No, I meant wasn't. The section started with "Presumes:" So read it as "presumes earth wasn't colonized..." and so forth.
would an intelligent species leave less?
They might, especially if that was their intention. Intelligence supersedes the natural order, you know. Since we weren't there, we can't presume.
We share most of our genome with "dolphins, cats and fleas".
Doesn't mean we weren't engineered out of the same genome, though. Evolution is one force that we are pretty certain can do the job. However, engineering is a force we know can do the job. We're using it ourselves, right now.
Strangely, I've never seen any mention of such a mechanism.
See the US "no-fly" list for a good example of this in practice. If you get on, (a) you can't see why, and (b) you can't discuss it with anyone (after all, you don't know why), and (c) you can't get off. Even if you're an infant.
The rule is, cede power to the government in any form - law, regulation, classification - and you will not get it back. Once taken, there is no assurance (I'm not talking about verbal assurance, I'm talking about assurance in the sense you meant it, a working mechanism) that you as a citizen will ever have any measure of control over the issue at hand ever again.
This is a one way street. Once gone, there is no return.
The art of repressive politics - overall - is keeping the level of abuse down to just under that point where the populace will turn on you. Both the UK and the USA have been riding ever closer to that line, yet artfully avoiding crossing it. Modern polling techniques added to modern disinformation techniques have produced a society that is passive in the face of massive levels of rights loss, coercion, and general interference; modern comforts leave citizens ever more unwilling to take the risk of sacrificing all for what to most of them is just an abstract.
As long as this balance in maintained, there are only two choices for the disaffected; push the rest of the populace over the line (which puts you in the same position as the government - the populace didn't want to go there in the first place so you are engaged in coercion) or act on your own if you can find an effective vector. This, of course, is extremely risky, as the natural corollary for the government's getting out of hand in the above-described ways is an increased level of activity against the disaffected.
Currently, the levers that crack open the door to dictatorship are labeled "terrorism" and "think of the children." These two factors, artfully applied, have demonstrated the power to make the UK and USA populations give up anything, put up with anything, pay anything, without upsetting anyone but the highest functioning individuals who have made rights and freedom their concern. And this is far too small a demographic to result in an effective counter reaction. Until or unless you can defuse the power of these two control vectors to manipulate the general population, and keep replacement and enhancement vectors from taking their place (oh god, we have to control carbon output) it is my opinion that the governments of both countries will continue to increase pressure on the populace in the areas of rights loss, coercion, and general interference. The benefits are power, as you noted, and financial gains for those who control the system. These are not elements that can be replaced for the power hungry; you can offer no substitute, you can only remove them, and that, of course, will provoke a severe reaction.
Satellite radio doesn't really offer anything that can't be had by AM/FM or an iPod
Nonsense. Satellite radio is uncensored, and it offers the opportunity to hear new things not in your library. Commercial radio can do the latter, but not the former. Your iPod can do the former, but not the latter. Satellite radio doesn't devolve into religious MUSH every Sunday; commercial radio does. Satellite radio offers more to rural areas in terms of choice than they ever had previously. The digital nature of the format makes for very high quality, *especially* for fixed receivers like my Sirius at home. And - at least at the moment - satellite radio doesn't sandwich music between a series of lame, lowest common denominator commercials. Finally, satellite radio has a HECK of a lot more variety than does commercial radio. Even in an urban area.
As far as I'm concerned, Sirius is the best thing ever to happen to broadcast radio. Regardless of where it is broadcast from. I used to subscribe to XM, but after way too many playings of Bob Dylan's folk music in the middle of what they said was a classic rock station, I pulled the plug. There's only so much nasal whining I can take. I'm much happier with Sirius's Buzzsaw and Octane and their neighbors. As for our local FM station... ugh. The farm report. Brittney's shaved her head. Trump is arguing with Rosie. A mix of country and pop. Makes me throw up in my mouth a little just to think about it.
Religion allows people to do things that would otherwise be insane
If you'll take the "otherwise" out, I'll agree with you. As for the rest, I don't see how you would make getting to mars - or anywhere else off planet - a religious goal. Nor do I think that if you could, it would be a good thing to begin populating the solar system with the poorest thinkers self-selected from the species. Superstition is a poor basis for maintaining one's safety in a harsh and unfriendly environment. Prayer won't seal leaks, faith won't solve problems, and imaginary friends will not come to anyone's aid. And it is the basis for many of the social ills we suffer today; repression of females, vilification of sexuality, homophobia, terrorism, constant invasion of people's right to choose what to do with their own bodies, interference with actual science teaching, censorship, even interference with what stores can sell you which products at what times and what days. I'd rather not carry those particular legacies to the planets, or the stars should we figure out a way to even approach that task. If they have to come because we can't educate the populace out of the ridiculous ideas that back religion, then let it come as an also-ran, not as the primary means of motivation. I cannot imagine a worse situation than a religious diaspora. The idea is outright repellant.
non-believers are too disorganized.
Come on. I didn't even visit the state, but I put seven figures into Katrina across various charities. I just about support our local animal shelter single handedly; without me, it is certain we wouldn't even have one - there wasn't one before I moved my company here. I paid 1/4 of the cost to put up our local PBS repeater, too. And I am the very poster child for a "non-believer." There are more ways to help than hammering nails, you know. I'm picky - really picky - about what charities I'll support, particularly with regard to the overheads they claim to need and what services they claim they supply. I spent a lot about a decade ago on an overseas gig - African - and that stuff ended up rotting on the docks. Charity is one thing; waste is entirely another. I'm a lot more cynical these days, but I can help, and I do. It has nothing to do with religion, or organization. It's a function of compassion. No more, no less - and religion has no monopoly on compassion whatsoever. No matter what they, or you, might claim to the contrary.
Re: Photon gathering (and x-rays, RF, IR, etc.)
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You ignored the whole argument I made about terrorists and the community around them not being binary. The guy who is willing to blow himself up is not the same as the people who are necessary to help a terrorist acquire and use nuclear weapons
Oh, sorry. So I did. I didn't mean to, I actually missed what you were saying there, my bad.
