It is 12:20am. You are sitting in your concrete bungalow 23 km northwest of Nazca, Peru.
Tau Ceti will be rising in 23 minutes and will be approaching its zenith right above your head. The extra diesel generator has been engaged for supplementary power. You type in the absolute coordinates, -15deg 56' 14.928" declination and 01h 44m 04.0829s right ascension, and a large worm gear slowly grinds as the 20 meter dish aims toward the point where the star will soon appear just above the horizon.
You are nervous about getting this right and take a swig of Inca Cola and place the cool glass bottle to your forehead for a moment. As the first emissary from your planet you weigh your options carefully and finally decide on Message 17, a compilation of your favorite kiddie porn encoded as a grid of pixels using a form of differential pulse position modulation. The information is not contained in the length of the pulses, but in the varying length of pauses between them.
You ask your 'assistant', Miss Suarez, to pull down the large knife switch starting the superconducting magnet coils which help guide the electrons in your homemade 400 kW long pulsed 10 Ghz klystron. You can almost smell the ozone in the air as 300 kV appear across the secondary windings of your transformer ready to power up your hydrogen thyratron. The dish is in position, aimed almost at the horizon. You are now prepared to send your first 0.3 second test pulses. You load a test message into the messaging program and begin the first test pattern.
No, but your distance from the massive object does and that depends on the density of the planet. We can make some educated guesses based on the density of the Earth, Mars, Venus, Mercury, and from the moons in our system, but it is still no more than a guess.
Your idea of "reasonable" seems somewhat arbitrary. I would posit 0.03c as reasonable enough. Four hundred years or about 7 generations. Still alot closer than the 666 years it would take to get to Gliese 581.
You do realize that Voyager was never intended for interstellar exploration, right? It is not any sort of pinnacle of what humanity can do and it was never intended to be.
We could probably get to at least 0.07c with nuclear pulse propulsion. Of course at that speed it would still take us over 170 years to get there. Plus the additional 100-200 years to build the ship and the off world infrastructure necessary to do so.
The story repeatedly uses the term 'backscatter'. That gives me some confidence that Michael knew the difference between 30 Ghz millimeter waves courtesy of L3 and X-rays courtesy of Michael Chertoff and his close friends at Rapescan.
As far as Thz radiation, what are you on about? Those handheld passive scanners that they don't use for screening and hardly ever use in general?
You do realize that it is not only so called 'processed' foods that have MSG, right? Yes it is obviously a drug, but a very effective one. Used in the correct dosage it can make flavors more intense. Unfortunately I am highly sensitive to MSG and can only use very small quantities of it.
If they are banned from private ownership then they need to be banned from police organizations as well. It doesn't require military weapons to defend yourself from the police. Just a level playing field. If the police are allowed to carry so called 'assault rifles' then we should be as well.
Take my situation for example. I was seriously injured by a police officer who clearly broke the law, but I cannot report him to anyone because I believe that if I did so he would come to my house and simply kill me. If I had some way to defend myself against him I would be willing to take the risk of reporting him like any good citizen should be able to.
The fact is the government consists of ordinary peope. People who are far from perfect. It makes no sense to allow one group to have real weapons, but not allow another to have the same. It is an unjust imbalance. You want to ban firearms? Fine. But you'd better be willing to have a police force armed solely with tasers if you do.
If AGW is finally proven beyond any doubt then the logical thing to do is build nuclear power plants. Lots and lots of them.
Fossil fuel plants would have to be retired or converted into nuclear powered plants. In addition to AC powered highways (raised wires or high voltage rails in the road surface) combined with affordable electric cars of course.
As far as getting the entire planet to agree to go 100% nuclear and give up on fossil fuel powered cars I haven't a clue. That would be very, very difficult and maybe impossible. Especially in poor countries where everyone might have to go back to bicycles.
I agree that, although noticeably improved from the utterly unplayable interface of pre-MotB NWN2, the interface was still awful. If you can manage to get past it though MotB was still one of the best cRPGs that had been made in years.
