You can have a physical copper line integrated into your pbx if you feel like you need the security. The sipura SPA-3000 even does automatic failover if the power fails so whatever phone is connected to it's input line is now connected directly to the hard copper line.
However, when the power is up, the pbx answers that hard line, or simply ignores it. Your scenario does not negate the usefulness of allowing the pbx to answer the phone.
However, I'm not ready to live under that constant "threat" of what if? The most likely "emergency" is a medical one and what are you going to do if you can't get to your landline because it's downstairs and you can't move? Wireless phones won't help you there, the base stations run off AC. Better get one of those monitored wrist devices that lets you just press a button to summon help. Being able to get ahold of XYZ to tell them you're ok isn't really an emergency but it's the kind of thing people REALLY do during a power outage that gives them that comfort feeling of owning a landline.
No, it's pretty easy really, all voice mails go to an email. So a quick listen tells me right away who they are without listening to the entire message. Caller id is in the subject line and there's far less of it than there is of spam.
Wow, do you guys REALLY care about that shit, cause I sure don't.
To me OSX=OS X=OS-X=OS/X=OS10=osx==os 10=OS 10=osX=OSx=os/x=os-x=Only MacOS that's worth a shit.
The problem with OS X in a sentence is that it's hard to read. I don't care if you like it, OS/X stands out more clearly. That's what I'm gonna use until apple gives it a good name, like linux.
That's always the hypothetical situation that sells so many cell phones. Still, I bet many don't take their cells into the bath with them. Nevertheless, with voip it's easier than with a typical landline. What if your battery is dead in your cell phone and your teenage daughter is tying up the land line, how is your loved one going to get in touch with you? Oh sure, you have call waiting, but what if your daughter just ignores it?
Almost any pbx can be setup so you can just call it and access it directly if you know where and what to dial to gain access. That's always setup and my "loved ones" know how to use it. Thus, people I trust implicitly will have no problem as they will know the correct sequence of numbers to dial to ring any or all extensions in my house from any number, even a blacklisted one.
Yes, of course, so could a savy telemarketer, but he'd have to break some laws and quite a sweat to do it. I doubt even the most persistant telemarketer will try calling thousands of times to the same residence attempting to discover which extension gains access and which pin codes get you in.
But really to be accessible you need to have a cell phone. I had one for a while, but I didn't like it for a variety of reasons so I got rid of it. If I still had one, however, I could integrate it easily into the pbx and then would never have to give my cell phone number to anyone. But, I digress. So, oh my god, we live day to day with the everpresent fear that we MIGHT NOT be able to reach each other in case of an "emergency".
That's why we have 911 operators you know, so there is someone you can call in an emergency who is trained to help you out. I question whether any situation that doesn't warrant calling 911 is actually an emergency.
I'm not on the american register. But, I've noticed several things.
1) There ARE fewer calls. Fewer companies seem to be willing to risk the fines or pay for the lists.
2) Companies seem to love to play the "We have a relationship" card much more than they used to. They go out of their way to make sure I know that.
3) Those that call are much more aggressive. They are using automatic systems to make calls more and more. I seldom get a person directly on the other end. Even though I only get a few calls a month, it is for this and other reasons that I'm ditching my landline and going to voip only.
With voip it is both easy to have multiple phone numbers that can be changed quickly. Further it's much easier to filter by caller id and completely control how each call is handled. f you don't know the secret personal number which I can change at the drop of a hat, you won't get to talk directly to me ever. I have separate permanent numbers for places I do business with so that they will ALWAYS have to leave a message. Those numbers can take ALL the junk calls they want to dish out because they will NEVER ring a phone in my house. Only my personal voip numbers ring a phone and only if your number hasn't been blacklisted.
Voip is to phones what email is to postal mail. Your physical address no longer has any meaning and it's easy to set it up so that you control what is coming and going based on how available you want to be.
We've got a guy at work who goes on and on and on and on and on about how he "gets more work done" on a mac. He really loved the old Mac OS. See, I like OS/X, and I do think that it's quite useful. Macs may have always been more productive for some people but I get the sense that "getting more work done" is a baseless claim that is synonymous with "I like it more".
Now, I prefer OS/X or linux depending on what I'm doing. But I've had to oversee computers in the work place and I don't find that there is any metric that is particularly useful when applied to individual workers. What allows the company to get more work done is the better question.