Well - personally - I think of myself as a realist. I don't see what you are describing there; I think your view may be born of optimism, rather than of examining the facts. Judging by the magnitude of the WTC event, I don't think killing a few thousand or a few ten thousands, is a difference that would do much more than make terrorists cheer. But - I hope you're right. Really, I do.
Personally, I fully expect them to get, and use, nuclear weapons. What happens then will test a lot of things about our society.
How about neither?
Well yes, of course - but that doesn't really address the issue of your imagining that wounds from nukes are worse than wounds from conventional weapons. My point was, they aren't. And of course if you die, you die, so that's kind of a moot point. As for leaving radiation around, really, it's not as bad as all that. Remember, we've blown off all manner of nukes; you can go visit ground zero at Hiroshima if you like, no risk at all. And for when it happens, a geiger counter and some planning is all you need to stay safe. Radiation is only invisible if you don't prepare. The tools are cheap; I've had a good set for decades. This stuff was all figured out during the cold war (which is why I own the stuff... I'm old...).
species benefiting from expansive conquering, will.
And a species that's had its ass kicked back to the stone age due to poor selection of whom to conquer will learn or die out. Look at Germany; so badly beaten they won't even let their citizens talk about the Nazis. And while you're in Germany, look around: See any US conquerors? Of course not. Germany didn't have anything we wanted, though we certainly could have taken the country lock, stock and barrel.
It just isn't cut and dry that unlimited, willful expansion is the only possible outcome for a society that makes it into space. Presuming, of course, that they have some reason to disregard the time limits that appear to be unavoidable; very few people here want to consider a generations-long trip to anywhere. Maybe we're the longest lived species in the universe, and that trip looks even worse to everyone else. It's all speculation, but I think the one thing you don't want to do is say "this is the only way it can happen", and that's what is wrong with ol' Fermi's speculation. It doesn't matter if you couch such a view in a formula; it is unjustified no matter what language you use to express it.
Re: Photon gathering (and x-rays, RF, IR, etc.)
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Probably, but I don't think this is a binary thing.
From today's news (New York Times) (bold emphasis mine):
BAGHDAD, Feb. 19 -- In a coordinated assault on an American combat outpost north of Baghdad, suicide bombers drove three cars filled with explosives into the base today, killing two American soldiers and wounding at least 17 more, witnesses and the American military said.
Now, I ask you, if these chumps are convinced that blowing themselves up with C4 or Semtex or TNT or even black powder is going to get them to paradise, or some other outcome they think is better than living, why is it you resist the idea that they'd be pretty happy to strap a nuke on?
People are rational enough to know that radiation is a nasty thing, nastier than bullets or conventional bombs.
You see, that's exactly what I'm talking about. Your statement - and I'm not trying to be abusive, really - is absolutely, 100% wrong and displays a complete lack of understanding of what havoc "standard" weapons normally wreak. There are people surviving today who have had some pretty severe radiation burns. People survived such burns in Japan. Radiation, like everything else, comes in degrees, and it isn't cut-and-dry that it's "nastier than bullets or conventional bombs", that's just hysteria. My sweetheart is in the middle of a seven-week long radiation regimen at >20MEV for breast cancer; and its not the radiation we're worried about, let me tell you.
You tell me which you'd rather experience: A 50 caliber machine gunning across your torso, or too many rads such that you have symptoms? I'd take the rads without question; no matter what the level of exposure was. Until you've seen the damage a single 50-cal round can do, you're not qualified to say radiation is worse. Once you have, you should know better. That goes for all manner of other ways to catch it from "conventional" munitions. You should get a look at an after-action photo of the crew of a tank after a depleted uranium SABOT round has its way with them (and let me give you a hint - it's not a hard radiation issue at all.)
Nuclear weapons are the boogieman because incompetents have enormous trouble understanding and comparing the effects of these weapons, and because they confuse the stories of world destruction when the superpowers were facing each other down with the effect of a few nukes here and there on specific limited battlefronts.
Nuclear weapons are very large explosives with side effects of radiation. They do lots of damage; that's the point. however, I don't think you can argue such that (for instance) the people who died in the Tokyo, Dresden or Hamburg firestorms died any more pleasantly, or that those who survived with severe burns were any better off than the survivors at Hiroshima or Nagasaki. To say that they are "nastier" than something else is to say nothing. You need to put some facts on the table to back that assertion up, and I don't think you can find any such facts. Within the last 50-60 years, about a thousand nukes have been set off between the US, USSR, UK, France and a few others. The largest was about 50 megatons IIRC (Tsar Bomba, USSR) and the smaller ones went all the way down to fractions of a kt. To say "nuke 'em" means something in that range, almost certainly the low end. Those tests did not destroy the world or even cause much of a problem, as long as you don't count the hysteria, or the intentional damage in Japan. They've gone off in space, in the atmosphere, underground, on the ground, under water, on the water... pretty much everywhere they could think to try them. And we're just about all still here, again, barring those who were actually targets.
Chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons are taboo for good reason.
Of the group, the only one to fear more than a gun or other conventional ordinance is biological. The others all have limited zones of effect; if you want real fear, that's the place to look. Execute biowarfare on your enemy, die at home on the other side of the planet next year. Now that stuff you can legitimately call nasty.
Agreed, it was. However, you overlooked one factor: Slashdot moderators rarely display intelligence. Slashdot moderation is completely broken.
Treating your sally seriously, I think that religion is just a successful subset of general superstition; and when you broaden the question to why would superstition be successful within an intelligent civilization, the answer is that before science is understood by the entire population, beings will look in the wrong places for explanations because it is very easy to do so. I really think it is just as simple as that.
...and our broadcasts are unmistakably "intelligently designed".
You must be listening to a different set of radio broadcasts, or watching a different set of television broadcasts, than the ones I've come into contact with.
More seriously, broadcast radio is probably a blip; we're already going to optical and cable transmissions, because the spectrum is too small for the kinds of uses an advanced (cough) civilization such as ours can come up with. We're also using portions of the spectrum that don't get out of our atmosphere. Maybe they're listening, but not for radio. For what? I don't know. Or, maybe they expect us to use narrow beams, like lasers, so they don't expect to intercept any communications unless they are sent right to them, so they're not looking around - maybe they don't expect a civilization to be so profligate with energy as to "broadcast."