I don't care about the biased opinions of climate scientists. I don't care what they believe. I bet many of them believe in a supernatural entity of some kind. I will never believe a particular thing is true due to a poll. These discussions should only be about one thing: raw data.
Show me the numbers. Not someone's opinion about what they mean, but a detailed description of each experiment and the raw data that resulted.
Any of you devout AGW believers should have a detailed list on hand and be able to thoroughly explain each experiment as well as the resulting data. If you cannot cite the undeniable proof that you are always referring to but almost never actually showing then it could be argued that you have no idea what you are talking about.
I remain unconvinced of AGW for one reason: insufficient data to draw any conclusion one way or the other. It may well be that the amount of CO2 our species produces is sufficient to significantly warm the planet. It is certainly not impossible. However as far as I have seen that hypothesis remains unproven. Show me sufficiently convincing data from multiple experiments and I am quite willing to change my mind.
1. The vast majority of scientists who have devoted their professional lives to the study of the earth's climate;
I think you will find that the vast majority of so called climate scientists have believed in AGW from a very young age and are not attempting to disprove the theory (as you would normally do in science), but to reinforce it as much as possible so as to convince politicians to save the world from what they passionately believe will otherwise result in the extinction of our entire species and perhaps even all animal life on the planet.
Imagine a mythical climate scientist who is not a true believer. Who didn't drink the koolaid and is naturally skeptical of the AGW theory. How far do you think he would get in school? Unless he lied on his exams he would fail or at least do poorly. He would be unlikely to go into a field where it was so obvious he was not wanted. If I had been interested in studying the Earth's climate and was not persuaded by the AGW arguments/evidence I would certainly not consider becoming a climate scientist as a practical option. Even if I managed to somehow graduate by telling the profs what they wanted to hear on every exam I would still never be hired by anyone as a climate scientist when they discovered that I was a skeptic.
I am pro-GW (I am in favor of it). So perhaps I may be of some assistance. I try to resist posting in global warming related 'stories' because:
1. They are off topic for this site. Nothing to do with geeks or technology or Linux.
2. Any post I make is likely to be modded down to -1 and vanish before any interesting discussion can develop. That is pretty much inevitible with any controversial topic where the overwhelming majority is on one side of the debate. I think you guys really do prefer to just debate among yourselves anyway.
Let me summarize the debate. One side believes there is sufficient evidence for theory X. The other side believes there is insufficient evidence. The side that believes there is sufficient evidence believes that the evidence is so overwhelming that to be skeptical of it is of the same order as being skeptical of gravity.
I personally believe rational argument is virtually impossible on the topic of global warming. Devout AGW believers will not be swayed by any argument. To them AGW is self-evident and the burden of proof should be on the other side to prove that it is not happening.
GW heretics like myself OTOH, will not be convinced of AGW without the sort of overwhelming evidence that we aren't likely to ever have. Certainly not within the lifetime of anyone now alive. The fact that the vast majority believes AGW is undeniably real and even some kind of immediate threat to our species makes it even more unlikely that any real evidence will ever be gathered. Why bother to gather evidence about something that the majority of the world has already decided is undeniably true? These days scientists (and I use that term loosely) focus on refining and reinforcing the argument in favor of AGW. Not so much on proving that it exists.
I'm looking at my mac options from GOG and I'm wondering.. Planescape or Baldurs Gate?
Skip Baldur's Gate 1. Baldur's Gate 2 is much better in pretty much every way. My advice would be to play both Planescape: Torment and Baldur's Gate 2. Both are two of the greatest computer role playing games every made. Baldur's Gate 2 doesn't have a good story mainly because Bioware has never believed in bothering to hire good writers, but the combat is great fun. Especially the mage combat. Definitely try some of the mods that are available for it. Most importantly SCSII aka Sword Coast Strategems II. It vastly improves enemy AI to the point of making the game one of the most challenging I've ever played. Challenging and fun too. BG2Fixpack and BG2Tweaks are also mandatory.
PS:T is very much an interactive novel. A very good one. I am one of those who also enjoyed the combat, but nearly everyone complains about Torment combat it seems. It's not as good as Baldur's Gate 2, but it is still far better than the vast majority of cRPGs IMO. Torment is so good that it transcends game-ness and becomes something different.