Back in the day that partly meant networking which was a royal pain on the old world macs. Trying to get macs and windows working together was also a pain. I never worked in an all mac shop so I don't know if that would be better, however, given that almost every place I worked used windows it was a LOT easier to just not use macs unless you had to. Maybe one employee's productivity would go up, maybe not, but ours would go down without a doubt.
With OS/X that has changed. OS/X macs are nothing like what macs used to be. I have several although I prefer linux for most of my work for reasons that have little to do with the user interface or how pretty it is or isn't. But new macs are every bit as easy to integrate and secure as windows or linux, in fact, easier in many cases. There are fewer reasons today to not use macs in the workplace.
BUT, you can't extrapolate the current OS/X macs productivity backwards. The old macs were slow, crashed frequently, were super expensive to upgrade, etc etc. If you liked them it was because you cut your teeth on them and were afraid to go to windows. Granted win 3.1 wasn't much more than a pretty (ugly) shell, but by the time windows 95 came out the Mac OS had little advantage and 98 killed any advantage that was left. Yes I was using linux in those days. Linux had a LONG LONG way to go to be on the desktop. In fact, in most cases XFree86 was much slower than win95/98 on the same hardware. Oh, and NOTHING worked out of the box.
Of course there were differences, and of course, if you cut your teeth on a mac you would have a learning curve to switch to windows. But there wasn't really a significant difference in how "productive" an individual could be. Any effects you could measure would be second order and by the time you factored in the cost of maintaining and supporting macs it was a losing battle.
Remember Apple was struggling with their operating systems direction during this time and had several failed initiatives. Whatever they did to the original MacOS was really just a stop gap measure to try and hold on to their market share. I think "Mac People" forget that pretty much only artists, musicians, and teachers used macs back in those days. Things have changed, but it hasn't been THAT long that I've forgotten how much macs used to suck.
"We spent about two weeks talking about this. Every night at the dinner table imagine dinner-table conversation about washing machines every night!...Of course, this wasn't really about washing machines; it was about passing along the concern for design to his children and perhaps to (his wife) Laurene."
I don't think that the OP was saying there was anything wrong with it, just that it's the culture of those places. It sounded more to me like he was drawing some parallels between working for MS and Apple.
I think he was further suggesting that the culture is perhaps a bit larger than life, that is, Jobs doesn't walk up to your cubicle all that often to see what you are doing even though people stay on their toes because they expect it might happen. Or, they wish it would happen...oh pick me Mr Jobs!!!
I can't imagine development at either job place is low pressure. But, I can't imagine too many places other places where the opportunity has so much potential either. Not that I'd work at either place, it's just not my cup of tea.
"Who on earth says the psychics would give them any part of their soon to be earned fortune?"
Who said that would be the source of the fortune? One psychic isn't enough for the world. Once psychic ability is proven (snicker) REAL!!! The randi institute will help you to locate GENUINE psychics. As the parent said
"the Randi people would be in at the sub-basement level of the investment opportunity of a lifetime"
I can hear the radio spot now
"Don't be fooled by imitators, the Randi Foundation will help you find a GENUINE psychic. We have over FOURTY years of experience in outing charlatans"
Crookes was torn between science and his own need to believe in an afterlife. The evaluation of Home happened after the death of Crookes beloved younger brother which might have affected Crookes devotion to science in the face of spiritualism.
It should not be forgotten that this was a time where many people were looking to science to prove that the afterlife existed. The scientist who could prove such a thing would stand to gain a lot, especially in his own time.
"Why can't God use effective tools such as evolution?"
What does god add to that argument? If evolution is an effective tool that does the job without God's intervention then why does it need god to make use of it or invent it.
In my opinion, that's why god can't use evolution. If he used evolution, and the big bang, and whatever else science offers us, then it won't be long before bright young kids are asking, "so what does god do?".
1. God created it. 2. We'll learn more as our technology advances. (I look forward to it) 3. We'll never know the whole truth. (The truth is unknowable?!)
1 and 3 are the same answer. The problem with these justifications for God is that you cannot eliminate the circular reasoning of God. God is an unnecessary component for any origins discussion. It's equivalent to saying I don't know.
"Its seriously not worth my time to consider your commentary any further, unless it is for comic relief."
Then don't. You seem to under some delusion that you are "winning" an argument.