Just because we use radio, doesn't mean they do. Maybe they twiddle quantum bits that are superimposed; maybe they've figured out how to make them not decohere. That'd be a lot more efficient than radio, if you could make it work. No wires, no broadcast, no tapping. Nice.:) On our planet, this would be suppressed by George Bush.
The Fermi Paradox is that if they were here any time in the last 500 million years or so, thay would have colonised the place
Presumes:
Earth is the right distance from the sun
Earth has the right atmosphere
Earth has the right gravity
Earth doesn't have something common, which is toxic to them
Earth is somewhere they want to be (a spiral arm in the boonies)
Earth wasn't colonized, and we are it
Earth wasn't colonized, and dolphins (or something else, maybe cats or fleas) are the remains of it
Earth wasn't colonized, and they died out due to lack of vigor
Earth wasn't colonized, and they died out as a result of an asteroid, etc
Earth wasn't colonized, and someone else came along and took exception to it, and wiped them out
Aliens are interested in colonization (because we are - but that may not follow)
...and those are just off the top of my head. Just because you're qualified to push formulas around, doesn't mean you're an authority on aliens, for crying out loud. Some people - and clearly, Fermi was one - can't think their way out of a paper bag when they step outside their speciality.
Re: Photon gathering (and x-rays, RF, IR, etc.)
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lack of intel as to which caves to nuke
I don't really think that's a "practical" issue. They knew the area down to a few square miles for a short time. A few baby nukes, and the odds favor having gotten the target.
lack of an effective vector
What are you saying here? A vector, in common parlance, is a direction. So you are saying... ?
fallout patterns
Very little fallout from throwing a small nuke into a cave; and given the hundreds of nuclear tests in the fifties, most far larger than anything I'm talking about here, right in the middle of the US, fallout isn't, in fact, a significant issue. There would be some, of course, and most of it would be in Afghanistan. I don't see how you can make a case that Bush cares about the people of Afghanistan from the evidence, though it might be amusing to see you try.:)
certain political backlash from everyone and their dog
Again, we're talking about the reign of King-Emperor George Bush, Master of the World, Ruler of All He Surveys, Maker and Breaker of Laws, High Justice to Removal of Rights, The Decider, and Speaker To God Almighty Himself. I just don't think you can make a case that the finger presently on the button is in any way sensitive to other people's opinions. Including opinions in his, and my, own country.
possible accidental nuclear response from Russia if ICBMs/cruise missiles are used
No, no. You just tell them what you're doing. We did that when they were well armed - which they aren't now. In the 70's, you'd have had a point. Currently, they know that we don't care to nuke a democracy, which they sort-of are, and they have a much smaller arsenal. They'd be annihilated, we'd survive. Not much point in getting into a serious contest under those conditions. But again, channels exist to inform them, they'd be informed, and no one would do anything untoward. I don't buy your assertion here for a moment.
possible nuclear retaliation from non-state actors
If they had nukes, they would have already used them. Ergo, they don't. Nor do they need a reason to use them; they're ready to nuke us right now. They're ready to carry them in their jockstraps and set them off as carried. Any silly idea you might have that doing anything would "incite" them to want to nuke us is purest fairy tales. They already want to nuke us to the point where every nerve ending in their bodies sings at the very idea. However, the actual folks being nuked have a tendency to be slowed down. Just ask the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They were a little pre-occupied after their experience, don't you agree? Might not be so bad to have Osama and/or his lieutenants so preoccupied.
Realpolitik, baby, and stop pretending otherwise - no-one is buying.
(A) it doesn't matter if "you're buying" because it's old George Bush at the helm, and he doesn't care what you think. He's not "selling", ok? He's telling. (B) The reason people don't buy is because they really don't understand nuclear weapons. Death by radiation isn't in any way worse than death by cholera or nerve gas or systemic disease from falling on a Pungi stick. Death by nuclear blast isn't in any way worse than death by MOAB or SMART-PIG. Cancer from fallout isn't any worse than cancer from agent orange. Death by nuclear flame isn't any worse than death by napalm. Fallout is an issue, but then again, show me a country that's all healthy-like after having a war conducted on its soil and I'll be quite surprised. You'll note that both Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been rebuilt and are thriving; and those bombs were not relatively clean modern tactical weapons - they were truly filthy 15kt and 20kt atte
Re: Photon gathering (and x-rays, RF, IR, etc.)
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Yes, that's what I said. Same thing.:-)
You want aperture, and you get that from spacing the elements; but you also want significant signal gathering, and you get that from area. So you do both.
Re: Photon gathering (and x-rays, RF, IR, etc.)
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What Daetrin said, plus, if the system is set up to mine asteroids in zero-G, that's entirely a different capability than being able to mine in a gravity well such as earth's, or even the moon's. Take an entirely different set of lifting capacities, which, at least at this point in our sciences, don't come without an energy cost that one would have a heck of a time paying from, for instance, the asteroid belt.
Though I do see some humor in our epitaph as a species being "Our Telescope Ate Us" rather than "We Blew Ourselves Up."
Re: Photon gathering (and x-rays, RF, IR, etc.)
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do you really want that big of a magnifying lens to exist? let alone have it's focal point you planet?
Why would you make the focal point the planet, get all that atmosphere involved? I mean, for normal operations? The focal point would be way out in space, I would think. And if a significant portion of the system lost focus on the sensor array, one could certainly disable - or destroy - the system. Such a thing would be pretty fragile, really.
Weapons use would be something to consider, but I don't think it is a critical flaw in the idea. Most people would hesitate at frying the planet. That's why we didn't nuke the caves in Afghanistan; we don't even like the idea of frying a little chunk of the planet, even when it would be really, really convenient and the objections are more about hysteria than practical issues.
Re: Photon gathering (and x-rays, RF, IR, etc.)