I guess it depends on how you define "good". Can you give even one example of a modern video game which even remotely resembles Planescape: Torment? Such games just aren't being made and haven't been made since. So there really isn't anything to compare it too. Well, maybe Mask of the Betrayer, but that was technically an expansion and not a complete game in itself. The graphics will take a little getting used to if you never played early post-millenium cRPGs, but the game as a whole doesn't compare to most modern games because it is much, much better. People who never learned to read or can't be bother reading should avoid it though.
Project Eternity is not a spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment. It is intended to be more like a cross between Icewind Dale and Baldur's Gate 2, except with a much, much, much better story than either of those. The story will be written by both the guy who mostly wrote Planescape: Torment (Chris Avellone) and the guy who wrote most of the NWN2 expansion Mask of the Betrayer (George Ziets). So the story is likely to be very, very good, but it is not intended to be any sort of successor to PS:T.
All birds are not the same. Some of them are probably not very bright. I've owned birds for years and I can't recall one being startled as you describe. Even when he meets a new person who comes to visit. Perhaps if you could be more specific about the particular species of bird and a more exact circumstance which could cause such a panic.
Most of the time glass is not truly transparent. Not indistinguishable from air. If you clean your glass every day very thoroughly with a high quality glass cleaner it might be more of an issue. In my experience most people are not that obsessive about keeping their windows and glass doors clean and when they are they don't usually keep birds as their cages and the area around them can get messy very quickly and I think they would find it disturbing.
Let me repeat, are you actually saying that you have seen African Grey parrots fly into glass windows or doors? If a finch did it I wouldn't be surprised. They don't seem particularly bright. I would be very surprised to see any medium to large sized parrot do so however. I'm not claiming it never happens of course. Even humans walk through glass doors from time to time and dogs and cats must also do it occassionally.
One simple solution if you keep birds and are afraid of this happening is blinds. They make it quite clear to all but the absolutely most stupid animal that there is a physical object in their way and that they will injure themselves if they run or fly into it. It's not a valid excuse to trim flight feathers IMO or to keep a dog/cat in its carrier all the time and never let it run around or to keep small children confined to their rooms with their windows boarded up.
Those are the survivors. Likely a small percentage. Also, I used to live in Central Florida (space coast area), which is nearly as warm, and I never once saw an escaped parrot flying around. So what about the parrots that are kept outside of South Florida?
We still haven't confirmed a single habitable planet. I don't think this suggests that habitable worlds are at all common. Besides, when it comes to Fermi's paradox remember that,with all of our technology, we still have no idea how to make life from some sort of primitive chemical soup. It is still like magic to us that these dumb simple molecules can arrange themselves into complex machines by chance alone. It could still be such a rare event that only a handful of life forms exist in each galaxy and only a fraction of those worlds may ever have a life form which develops intelligence of the kind that we would recognize as such. Think about the countless thousands of species on our world since life began and think about the fact that evolution only chose intelligence as the optimal path exactly once. One time. If it is such a powerful advantage for survival why haven't more species become as intelligent as we are. Or at least close. Monkeys, parrots, corvids,cephalopods, and dolphins may all be remarkably intelligent but I haven't noticed any building giant radiotelescopes or computers or motor vehicles or spaceships.
Also, keep in mind that even with impossibly large space-based optical telescopes only star systems within maybe 200-500 light years would know that we are an intelligent, technology using world. For everyone else we are just skinny hairless apes. Of course if life is rare in the galaxy then Earth would still be a major find and they would likely want to plot a course to our system to get a closer look. Even the dinosaurs would have been quite an interesting sight for alien scholars.
To be fair, the vast majority of pet parrots, not just in the US, but in the world are raised by humans not by their parents. And usually their parents weren't raised in the wild either. So that ship has already sailed. If the parents decide to breed (and it's not like you can force them) those babies cannot be shipped back to Africa or South America and set free in the wild. Only a small percentage of them would survive at all without instruction from wild parents. I think that would be more cruel. It is already illegal to collect these birds from the wild.