"Your adherence to rational debate is flighty at best, and you are prone to going off on wild tangents to areas where you feel safer. "
Pot, meet kettle.
Seriously, you have ignored some of the excellent points made by others on this subject. Several have pointed out to you very good reasons why your financial argument has no basis. I don't feel it necessary to copy them here as I trust you are able to read. What is clear is that you pick and choose what you want to debate.
But, I'll paraphrase for you. There is FAR MORE FINANCIAL VALUE in proving paranormal power than in refuting frauds. If the sole purpose of the foundation were financial gain then they would be FAR better off to try and find a GENUINE EXAMPLE.
Somehow I think this is personal for you. Is your mom a psychic or something?
Nobody is missing your point. You are saying we should question the motives of the Randi Foundation as they are fiscally motivated. We get it.
You have failed to make your point. You have no evidence about their motivations. You only have your own speculation based on projecting your ideals onto his organization. What's left is the equivalent of you trying to prove that santa claus might exist and lives at the center of the earth instead of the north pole yet we can't disprove this yet because his powers allow him to shrink to the size of a proton while he's there and we can't measure him with our current equipment.
There are an infinite possiblity of things that science MAY find. But it's NOT science to speculate about what they might be. The randi foundation is about debunking pseudoscience, which paranormal activity is. The day it becomes science, the randi foundation won't have anything to do with it anymore...getting it?
"Sigh. Could a person 200 years ago, given the knowledge and skills they had at the time, have demonstrated quantum theory? No. Can we demonstrate esp powers with what we have now? No. Might we in future? Maybe. Getting it? "
Sigh yourself. You seem to think you're making some deep points. But you fail to see the simplest of points. No knowledge or skill is necessary to demonstrate something that one claims has obvious effect.
People CLAIM they have a power, for example, that ridiculous women that talks to animals that she demonstrates daily on TV to millions, if not billions, of idiots around the world. This woman implicitly claims that animals have human like thoughts, are aware of familial relationships, perhaps even the basics of math, science, etc, and are able to share this with humans who have her "power". This claim is not outside the limitation of science to test. This is not a limitation of our ability to measure. This woman claims that she talks to animals and that they talk back and despite the fact that you can't hear them, she can.
Now, let's suppose she's telling the truth and the communication happens via some mechanism that we don't yet understand and won't for thousands of years.
You CAN say that science can say nothing about that mechanism today. You cannot test that mechanism without some understanding of what it is.
BUT, and it's a BIG DAMN BUT, you can test her ability. Tell five cats that they have a new name. Tell each cat in isolation that his name is X. Make sure that the cat hears the name X many many times, say five thousand times or more. X must be different from the cats name given by the owners.
Now, we send the cats, one at a time, into a room with her. However, no cat owners can be present. Can she successfully tell us what the original name of the cat is, and what each cat was told its new name is?
I've seen the show, in between fits of laughter I caught enough of her responses to suggest to me that she believes she could do such a thing.
But, let's say she doesn't like that PROTOCOL. She is free to design one of her own so long as it fully demonstrates that her power is indeed talking to animals and NOT reading clues from her customers.
No science equipment is needed to test such a "power". People claim today that they have such powers and that they affect the world with their powers. That ability can be tested without understanding any mechanism that may or may not exist.
Just as if you had a radio 5000 yeas ago, you could test the existence of a magical medium that allowed you to talk over great distances.
Perhaps you should consider the moderation to mean somthing different than you seem to think. You seem to think that you are offering some kind of insight into the matter yet others disagree. It is possible, that the reason isn't because others don't get it, but rather because you don't.
"Here's the picture: a few thousand years before it was known that blood circulates or germs cause disease, doctors who had never dissected a frog, claimed that yin and yang could be balanced by inserting needles into the right points, among the hundreds of points strung along 12 meridians....Scientists suggest the needles stimulate release of endorphins. Jalapeno peppers do the same thing. So it wouldn't matter where you stick the needles would it? Then who needs an acupuncturist?"
He has a point. Clinical trials suggest that acupuncture controls pain. However, acupuncture claims to work by controlling the balance of yin and yang. This is the paranormal part. You have to control for the endorpine release as well as the placebo and regressive effect. Since practitioners claim yin and yang are beyond the measurement of science, then it is by definition, paranormal.