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· Score: 5, Interesting
We don't even have to wait that long. All we need to do is build a space telescope with sufficient resolving power - which is simply a function of size (and not even continuous size, necessarily... see the various multi mirror / multi antenna designs we use now) and precision - and we can look and see what the conditions were ten years ago (for D=10 LY) and then decide if we want to send anything at all. No need to launch anything out of the solar system; the information has been coming our way all along. We're just not (yet) capable of resolving it, but it doesn't even depend on new technology - just lots of materials, and space-based manufacturing to make it practical. Even if something is 500 LY away, we can still see what was happening 500 years ago. Much faster turnaround than the fastest light-sail technology could provide, which is transit time + message back time - at least twice as long. And of course it would benefit us in many ways to build such telescopes.
It seems to me that the optimum method would be to start an automated system that just keeps making the telescope bigger using materials culled from asteroids, comets and so forth. The longer it runs, the more detail we cold resolve. Why ever turn such a system off?
Sexual content and violence should be regulated by the government exactly the same, which is no regulation at all.
That is exactly correct. All such regulation is illegitimate; the 1st amendment to the constitution says "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press" It doesn't say "except for violent or sexual expression", nor are there any constitutional amendments that say anything of the kind. The 1st amendment is directed at the federal government (which covers the FCC quite nicely) but also keep in mind that the 14th amendment is directly interpreted by the federal government, via the courts to mean that the bill of rights (amendments 1-10) applies to the states as well.
At the time, speech and print was all they had; generalizing to video is a no-brainer, if they'd thought you could send pictures from here to there without being burned at the stake. The idea translates exactly.
This is just one example of many where the US government has stepped far outside the hard boundaries that its constituting authority (the constitution itself) set. Keep in mind that any censorship law the government makes is completely illegitimate. There is no possible legitimacy for laws that directly violate the constitution's prohibitions without proper revision of the constitution, meaning, a constitutional convention covering the appropriate changes, and ratification of those changes.
Remember that a government that steps outside its constituting authority has only one authority left, that of force and coercion. That's not even similar to the claimed authority of a king; that is what forms the basis for a dictatorship.
Finder - at least under Tiger - is pretty limited. I suggest you look at "Path Finder", which is a very nice Finder replacement, when and if you get around to OSX.
I mis-described that, sorry. You can't right+left click and drag from a left click state. In other words, here I am dragging out an ellipse with the left button. I want to release the anchor, which is done in this particular application by pressing the right button without releasing the left button. On the Mac, this action (dropping the second finger) locks the trackpad's position sensing, which means that there is no way to move the anchor. With a mouse, going from left press (sizing the ellipse) to left+right press (re-position anchor) and back is a matter of pressing and releasing the right button while holding the left down, which is just how it is supposed to work. This type of control over area selections is much, much faster and more flexible than not having the facility available - you get the area selection correct sooner than you do if you have to go back and edit it, etc. Consequently, I use this feature constantly, except if I am limited to the single button, I cannot.
Also, I find that it isn't an issue in MacOS X. It is only an issue when I'm trying to use WinXP on my MacBook Pro
Right. Well, I was trying to describe the issues I faced, not the ones you faced, so...:-)
Yes, I use it all the time. But there are still things you can't do; you can't right click and drag with the two-finger setup, for instance. If you use the control and drag method, then both hands are tied up and you can't access the keyboard to fire off keystroke commands while you drag. It's really annoying, and the only solution for problems at this level is a mouse or other input device that has real buttons. Which is exactly what I do. I just find it a little incredible that for the amount of money I paid for this puppy, it has such limited input mechanisms (and that goes for the functionally retarded keyboard, as well.)
I love my Mac and the closest I go to a PC these days is to fire up Parallels, but some changes would definitely benefit me.
I'm always curious why people think they need/want a MBP instead of a plain old MB.
(1) Higher display resolution and more display space at 17 inches (I do graphics intensive stuff); (2) faster display hardware; (3) More memory; (4) faster CPU cores; (5) bigger screen; (6) more ports; (7) illuminated keyboard (turns out, I love this little feature.)
There are some things I don't care about or consider really bad design decisions -- the MBP has much better sound, but that is to say that that the MB built-in sound sucks at 1 on a scale from 0 to 10, and the MBP sound sucks at a scale of about 2 on that same scale, easily twice as good while still managing to sound like an old Victrola heard through tinfoil, while consuming space that could have really been better used by (for instance) a full keyboard instead of the same retarded one without a keypad or perhaps something clever like a built in mini-tablet or an iPod dock or really, just about anything but the really crappy speakers they put there. Sigh. And the bloody single button design, don't even get me started on how retarded that is. I have to carry a mouse so I can work because of that; now that pisses me off.
Overall, the MBP is a much better fit for me than the MB. That's not to say they couldn't improve on it.
I take it you haven't heard about the two-finger right click functionality
That doesn't cover all right-button uses; for instance, you can't right-click-and-drag with the two-finger method. I use this all the time, and I have to carry a mouse with my ($2800!!!) Macbook pro so that I can actually do it. And I use the two-finger trick all the time, as well as the control button trick. It's just not the same, and it is long past time for Apple to simply say "ooops" and fix the darned thing. Two buttons are considerably better than one; and so on for a reasonable number of buttons, for that matter. It really is just that simple.
Honestly - what that shows is that five years of philosophy has not equipped you to recognize arguments that are empty.
- If we evolved, then it was a matter of random chance.
- Random chance cannot create things like an eye
The first statement is some kind of religious confusion. Evolution is not a process driven by "random chance", any more than your selection of a mate is "random chance." Evolution chooses results by an extremely powerful filtering process colloquially described as "survival of the fittest", with regard to which genes make it through various generations of interacting with the real world, as expressed in the organism of interest. The way it works is this: As genes for the eye change, the individuals with better vision do better in the world during their lives, and so those genes continue down the path of heredity. Poorer gene expressions fail to remain in the path for the obvious reasons (in humans: could not learn a craft or useful role, didn't see the bear coming, "Oh no, Martha, you don't want to marry the blind guy... he can't support himself!") This process continues until further improvement does not confer an advantage, or further improvement isn't possible because the expression of the gene is close to optimum and cannot make a radical change to an entirely new kind of vision because it is in a local minima that doesn't describe in any way, for instance, a multi-lensed system or one that can change to sense RF (which is a very good description of the eye, by the way.) But you can see myriad variations of how gene expression for the eye has changed simply by looking at the many types of eyes and their capabilities all across the set of organisms that (a) have eyes [many of them] and (b) use genes [all of them, so far.] Some animals do see in the ultraviolet, some use multiple lenses, some have more than binocular vision, some don't have a lot of use for vision, etc, ad infinitum. The process isn't random; Even reading Darwin, who had a very unhealthy respect for the supernatural not uncommon in his time, the process is obviously not random. The root cause of this inadequate line of thinking is probably the idea that the original DNA-based organism was a random product of the so-called primordial soup; whether that is true or not, once DNA was involved, the word "random" isn't anything you'd want to use to describe the process.
