing effect) for a few days, or even a few weeks, if you had one.
But no material thing -- not an iPad, not a brand new sports car, not an official Red Ryder, carbine action, two-hundred shot range model air rifle -- will make you truly happy. Nor will other people, who have this annoying tendency to change, to disappoint your expectations, to get old and sick and to die.
The good news is that, knowing this, you can stop wasting so much time and energy looking for the things and relationships that are finally going to make you happy. Nothing outside yourself will do it.
Meanwhile, while neither is going to bring me happiness, when looking for tools I prefer actual general-purpose computers to information appliances designed for passive consumers. Fsck the iPad and all the other gilded cages that come out of Apple.
And you pull this number of what it "ought" to cost from where, exactly?
If it "ought" to cost only $2,500 per student-year to educate a student, how is it that independent private schools spend $15,000, Hebrew schools spend $12,000, and Catholic schools (which slightly under-perform public schools, and provide fewer services) spend $7,743.. Even conservative Christian schools, which perform much worse than public schools, spend $5,727 -- more than twice your $2,500.