"The NCAHF issued a position paper on acupuncture that asserts, "Research during the past twenty years has failed to demonstrate that acupuncture is effective against any disease" and that "the perceived effects of acupuncture are probably due to a combination of expectation, suggestion, counter-irritation, operant conditioning, and other psychological mechanisms." In short, most of the perceived beneficial effects of acupuncture are probably due to mood change, the placebo effect, and the regressive fallacy. Just because the pain went away after the acupuncture doesn't mean the treatment was the cause. Much chronic pain comes and goes. An alternative treatment such as acupuncture is sought only when the pain is near its most severe level. Natural regression will lead to the pain becoming less once it has reached its maximum level of severity. Also, much of the support for acupuncture is anecdotal in the form of testimonial evidence from satisfied customers. Unfortunately, for every anecdote of someone whose pain was relieved by acupuncture there may well be another anecdote of someone whose pain was not relieved by acupuncture But nobody is keeping track of the failures (confirmation bias)."
4.3. What should I expect during the application process?
You should expect a lot of (written) communication between yourself and the JREF. You should also expect to do a bit of traveling for the actual test, unless you happen to live in an area with an established skeptical group or expert, or in close proximity to a University that might agree to assist both yourself and the JREF in testing your claim.
"Two centuries ago, would you have been relatively certain that radio waves didn't exist?"
That's a naive analogy. Radio waves do exist, and they existed then. If you posessed a transmitter and receiver you could demonstrate that fact. The lack of understanding has NOTHING to do with the cause and effect. Paranormals make claims that they can affect the physical world with their powers. If for example ESP existed, then it would be demonstrable regardless of our understanding of it. We would not have to wait 200 years to discover the mechanism just to see that it exists.
Slashdot Mirror
You can have a physical copper line integrated into your pbx if you feel like you need the security. The sipura SPA-3000 even does automatic failover if the power fails so whatever phone is connected to it's input line is now connected directly to the hard copper line.
However, when the power is up, the pbx answers that hard line, or simply ignores it. Your scenario does not negate the usefulness of allowing the pbx to answer the phone.
However, I'm not ready to live under that constant "threat" of what if? The most likely "emergency" is a medical one and what are you going to do if you can't get to your landline because it's downstairs and you can't move? Wireless phones won't help you there, the base stations run off AC. Better get one of those monitored wrist devices that lets you just press a button to summon help. Being able to get ahold of XYZ to tell them you're ok isn't really an emergency but it's the kind of thing people REALLY do during a power outage that gives them that comfort feeling of owning a landline.
No not like tiger. Tiger only applies to one version of os/x. No, I mean like munix, or applenix, or fruitnix, or McUnix, or something like that.
Yes, I think that works, McUnix.
You forgot, one of them has withstood scrutiny by the scientific community for over a century, one has not.
I'm just point out one of ways they are different since you were pointing out how they are the same. Fair's fair.
No, it's pretty easy really, all voice mails go to an email. So a quick listen tells me right away who they are without listening to the entire message. Caller id is in the subject line and there's far less of it than there is of spam.
Wow, do you guys REALLY care about that shit, cause I sure don't.
To me OSX=OS X=OS-X=OS/X=OS10=osx==os 10=OS 10=osX=OSx=os/x=os-x=Only MacOS that's worth a shit.
The problem with OS X in a sentence is that it's hard to read. I don't care if you like it, OS/X stands out more clearly. That's what I'm gonna use until apple gives it a good name, like linux.
Get over it.
That's always the hypothetical situation that sells so many cell phones. Still, I bet many don't take their cells into the bath with them. Nevertheless, with voip it's easier than with a typical landline. What if your battery is dead in your cell phone and your teenage daughter is tying up the land line, how is your loved one going to get in touch with you? Oh sure, you have call waiting, but what if your daughter just ignores it?
Almost any pbx can be setup so you can just call it and access it directly if you know where and what to dial to gain access. That's always setup and my "loved ones" know how to use it. Thus, people I trust implicitly will have no problem as they will know the correct sequence of numbers to dial to ring any or all extensions in my house from any number, even a blacklisted one.
Yes, of course, so could a savy telemarketer, but he'd have to break some laws and quite a sweat to do it. I doubt even the most persistant telemarketer will try calling thousands of times to the same residence attempting to discover which extension gains access and which pin codes get you in.