- If you believe that you were created through random chance, then
- You are a slave to chemical reactions
This doesn't even follow. Perhaps one might say that if you believe such a thing, then you presume that chemical reactions are complicit in your existence; slavery doesn't enter into it... there is no damage to the idea of free will in this simplistic statement.
If you are a slave to chemical reactions, then
- You cannot trust your thoughts.
Leaving the (already disproved) "slave" idea alone for a moment, regardless of the number, and nature, of systems that work together to implement the multi-system that allows us to think, the question of trusting our perceptions and subsequent thoughts is almost trivially answered by how well our model of the world allows us to interact with it both over time and with regard to challenges to our understanding. If your interaction is superficial and primarily depends on systems, social and technological, that others have set up for you, then you're not going to be able to make as good an evaluation of how accurate your model is. However, for those who actually understand science, this relatively simple method, by design, is excellent at exposing the error in both perception and presumption, and serves as an external, consensual check on just how well we understand the world around us, and hence, how well we can trust our thoughts and memories of that world, for the set of people who can understand these issues. It doesn't hinge upon wh
Slashdot Mirror
No, I meant wasn't. The section started with "Presumes:" So read it as "presumes earth wasn't colonized..." and so forth.
They might, especially if that was their intention. Intelligence supersedes the natural order, you know. Since we weren't there, we can't presume.
Doesn't mean we weren't engineered out of the same genome, though. Evolution is one force that we are pretty certain can do the job. However, engineering is a force we know can do the job. We're using it ourselves, right now.
See the US "no-fly" list for a good example of this in practice. If you get on, (a) you can't see why, and (b) you can't discuss it with anyone (after all, you don't know why), and (c) you can't get off. Even if you're an infant.
The rule is, cede power to the government in any form - law, regulation, classification - and you will not get it back. Once taken, there is no assurance (I'm not talking about verbal assurance, I'm talking about assurance in the sense you meant it, a working mechanism) that you as a citizen will ever have any measure of control over the issue at hand ever again.
This is a one way street. Once gone, there is no return.
The art of repressive politics - overall - is keeping the level of abuse down to just under that point where the populace will turn on you. Both the UK and the USA have been riding ever closer to that line, yet artfully avoiding crossing it. Modern polling techniques added to modern disinformation techniques have produced a society that is passive in the face of massive levels of rights loss, coercion, and general interference; modern comforts leave citizens ever more unwilling to take the risk of sacrificing all for what to most of them is just an abstract.
As long as this balance in maintained, there are only two choices for the disaffected; push the rest of the populace over the line (which puts you in the same position as the government - the populace didn't want to go there in the first place so you are engaged in coercion) or act on your own if you can find an effective vector. This, of course, is extremely risky, as the natural corollary for the government's getting out of hand in the above-described ways is an increased level of activity against the disaffected.
Currently, the levers that crack open the door to dictatorship are labeled "terrorism" and "think of the children." These two factors, artfully applied, have demonstrated the power to make the UK and USA populations give up anything, put up with anything, pay anything, without upsetting anyone but the highest functioning individuals who have made rights and freedom their concern. And this is far too small a demographic to result in an effective counter reaction. Until or unless you can defuse the power of these two control vectors to manipulate the general population, and keep replacement and enhancement vectors from taking their place (oh god, we have to control carbon output) it is my opinion that the governments of both countries will continue to increase pressure on the populace in the areas of rights loss, coercion, and general interference. The benefits are power, as you noted, and financial gains for those who control the system. These are not elements that can be replaced for the power hungry; you can offer no substitute, you can only remove them, and that, of course, will provoke a severe reaction.
Nonsense. Satellite radio is uncensored, and it offers the opportunity to hear new things not in your library. Commercial radio can do the latter, but not the former. Your iPod can do the former, but not the latter. Satellite radio doesn't devolve into religious MUSH every Sunday; commercial radio does. Satellite radio offers more to rural areas in terms of choice than they ever had previously. The digital nature of the format makes for very high quality, *especially* for fixed receivers like my Sirius at home. And - at least at the moment - satellite radio doesn't sandwich music between a series of lame, lowest common denominator commercials. Finally, satellite radio has a HECK of a lot more variety than does commercial radio. Even in an urban area.
As far as I'm concerned, Sirius is the best thing ever to happen to broadcast radio. Regardless of where it is broadcast from. I used to subscribe to XM, but after way too many playings of Bob Dylan's folk music in the middle of what they said was a classic rock station, I pulled the plug. There's only so much nasal whining I can take. I'm much happier with Sirius's Buzzsaw and Octane and their neighbors. As for our local FM station... ugh. The farm report. Brittney's shaved her head. Trump is arguing with Rosie. A mix of country and pop. Makes me throw up in my mouth a little just to think about it.
If you'll take the "otherwise" out, I'll agree with you. As for the rest, I don't see how you would make getting to mars - or anywhere else off planet - a religious goal. Nor do I think that if you could, it would be a good thing to begin populating the solar system with the poorest thinkers self-selected from the species. Superstition is a poor basis for maintaining one's safety in a harsh and unfriendly environment. Prayer won't seal leaks, faith won't solve problems, and imaginary friends will not come to anyone's aid. And it is the basis for many of the social ills we suffer today; repression of females, vilification of sexuality, homophobia, terrorism, constant invasion of people's right to choose what to do with their own bodies, interference with actual science teaching, censorship, even interference with what stores can sell you which products at what times and what days. I'd rather not carry those particular legacies to the planets, or the stars should we figure out a way to even approach that task. If they have to come because we can't educate the populace out of the ridiculous ideas that back religion, then let it come as an also-ran, not as the primary means of motivation. I cannot imagine a worse situation than a religious diaspora. The idea is outright repellant.