That is nothing at all like my experience with greys. What kind of parrot did your parents have?
As far as young birds getting their first flight feathers it is a good idea to be extra cautious with windows and doors at that time. Curtains/blinds or just making sure that the glass is very dirty will help a lot at that time. It won't take long before they realize the glass is solid. Letting them explore the windows and doors on foot with their beaks before they learn to fly is also probably a good idea. Of course if you live in some uber-contemporary house with mostly glass walls I would advice keeping that glass as dirty as possible.
You may find this surprising, but all of the places in which my birds lived for years had windows and glass doors and there was not a single time that any even came close to flying into them. They are a lot smarter than you give them credit for. They don't fly into windows and glass doors for the same reason that you don't walk into them. They see them, know that they are there and that they are solid. Having said that, I don't tend to make any great effort to keep the glass clean.
It could be argued that the domestication process itself is cruel. Almost a form of genocide. Enslaving not just a single animal, but an entire species, just so we can have the living equivalent of a teddy bear.
Ask yourself which you would prefer: being left alone in the wilderness with no food and having to worry about bears and wolves and other predators or being fed and taken care of by someone who really cares about you and wants you to be happy. How long would you even survive alone in the forest? Once these birds are born and raised by humans the 'damage' is already done. After that they are unlikely to survive in the wild.
I do think it is cruel to lock a bird even in a fairly large cage most of the time. But I don't think being locked inside a house with a perch and an open (unlocked) cage and plenty of food that you like and water to drink is all that cruel. It is still the equivalent of house arrest, but we treat our own children the same way and no one thinks we are cruel for putting them under house arrest. The bird is often loved, is protected from predators, fed a variety of foods that would be difficult for him to find in the wild. Whether that is worth giving up your freedom for would probably depend a lot on the individual parrot. I don't think it's such a bad deal and would probably take it myself. I think being someone's pet is much better than having to fend for myself in the jungle.
Slashdot Mirror
It is 12:20am. You are sitting in your concrete bungalow 23 km northwest of Nazca, Peru.
Tau Ceti will be rising in 23 minutes and will be approaching its zenith right above your head. The extra diesel generator has been engaged for supplementary power. You type in the absolute coordinates, -15deg 56' 14.928" declination and 01h 44m 04.0829s right ascension, and a large worm gear slowly grinds as the 20 meter dish aims toward the point where the star will soon appear just above the horizon.
You are nervous about getting this right and take a swig of Inca Cola and place the cool glass bottle to your forehead for a moment. As the first emissary from your planet you weigh your options carefully and finally decide on Message 17, a compilation of your favorite kiddie porn encoded as a grid of pixels using a form of differential pulse position modulation. The information is not contained in the length of the pulses, but in the varying length of pauses between them.
You ask your 'assistant', Miss Suarez, to pull down the large knife switch starting the superconducting magnet coils which help guide the electrons in your homemade 400 kW long pulsed 10 Ghz klystron. You can almost smell the ozone in the air as 300 kV appear across the secondary windings of your transformer ready to power up your hydrogen thyratron. The dish is in position, aimed almost at the horizon. You are now prepared to send your first 0.3 second test pulses. You load a test message into the messaging program and begin the first test pattern.
No, but your distance from the massive object does and that depends on the density of the planet. We can make some educated guesses based on the density of the Earth, Mars, Venus, Mercury, and from the moons in our system, but it is still no more than a guess.
Your idea of "reasonable" seems somewhat arbitrary. I would posit 0.03c as reasonable enough. Four hundred years or about 7 generations. Still alot closer than the 666 years it would take to get to Gliese 581.
It was that sort of reasoning that almost prevented the Tau Cetians from seeding life here. Luckily cooler heads prevailed and here we are.
You do realize that Voyager was never intended for interstellar exploration, right? It is not any sort of pinnacle of what humanity can do and it was never intended to be.
We could probably get to at least 0.07c with nuclear pulse propulsion. Of course at that speed it would still take us over 170 years to get there. Plus the additional 100-200 years to build the ship and the off world infrastructure necessary to do so.