But really to be accessible you need to have a cell phone. I had one for a while, but I didn't like it for a variety of reasons so I got rid of it. If I still had one, however, I could integrate it easily into the pbx and then would never have to give my cell phone number to anyone. But, I digress. So, oh my god, we live day to day with the everpresent fear that we MIGHT NOT be able to reach each other in case of an "emergency".
That's why we have 911 operators you know, so there is someone you can call in an emergency who is trained to help you out. I question whether any situation that doesn't warrant calling 911 is actually an emergency.
If you have asterisk who cares. It's pretty easy to set it up so that anyone you don't know gets a nice message.
ymmv.
I'm not on the american register. But, I've noticed several things.
1) There ARE fewer calls. Fewer companies seem to be willing to risk the fines or pay for the lists.
2) Companies seem to love to play the "We have a relationship" card much more than they used to. They go out of their way to make sure I know that.
3) Those that call are much more aggressive. They are using automatic systems to make calls more and more. I seldom get a person directly on the other end. Even though I only get a few calls a month, it is for this and other reasons that I'm ditching my landline and going to voip only.
With voip it is both easy to have multiple phone numbers that can be changed quickly. Further it's much easier to filter by caller id and completely control how each call is handled. f you don't know the secret personal number which I can change at the drop of a hat, you won't get to talk directly to me ever. I have separate permanent numbers for places I do business with so that they will ALWAYS have to leave a message. Those numbers can take ALL the junk calls they want to dish out because they will NEVER ring a phone in my house. Only my personal voip numbers ring a phone and only if your number hasn't been blacklisted.
Voip is to phones what email is to postal mail. Your physical address no longer has any meaning and it's easy to set it up so that you control what is coming and going based on how available you want to be.
We've got a guy at work who goes on and on and on and on and on about how he "gets more work done" on a mac. He really loved the old Mac OS. See, I like OS/X, and I do think that it's quite useful. Macs may have always been more productive for some people but I get the sense that "getting more work done" is a baseless claim that is synonymous with "I like it more".
Now, I prefer OS/X or linux depending on what I'm doing. But I've had to oversee computers in the work place and I don't find that there is any metric that is particularly useful when applied to individual workers. What allows the company to get more work done is the better question.
Back in the day that partly meant networking which was a royal pain on the old world macs. Trying to get macs and windows working together was also a pain. I never worked in an all mac shop so I don't know if that would be better, however, given that almost every place I worked used windows it was a LOT easier to just not use macs unless you had to. Maybe one employee's productivity would go up, maybe not, but ours would go down without a doubt.
With OS/X that has changed. OS/X macs are nothing like what macs used to be. I have several although I prefer linux for most of my work for reasons that have little to do with the user interface or how pretty it is or isn't. But new macs are every bit as easy to integrate and secure as windows or linux, in fact, easier in many cases. There are fewer reasons today to not use macs in the workplace.
BUT, you can't extrapolate the current OS/X macs productivity backwards. The old macs were slow, crashed frequently, were super expensive to upgrade, etc etc. If you liked them it was because you cut your teeth on them and were afraid to go to windows. Granted win 3.1 wasn't much more than a pretty (ugly) shell, but by the time windows 95 came out the Mac OS had little advantage and 98 killed any advantage that was left. Yes I was using linux in those days. Linux had a LONG LONG way to go to be on the desktop. In fact, in most cases XFree86 was much slower than win95/98 on the same hardware. Oh, and NOTHING worked out of the box.
Of course there were differences, and of course, if you cut your teeth on a mac you would have a learning curve to switch to windows. But there wasn't really a significant difference in how "productive" an individual could be. Any effects you could measure would be second order and by the time you factored in the cost of maintaining and supporting macs it was a losing battle.
Remember Apple was struggling with their operating systems direction during this time and had several failed initiatives. Whatever they did to the original MacOS was really just a stop gap measure to try and hold on to their market share. I think "Mac People" forget that pretty much only artists, musicians, and teachers used macs back in those days. Things have changed, but it hasn't been THAT long that I've forgotten how much macs used to suck.
"We spent about two weeks talking about this. Every night at the dinner table imagine dinner-table conversation about washing machines every night!...Of course, this wasn't really about washing machines; it was about passing along the concern for design to his children and perhaps to (his wife) Laurene."
Can you spell D.I.V.O.R.C.E.
What kind of engineer can't afford an ibook?