Come on. I didn't even visit the state, but I put seven figures into Katrina across various charities. I just about support our local animal shelter single handedly; without me, it is certain we wouldn't even have one - there wasn't one before I moved my company here. I paid 1/4 of the cost to put up our local PBS repeater, too. And I am the very poster child for a "non-believer." There are more ways to help than hammering nails, you know. I'm picky - really picky - about what charities I'll support, particularly with regard to the overheads they claim to need and what services they claim they supply. I spent a lot about a decade ago on an overseas gig - African - and that stuff ended up rotting on the docks. Charity is one thing; waste is entirely another. I'm a lot more cynical these days, but I can help, and I do. It has nothing to do with religion, or organization. It's a function of compassion. No more, no less - and religion has no monopoly on compassion whatsoever. No matter what they, or you, might claim to the contrary.
Oh, sorry. So I did. I didn't mean to, I actually missed what you were saying there, my bad.
Well - personally - I think of myself as a realist. I don't see what you are describing there; I think your view may be born of optimism, rather than of examining the facts. Judging by the magnitude of the WTC event, I don't think killing a few thousand or a few ten thousands, is a difference that would do much more than make terrorists cheer. But - I hope you're right. Really, I do.
Personally, I fully expect them to get, and use, nuclear weapons. What happens then will test a lot of things about our society.
Well yes, of course - but that doesn't really address the issue of your imagining that wounds from nukes are worse than wounds from conventional weapons. My point was, they aren't. And of course if you die, you die, so that's kind of a moot point. As for leaving radiation around, really, it's not as bad as all that. Remember, we've blown off all manner of nukes; you can go visit ground zero at Hiroshima if you like, no risk at all. And for when it happens, a geiger counter and some planning is all you need to stay safe. Radiation is only invisible if you don't prepare. The tools are cheap; I've had a good set for decades. This stuff was all figured out during the cold war (which is why I own the stuff... I'm old...).
And a species that's had its ass kicked back to the stone age due to poor selection of whom to conquer will learn or die out. Look at Germany; so badly beaten they won't even let their citizens talk about the Nazis. And while you're in Germany, look around: See any US conquerors? Of course not. Germany didn't have anything we wanted, though we certainly could have taken the country lock, stock and barrel.
It just isn't cut and dry that unlimited, willful expansion is the only possible outcome for a society that makes it into space. Presuming, of course, that they have some reason to disregard the time limits that appear to be unavoidable; very few people here want to consider a generations-long trip to anywhere. Maybe we're the longest lived species in the universe, and that trip looks even worse to everyone else. It's all speculation, but I think the one thing you don't want to do is say "this is the only way it can happen", and that's what is wrong with ol' Fermi's speculation. It doesn't matter if you couch such a view in a formula; it is unjustified no matter what language you use to express it.
From today's news (New York Times) (bold emphasis mine):
Now, I ask you, if these chumps are convinced that blowing themselves up with C4 or Semtex or TNT or even black powder is going to get them to paradise, or some other outcome they think is better than living, why is it you resist the idea that they'd be pretty happy to strap a nuke on?
You see, that's exactly what I'm talking about. Your statement - and I'm not trying to be abusive, really - is absolutely, 100% wrong and displays a complete lack of understanding of what havoc "standard" weapons normally wreak. There are people surviving today who have had some pretty severe radiation burns. People survived such burns in Japan. Radiation, like everything else, comes in degrees, and it isn't cut-and-dry that it's "nastier than bullets or conventional bombs", that's just hysteria. My sweetheart is in the middle of a seven-week long radiation regimen at >20MEV for breast cancer; and its not the radiation we're worried about, let me tell you.
You tell me which you'd rather experience: A 50 caliber machine gunning across your torso, or too many rads such that you have symptoms? I'd take the rads without question; no matter what the level of exposure was. Until you've seen the damage a single 50-cal round can do, you're not qualified to say radiation is worse. Once you have, you should know better. That goes for all manner of other ways to catch it from "conventional" munitions. You should get a look at an after-action photo of the crew of a tank after a depleted uranium SABOT round has its way with them (and let me give you a hint - it's not a hard radiation issue at all.)
Nuclear weapons are the boogieman because incompetents have enormous trouble understanding and comparing the effects of these weapons, and because they confuse the stories of world destruction when the superpowers were facing each other down with the effect of a few nukes here and there on specific limited battlefronts.
Nuclear weapons are very large explosives with side effects of radiation. They do lots of damage; that's the point. however, I don't think you can argue such that (for instance) the people who died in the Tokyo, Dresden or Hamburg firestorms died any more pleasantly, or that those who survived with severe burns were any better off than the survivors at Hiroshima or Nagasaki. To say that they are "nastier" than something else is to say nothing. You need to put some facts on the table to back that assertion up, and I don't think you can find any such facts. Within the last 50-60 years, about a thousand nukes have been set off between the US, USSR, UK, France and a few others. The largest was about 50 megatons IIRC (Tsar Bomba, USSR) and the smaller ones went all the way down to fractions of a kt. To say "nuke 'em" means something in that range, almost certainly the low end. Those tests did not destroy the world or even cause much of a problem, as long as you don't count the hysteria, or the intentional damage in Japan. They've gone off in space, in the atmosphere, underground, on the ground, under water, on the water... pretty much everywhere they could think to try them. And we're just about all still here, again, barring those who were actually targets.
Of the group, the only one to fear more than a gun or other conventional ordinance is biological. The others all have limited zones of effect; if you want real fear, that's the place to look. Execute biowarfare on your enemy, die at home on the other side of the planet next year. Now that stuff you can legitimately call nasty.
Agreed, it was. However, you overlooked one factor: Slashdot moderators rarely display intelligence. Slashdot moderation is completely broken.
Treating your sally seriously, I think that religion is just a successful subset of general superstition; and when you broaden the question to why would superstition be successful within an intelligent civilization, the answer is that before science is understood by the entire population, beings will look in the wrong places for explanations because it is very easy to do so. I really think it is just as simple as that.
You must be listening to a different set of radio broadcasts, or watching a different set of television broadcasts, than the ones I've come into contact with.