The story repeatedly uses the term 'backscatter'. That gives me some confidence that Michael knew the difference between 30 Ghz millimeter waves courtesy of L3 and X-rays courtesy of Michael Chertoff and his close friends at Rapescan.
As far as Thz radiation, what are you on about? Those handheld passive scanners that they don't use for screening and hardly ever use in general?
There have not been any third party tests of the devices, smart guy. No unbiased testing has been done.
You do realize that it is not only so called 'processed' foods that have MSG, right? Yes it is obviously a drug, but a very effective one. Used in the correct dosage it can make flavors more intense. Unfortunately I am highly sensitive to MSG and can only use very small quantities of it.
If they are banned from private ownership then they need to be banned from police organizations as well. It doesn't require military weapons to defend yourself from the police. Just a level playing field. If the police are allowed to carry so called 'assault rifles' then we should be as well.
Take my situation for example. I was seriously injured by a police officer who clearly broke the law, but I cannot report him to anyone because I believe that if I did so he would come to my house and simply kill me. If I had some way to defend myself against him I would be willing to take the risk of reporting him like any good citizen should be able to.
The fact is the government consists of ordinary peope. People who are far from perfect. It makes no sense to allow one group to have real weapons, but not allow another to have the same. It is an unjust imbalance. You want to ban firearms? Fine. But you'd better be willing to have a police force armed solely with tasers if you do.
If AGW is finally proven beyond any doubt then the logical thing to do is build nuclear power plants. Lots and lots of them.
Fossil fuel plants would have to be retired or converted into nuclear powered plants. In addition to AC powered highways (raised wires or high voltage rails in the road surface) combined with affordable electric cars of course.
As far as getting the entire planet to agree to go 100% nuclear and give up on fossil fuel powered cars I haven't a clue. That would be very, very difficult and maybe impossible. Especially in poor countries where everyone might have to go back to bicycles.
I agree that, although noticeably improved from the utterly unplayable interface of pre-MotB NWN2, the interface was still awful. If you can manage to get past it though MotB was still one of the best cRPGs that had been made in years.
I don't care about the biased opinions of climate scientists. I don't care what they believe. I bet many of them believe in a supernatural entity of some kind. I will never believe a particular thing is true due to a poll. These discussions should only be about one thing: raw data.
Show me the numbers. Not someone's opinion about what they mean, but a detailed description of each experiment and the raw data that resulted.
Any of you devout AGW believers should have a detailed list on hand and be able to thoroughly explain each experiment as well as the resulting data. If you cannot cite the undeniable proof that you are always referring to but almost never actually showing then it could be argued that you have no idea what you are talking about.
I remain unconvinced of AGW for one reason: insufficient data to draw any conclusion one way or the other. It may well be that the amount of CO2 our species produces is sufficient to significantly warm the planet. It is certainly not impossible. However as far as I have seen that hypothesis remains unproven. Show me sufficiently convincing data from multiple experiments and I am quite willing to change my mind.
1. The vast majority of scientists who have devoted their professional lives to the study of the earth's climate;
I think you will find that the vast majority of so called climate scientists have believed in AGW from a very young age and are not attempting to disprove the theory (as you would normally do in science), but to reinforce it as much as possible so as to convince politicians to save the world from what they passionately believe will otherwise result in the extinction of our entire species and perhaps even all animal life on the planet.
Imagine a mythical climate scientist who is not a true believer. Who didn't drink the koolaid and is naturally skeptical of the AGW theory. How far do you think he would get in school? Unless he lied on his exams he would fail or at least do poorly. He would be unlikely to go into a field where it was so obvious he was not wanted. If I had been interested in studying the Earth's climate and was not persuaded by the AGW arguments/evidence I would certainly not consider becoming a climate scientist as a practical option. Even if I managed to somehow graduate by telling the profs what they wanted to hear on every exam I would still never be hired by anyone as a climate scientist when they discovered that I was a skeptic.