Did it ever occur to you that it might be the case that Jobs is wealthy BECAUSE he's charismatic?
I'll let you work out the contrapositive.
I don't think that the OP was saying there was anything wrong with it, just that it's the culture of those places. It sounded more to me like he was drawing some parallels between working for MS and Apple.
I think he was further suggesting that the culture is perhaps a bit larger than life, that is, Jobs doesn't walk up to your cubicle all that often to see what you are doing even though people stay on their toes because they expect it might happen. Or, they wish it would happen...oh pick me Mr Jobs!!!
I can't imagine development at either job place is low pressure. But, I can't imagine too many places other places where the opportunity has so much potential either. Not that I'd work at either place, it's just not my cup of tea.
"No public displays of power."
Let me guess, you learn this at those psychic conventions. BTW: Why are there signs that tell you how to get to psychic conventions?
Is that where they were working on lucas electrics? If so, it's no great loss.
"Who on earth says the psychics would give them any part of their soon to be earned fortune?"
Who said that would be the source of the fortune? One psychic isn't enough for the world. Once psychic ability is proven (snicker) REAL!!! The randi institute will help you to locate GENUINE psychics. As the parent said
"the Randi people would be in at the sub-basement level of the investment opportunity of a lifetime"
I can hear the radio spot now
"Don't be fooled by imitators, the Randi Foundation will help you find a GENUINE psychic. We have over FOURTY years of experience in outing charlatans"
Crookes was torn between science and his own need to believe in an afterlife. The evaluation of Home happened after the death of Crookes beloved younger brother which might have affected Crookes devotion to science in the face of spiritualism.
It should not be forgotten that this was a time where many people were looking to science to prove that the afterlife existed. The scientist who could prove such a thing would stand to gain a lot, especially in his own time.
"Why can't God use effective tools such as evolution?"
What does god add to that argument? If evolution is an effective tool that does the job without God's intervention then why does it need god to make use of it or invent it.
In my opinion, that's why god can't use evolution. If he used evolution, and the big bang, and whatever else science offers us, then it won't be long before bright young kids are asking, "so what does god do?".
1. God created it.
2. We'll learn more as our technology advances. (I look forward to it)
3. We'll never know the whole truth. (The truth is unknowable?!)
1 and 3 are the same answer. The problem with these justifications for God is that you cannot eliminate the circular reasoning of God. God is an unnecessary
component for any origins discussion. It's equivalent to saying I don't know.
"Its seriously not worth my time to consider your commentary any further, unless it is for comic relief."
Then don't. You seem to under some delusion that you are "winning" an argument.
"Your adherence to rational debate is flighty at best, and you are prone to going off on wild tangents to areas where you feel safer. "
Pot, meet kettle.
Seriously, you have ignored some of the excellent points made by others on this subject. Several have pointed out to you very good reasons why your financial argument has no basis. I don't feel it necessary to copy them here as I trust you are able to read. What is clear is that you pick and choose what you want to debate.
But, I'll paraphrase for you. There is FAR MORE FINANCIAL VALUE in proving paranormal power than in refuting frauds. If the sole purpose of the foundation were financial gain then they would be FAR better off to try and find a GENUINE EXAMPLE.
Somehow I think this is personal for you. Is your mom a psychic or something?
Nobody is missing your point. You are saying we should question the motives of the Randi Foundation as they are fiscally motivated. We get it.
You have failed to make your point. You have no evidence about their motivations. You only have your own speculation based on projecting your ideals onto his organization. What's left is the equivalent of you trying to prove that santa claus might exist and lives at the center of the earth instead of the north pole yet we can't disprove this yet because his powers allow him to shrink to the size of a proton while he's there and we can't measure him with our current equipment.
There are an infinite possiblity of things that science MAY find. But it's NOT science to speculate about what they might be. The randi foundation is about debunking pseudoscience, which paranormal activity is. The day it becomes science, the randi foundation won't have anything to do with it anymore...getting it?
"Sigh. Could a person 200 years ago, given the knowledge and skills they had at the time, have demonstrated quantum theory? No. Can we demonstrate esp powers with what we have now? No. Might we in future? Maybe. Getting it? "
Sigh yourself. You seem to think you're making some deep points. But you fail to see the simplest of points. No knowledge or skill is necessary to demonstrate something that one claims has obvious effect.