More seriously, broadcast radio is probably a blip; we're already going to optical and cable transmissions, because the spectrum is too small for the kinds of uses an advanced (cough) civilization such as ours can come up with. We're also using portions of the spectrum that don't get out of our atmosphere. Maybe they're listening, but not for radio. For what? I don't know. Or, maybe they expect us to use narrow beams, like lasers, so they don't expect to intercept any communications unless they are sent right to them, so they're not looking around - maybe they don't expect a civilization to be so profligate with energy as to "broadcast."
Just because we use radio, doesn't mean they do. Maybe they twiddle quantum bits that are superimposed; maybe they've figured out how to make them not decohere. That'd be a lot more efficient than radio, if you could make it work. No wires, no broadcast, no tapping. Nice. :) On our planet, this would be suppressed by George Bush.
Presumes:
I don't really think that's a "practical" issue. They knew the area down to a few square miles for a short time. A few baby nukes, and the odds favor having gotten the target.
What are you saying here? A vector, in common parlance, is a direction. So you are saying... ?
Very little fallout from throwing a small nuke into a cave; and given the hundreds of nuclear tests in the fifties, most far larger than anything I'm talking about here, right in the middle of the US, fallout isn't, in fact, a significant issue. There would be some, of course, and most of it would be in Afghanistan. I don't see how you can make a case that Bush cares about the people of Afghanistan from the evidence, though it might be amusing to see you try. :)
Again, we're talking about the reign of King-Emperor George Bush, Master of the World, Ruler of All He Surveys, Maker and Breaker of Laws, High Justice to Removal of Rights, The Decider, and Speaker To God Almighty Himself. I just don't think you can make a case that the finger presently on the button is in any way sensitive to other people's opinions. Including opinions in his, and my, own country.
No, no. You just tell them what you're doing. We did that when they were well armed - which they aren't now. In the 70's, you'd have had a point. Currently, they know that we don't care to nuke a democracy, which they sort-of are, and they have a much smaller arsenal. They'd be annihilated, we'd survive. Not much point in getting into a serious contest under those conditions. But again, channels exist to inform them, they'd be informed, and no one would do anything untoward. I don't buy your assertion here for a moment.
If they had nukes, they would have already used them. Ergo, they don't. Nor do they need a reason to use them; they're ready to nuke us right now. They're ready to carry them in their jockstraps and set them off as carried. Any silly idea you might have that doing anything would "incite" them to want to nuke us is purest fairy tales. They already want to nuke us to the point where every nerve ending in their bodies sings at the very idea. However, the actual folks being nuked have a tendency to be slowed down. Just ask the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They were a little pre-occupied after their experience, don't you agree? Might not be so bad to have Osama and/or his lieutenants so preoccupied.
(A) it doesn't matter if "you're buying" because it's old George Bush at the helm, and he doesn't care what you think. He's not "selling", ok? He's telling. (B) The reason people don't buy is because they really don't understand nuclear weapons. Death by radiation isn't in any way worse than death by cholera or nerve gas or systemic disease from falling on a Pungi stick. Death by nuclear blast isn't in any way worse than death by MOAB or SMART-PIG. Cancer from fallout isn't any worse than cancer from agent orange. Death by nuclear flame isn't any worse than death by napalm. Fallout is an issue, but then again, show me a country that's all healthy-like after having a war conducted on its soil and I'll be quite surprised. You'll note that both Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been rebuilt and are thriving; and those bombs were not relatively clean modern tactical weapons - they were truly filthy 15kt and 20kt atte
Yes, that's what I said. Same thing. :-)
You want aperture, and you get that from spacing the elements; but you also want significant signal gathering, and you get that from area. So you do both.
What Daetrin said, plus, if the system is set up to mine asteroids in zero-G, that's entirely a different capability than being able to mine in a gravity well such as earth's, or even the moon's. Take an entirely different set of lifting capacities, which, at least at this point in our sciences, don't come without an energy cost that one would have a heck of a time paying from, for instance, the asteroid belt.
Though I do see some humor in our epitaph as a species being "Our Telescope Ate Us" rather than "We Blew Ourselves Up."
Why would you make the focal point the planet, get all that atmosphere involved? I mean, for normal operations? The focal point would be way out in space, I would think. And if a significant portion of the system lost focus on the sensor array, one could certainly disable - or destroy - the system. Such a thing would be pretty fragile, really.
Weapons use would be something to consider, but I don't think it is a critical flaw in the idea. Most people would hesitate at frying the planet. That's why we didn't nuke the caves in Afghanistan; we don't even like the idea of frying a little chunk of the planet, even when it would be really, really convenient and the objections are more about hysteria than practical issues.
We don't even have to wait that long. All we need to do is build a space telescope with sufficient resolving power - which is simply a function of size (and not even continuous size, necessarily... see the various multi mirror / multi antenna designs we use now) and precision - and we can look and see what the conditions were ten years ago (for D=10 LY) and then decide if we want to send anything at all. No need to launch anything out of the solar system; the information has been coming our way all along. We're just not (yet) capable of resolving it, but it doesn't even depend on new technology - just lots of materials, and space-based manufacturing to make it practical. Even if something is 500 LY away, we can still see what was happening 500 years ago. Much faster turnaround than the fastest light-sail technology could provide, which is transit time + message back time - at least twice as long. And of course it would benefit us in many ways to build such telescopes.
It seems to me that the optimum method would be to start an automated system that just keeps making the telescope bigger using materials culled from asteroids, comets and so forth. The longer it runs, the more detail we cold resolve. Why ever turn such a system off?
No... that'd be if it happened over Washington, D.C.
That is exactly correct. All such regulation is illegitimate; the 1st amendment to the constitution says "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press" It doesn't say "except for violent or sexual expression", nor are there any constitutional amendments that say anything of the kind. The 1st amendment is directed at the federal government (which covers the FCC quite nicely) but also keep in mind that the 14th amendment is directly interpreted by the federal government, via the courts to mean that the bill of rights (amendments 1-10) applies to the states as well.
At the time, speech and print was all they had; generalizing to video is a no-brainer, if they'd thought you could send pictures from here to there without being burned at the stake. The idea translates exactly.