I am pro-GW (I am in favor of it). So perhaps I may be of some assistance. I try to resist posting in global warming related 'stories' because:
1. They are off topic for this site. Nothing to do with geeks or technology or Linux.
2. Any post I make is likely to be modded down to -1 and vanish before any interesting discussion can develop. That is pretty much inevitible with any controversial topic where the overwhelming majority is on one side of the debate. I think you guys really do prefer to just debate among yourselves anyway.
Let me summarize the debate. One side believes there is sufficient evidence for theory X. The other side believes there is insufficient evidence. The side that believes there is sufficient evidence believes that the evidence is so overwhelming that to be skeptical of it is of the same order as being skeptical of gravity.
I personally believe rational argument is virtually impossible on the topic of global warming. Devout AGW believers will not be swayed by any argument. To them
AGW is self-evident and the burden of proof should be on the other side to prove that it is not happening.
GW heretics like myself OTOH, will not be convinced of AGW without the sort of overwhelming evidence that we aren't likely to ever have. Certainly not within the lifetime of anyone now alive. The fact that the vast majority believes AGW is undeniably real and even some kind of immediate threat to our species makes it even more unlikely that any real evidence will ever be gathered. Why bother to gather evidence about something that the majority of the world has already decided is undeniably true? These days scientists (and I use that term loosely) focus on refining and reinforcing the argument in favor of AGW. Not so much on proving that it exists.
I'm looking at my mac options from GOG and I'm wondering.. Planescape or Baldurs Gate?
Skip Baldur's Gate 1. Baldur's Gate 2 is much better in pretty much every way. My advice would be to play both Planescape: Torment and Baldur's Gate 2. Both are two of the greatest computer role playing games every made. Baldur's Gate 2 doesn't have a good story mainly because Bioware has never believed in bothering to hire good writers, but the combat is great fun. Especially the mage combat. Definitely try some of the mods that are available for it. Most importantly SCSII aka Sword Coast Strategems II. It vastly improves enemy AI to the point of making the game one of the most challenging I've ever played. Challenging and fun too. BG2Fixpack and BG2Tweaks are also mandatory.
PS:T is very much an interactive novel. A very good one. I am one of those who also enjoyed the combat, but nearly everyone complains about Torment combat it seems. It's not as good as Baldur's Gate 2, but it is still far better than the vast majority of cRPGs IMO. Torment is so good that it transcends game-ness and becomes something different.
I guess it depends on how you define "good". Can you give even one example of a modern video game which even remotely resembles Planescape: Torment? Such games just aren't being made and haven't been made since. So there really isn't anything to compare it too. Well, maybe Mask of the Betrayer, but that was technically an expansion and not a complete game in itself. The graphics will take a little getting used to if you never played early post-millenium cRPGs, but the game as a whole doesn't compare to most modern games because it is much, much better. People who never learned to read or can't be bother reading should avoid it though.
Project Eternity is not a spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment. It is intended to be more like a cross between Icewind Dale and Baldur's Gate 2, except with a much, much, much better story than either of those. The story will be written by both the guy who mostly wrote Planescape: Torment (Chris Avellone) and the guy who wrote most of the NWN2 expansion Mask of the Betrayer (George Ziets). So the story is likely to be very, very good, but it is not intended to be any sort of successor to PS:T.
All birds are not the same. Some of them are probably not very bright. I've owned birds for years and I can't recall one being startled as you describe. Even when he meets a new person who comes to visit. Perhaps if you could be more specific about the particular species of bird and a more exact circumstance which could cause such a panic.
Most of the time glass is not truly transparent. Not indistinguishable from air. If you clean your glass every day very thoroughly with a high quality glass cleaner it might be more of an issue. In my experience most people are not that obsessive about keeping their windows and glass doors clean and when they are they don't usually keep birds as their cages and the area around them can get messy very quickly and I think they would find it disturbing.
Let me repeat, are you actually saying that you have seen African Grey parrots fly into glass windows or doors? If a finch did it I wouldn't be surprised. They don't seem particularly bright. I would be very surprised to see any medium to large sized parrot do so however. I'm not claiming it never happens of course. Even humans walk through glass doors from time to time and dogs and cats must also do it occassionally.