People CLAIM they have a power, for example, that ridiculous women that talks to animals that she demonstrates daily on TV to millions, if not billions, of idiots around the world. This woman implicitly claims that animals have human like thoughts, are aware of familial relationships, perhaps even the basics of math, science, etc, and are able to share this with humans who have her "power". This claim is not outside the limitation of science to test. This is not a limitation of our ability to measure. This woman claims that she talks to animals and that they talk back and despite the fact that you can't hear them, she can.
Now, let's suppose she's telling the truth and the communication happens via some mechanism that we don't yet understand and won't for thousands of years.
You CAN say that science can say nothing about that mechanism today. You cannot test that mechanism without some understanding of what it is.
BUT, and it's a BIG DAMN BUT, you can test her ability. Tell five cats that they have a new name. Tell each cat in isolation that his name is X. Make sure that the cat hears the name X many many times, say five thousand times or more. X must be different from the cats name given by the owners.
Now, we send the cats, one at a time, into a room with her. However, no cat owners can be present. Can she successfully tell us what the original name of the cat is, and what each cat was told its new name is?
I've seen the show, in between fits of laughter I caught enough of her responses to suggest to me that she believes she could do such a thing.
But, let's say she doesn't like that PROTOCOL. She is free to design one of her own so long as it fully demonstrates that her power is indeed talking to animals and NOT reading clues from her customers.
No science equipment is needed to test such a "power". People claim today that they have such powers and that they affect the world with their powers. That ability can be tested without understanding any mechanism that may or may not exist.
Just as if you had a radio 5000 yeas ago, you could test the existence of a magical medium that allowed you to talk over great distances.
Perhaps you should consider the moderation to mean somthing different than you seem to think. You seem to think that you are offering some kind of insight into the matter yet others disagree. It is possible, that the reason isn't because others don't get it, but rather because you don't.
Bob Park had this to say:
"Here's the picture: a few thousand years before it was known that blood circulates or germs cause disease, doctors who had never dissected a frog, claimed that yin and yang could be balanced by inserting needles into the right points, among the hundreds of points strung along 12 meridians....Scientists suggest the needles stimulate release of endorphins. Jalapeno peppers do the same thing. So it wouldn't matter where you stick the needles would it? Then who needs an acupuncturist?"
He has a point. Clinical trials suggest that acupuncture controls pain. However, acupuncture claims to work by controlling the balance of yin and yang. This is the paranormal part. You have to control for the endorpine release as well as the placebo and regressive effect. Since practitioners claim yin and yang are beyond the measurement of science, then it is by definition, paranormal.
from http://skepdic.com/acupunc.html
"The NCAHF issued a position paper on acupuncture that asserts, "Research during the past twenty years has failed to demonstrate that acupuncture is effective against any disease" and that "the perceived effects of acupuncture are probably due to a combination of expectation, suggestion, counter-irritation, operant conditioning, and other psychological mechanisms." In short, most of the perceived beneficial effects of acupuncture are probably due to mood change, the placebo effect, and the regressive fallacy. Just because the pain went away after the acupuncture doesn't mean the treatment was the cause. Much chronic pain comes and goes. An alternative treatment such as acupuncture is sought only when the pain is near its most severe level. Natural regression will lead to the pain becoming less once it has reached its maximum level of severity. Also, much of the support for acupuncture is anecdotal in the form of testimonial evidence from satisfied customers. Unfortunately, for every anecdote of someone whose pain was relieved by acupuncture there may well be another anecdote of someone whose pain was not relieved by acupuncture But nobody is keeping track of the failures (confirmation bias)."
4.3. What should I expect during the application process?
You should expect a lot of (written) communication between yourself and the JREF. You should also expect to do a bit of traveling for the actual test, unless you happen to live in an area with an established skeptical group or expert, or in close proximity to a University that might agree to assist both yourself and the JREF in testing your claim.
"Two centuries ago, would you have been relatively certain that radio waves didn't exist?"
That's a naive analogy. Radio waves do exist, and they existed then. If you posessed a transmitter and receiver you could demonstrate that fact. The lack of understanding has NOTHING to do with the cause and effect. Paranormals make claims that they can affect the physical world with their powers. If for example ESP existed, then it would be demonstrable regardless of our understanding of it. We would not have to wait 200 years to discover the mechanism just to see that it exists.