This is just one example of many where the US government has stepped far outside the hard boundaries that its constituting authority (the constitution itself) set. Keep in mind that any censorship law the government makes is completely illegitimate. There is no possible legitimacy for laws that directly violate the constitution's prohibitions without proper revision of the constitution, meaning, a constitutional convention covering the appropriate changes, and ratification of those changes.
Remember that a government that steps outside its constituting authority has only one authority left, that of force and coercion. That's not even similar to the claimed authority of a king; that is what forms the basis for a dictatorship.
Finder - at least under Tiger - is pretty limited. I suggest you look at "Path Finder", which is a very nice Finder replacement, when and if you get around to OSX.
I mis-described that, sorry. You can't right+left click and drag from a left click state. In other words, here I am dragging out an ellipse with the left button. I want to release the anchor, which is done in this particular application by pressing the right button without releasing the left button. On the Mac, this action (dropping the second finger) locks the trackpad's position sensing, which means that there is no way to move the anchor. With a mouse, going from left press (sizing the ellipse) to left+right press (re-position anchor) and back is a matter of pressing and releasing the right button while holding the left down, which is just how it is supposed to work. This type of control over area selections is much, much faster and more flexible than not having the facility available - you get the area selection correct sooner than you do if you have to go back and edit it, etc. Consequently, I use this feature constantly, except if I am limited to the single button, I cannot.
Right. Well, I was trying to describe the issues I faced, not the ones you faced, so... :-)
Yes, I use it all the time. But there are still things you can't do; you can't right click and drag with the two-finger setup, for instance. If you use the control and drag method, then both hands are tied up and you can't access the keyboard to fire off keystroke commands while you drag. It's really annoying, and the only solution for problems at this level is a mouse or other input device that has real buttons. Which is exactly what I do. I just find it a little incredible that for the amount of money I paid for this puppy, it has such limited input mechanisms (and that goes for the functionally retarded keyboard, as well.)
I love my Mac and the closest I go to a PC these days is to fire up Parallels, but some changes would definitely benefit me.
(1) Higher display resolution and more display space at 17 inches (I do graphics intensive stuff); (2) faster display hardware; (3) More memory; (4) faster CPU cores; (5) bigger screen; (6) more ports; (7) illuminated keyboard (turns out, I love this little feature.)
There are some things I don't care about or consider really bad design decisions -- the MBP has much better sound, but that is to say that that the MB built-in sound sucks at 1 on a scale from 0 to 10, and the MBP sound sucks at a scale of about 2 on that same scale, easily twice as good while still managing to sound like an old Victrola heard through tinfoil, while consuming space that could have really been better used by (for instance) a full keyboard instead of the same retarded one without a keypad or perhaps something clever like a built in mini-tablet or an iPod dock or really, just about anything but the really crappy speakers they put there. Sigh. And the bloody single button design, don't even get me started on how retarded that is. I have to carry a mouse so I can work because of that; now that pisses me off.
Overall, the MBP is a much better fit for me than the MB. That's not to say they couldn't improve on it.
That doesn't cover all right-button uses; for instance, you can't right-click-and-drag with the two-finger method. I use this all the time, and I have to carry a mouse with my ($2800!!!) Macbook pro so that I can actually do it. And I use the two-finger trick all the time, as well as the control button trick. It's just not the same, and it is long past time for Apple to simply say "ooops" and fix the darned thing. Two buttons are considerably better than one; and so on for a reasonable number of buttons, for that matter. It really is just that simple.
Honestly - what that shows is that five years of philosophy has not equipped you to recognize arguments that are empty.
The first statement is some kind of religious confusion. Evolution is not a process driven by "random chance", any more than your selection of a mate is "random chance." Evolution chooses results by an extremely powerful filtering process colloquially described as "survival of the fittest", with regard to which genes make it through various generations of interacting with the real world, as expressed in the organism of interest. The way it works is this: As genes for the eye change, the individuals with better vision do better in the world during their lives, and so those genes continue down the path of heredity. Poorer gene expressions fail to remain in the path for the obvious reasons (in humans: could not learn a craft or useful role, didn't see the bear coming, "Oh no, Martha, you don't want to marry the blind guy... he can't support himself!") This process continues until further improvement does not confer an advantage, or further improvement isn't possible because the expression of the gene is close to optimum and cannot make a radical change to an entirely new kind of vision because it is in a local minima that doesn't describe in any way, for instance, a multi-lensed system or one that can change to sense RF (which is a very good description of the eye, by the way.) But you can see myriad variations of how gene expression for the eye has changed simply by looking at the many types of eyes and their capabilities all across the set of organisms that (a) have eyes [many of them] and (b) use genes [all of them, so far.] Some animals do see in the ultraviolet, some use multiple lenses, some have more than binocular vision, some don't have a lot of use for vision, etc, ad infinitum. The process isn't random; Even reading Darwin, who had a very unhealthy respect for the supernatural not uncommon in his time, the process is obviously not random. The root cause of this inadequate line of thinking is probably the idea that the original DNA-based organism was a random product of the so-called primordial soup; whether that is true or not, once DNA was involved, the word "random" isn't anything you'd want to use to describe the process.
This doesn't even follow. Perhaps one might say that if you believe such a thing, then you presume that chemical reactions are complicit in your existence; slavery doesn't enter into it... there is no damage to the idea of free will in this simplistic statement.
Leaving the (already disproved) "slave" idea alone for a moment, regardless of the number, and nature, of systems that work together to implement the multi-system that allows us to think, the question of trusting our perceptions and subsequent thoughts is almost trivially answered by how well our model of the world allows us to interact with it both over time and with regard to challenges to our understanding. If your interaction is superficial and primarily depends on systems, social and technological, that others have set up for you, then you're not going to be able to make as good an evaluation of how accurate your model is. However, for those who actually understand science, this relatively simple method, by design, is excellent at exposing the error in both perception and presumption, and serves as an external, consensual check on just how well we understand the world around us, and hence, how well we can trust our thoughts and memories of that world, for the set of people who can understand these issues. It doesn't hinge upon wh
Oh. You're superstitious. Sorry, not interested; you'll have to pursue this with someone else.