One simple solution if you keep birds and are afraid of this happening is blinds. They make it quite clear to all but the absolutely most stupid animal that there is a physical object in their way and that they will injure themselves if they run or fly into it. It's not a valid excuse to trim flight feathers IMO or to keep a dog/cat in its carrier all the time and never let it run around or to keep small children confined to their rooms with their windows boarded up.
Those are the survivors. Likely a small percentage. Also, I used to live in Central Florida (space coast area), which is nearly as warm, and I never once saw an escaped parrot flying around. So what about the parrots that are kept outside of South Florida?
We still haven't confirmed a single habitable planet. I don't think this suggests that habitable worlds are at all common. Besides, when it comes to Fermi's paradox remember that,with all of our technology, we still have no idea how to make life from some sort of primitive chemical soup. It is still like magic to us that these dumb simple molecules can arrange themselves into complex machines by chance alone. It could still be such a rare event that only a handful of life forms exist in each galaxy and only a fraction of those worlds may ever have a life form which develops intelligence of the kind that we would recognize as such. Think about the countless thousands of species on our world since life began and think about the fact that evolution only chose intelligence as the optimal path exactly once. One time. If it is such a powerful advantage for survival why haven't more species become as intelligent as we are. Or at least close. Monkeys, parrots, corvids ,cephalopods, and dolphins may all be remarkably intelligent but I haven't noticed any building giant radiotelescopes or computers or motor vehicles or spaceships.
Also, keep in mind that even with impossibly large space-based optical telescopes only star systems within maybe 200-500 light years would know that we are an intelligent, technology using world. For everyone else we are just skinny hairless apes. Of course if life is rare in the galaxy then Earth would still be a major find and they would likely want to plot a course to our system to get a closer look. Even the dinosaurs would have been quite an interesting sight for alien scholars.
To be fair, the vast majority of pet parrots, not just in the US, but in the world are raised by humans not by their parents. And usually their parents weren't raised in the wild either. So that ship has already sailed. If the parents decide to breed (and it's not like you can force them) those babies cannot be shipped back to Africa or South America and set free in the wild. Only a small percentage of them would survive at all without instruction from wild parents. I think that would be more cruel. It is already illegal to collect these birds from the wild.
That is nothing at all like my experience with greys. What kind of parrot did your parents have?
As far as young birds getting their first flight feathers it is a good idea to be extra cautious with windows and doors at that time. Curtains/blinds or just making sure that the glass is very dirty will help a lot at that time. It won't take long before they realize the glass is solid. Letting them explore the windows and doors on foot with their beaks before they learn to fly is also probably a good idea. Of course if you live in some uber-contemporary house with mostly glass walls I would advice keeping that glass as dirty as possible.
You may find this surprising, but all of the places in which my birds lived for years had windows and glass doors and there was not a single time that any even came close to flying into them. They are a lot smarter than you give them credit for. They don't fly into windows and glass doors for the same reason that you don't walk into them. They see them, know that they are there and that they are solid. Having said that, I don't tend to make any great effort to keep the glass clean.
It could be argued that the domestication process itself is cruel. Almost a form of genocide. Enslaving not just a single animal, but an entire species, just so we can have the living equivalent of a teddy bear.
Ask yourself which you would prefer: being left alone in the wilderness with no food and having to worry about bears and wolves and other predators or being fed and taken care of by someone who really cares about you and wants you to be happy. How long would you even survive alone in the forest? Once these birds are born and raised by humans the 'damage' is already done. After that they are unlikely to survive in the wild.
I do think it is cruel to lock a bird even in a fairly large cage most of the time. But I don't think being locked inside a house with a perch and an open (unlocked) cage and plenty of food that you like and water to drink is all that cruel. It is still the equivalent of house arrest, but we treat our own children the same way and no one thinks we are cruel for putting them under house arrest. The bird is often loved, is protected from predators, fed a variety of foods that would be difficult for him to find in the wild. Whether that is worth giving up your freedom for would probably depend a lot on the individual parrot. I don't think it's such a bad deal and would probably take it myself. I think being someone's pet is much better than having to fend for myself in the jungle.
African greys do.