yup. sure thing. you said it. That's the way it works. Actually, in some countries, legislation is being passed, allegedely by the most democratic of nations, to supress the civil liberties of some citiznes, as we speak. I know of a few countries where being muslim and trying to get in a plane is a direct ticket to an 8 hour interrogation room, or where magically, because of your race or religion, and being at the wrong place at the wrong time, they throw you in a concentration camp in Cuba, or they shoot you in the subway with no explanation whatsoever. So yes, actually, its just the way it works in your country (i asume you are from the us, as we already are a majority over here, and have been for the last 500~ years) too!
Now, in a more serious vein, a society should decide democratically how to set up rules to protect all of its precious values. Liberty being one, property being another. If, in the pursuit of protection of one of this values, ie property, we incurr in unaceptable violations to other values, and the majority of the people agree on that, THAT SYSTEM NEEDS TO BE REFORMED, in accordance to the way democracy works.
and that means? who cares if the musicians have X or Y interest, the point is that in our society, the protection of the rights of a few record labels and musicians is being used as a fundament for the violation of the individual rights of a lot of people. Since this violations only tend to increase in scope and absurdity, a moment wil come when society is gonna realize that the rules that enable said violations are wrong and need to be reformed.
I for my part have heard a lot more musicians, and more fervently, attacking copyright systems, than defending it, probably *because* they do not have any alternative. Specially with those democratic and competitive practices form the RIAA that prohibits playback of non-RIAA music to radios, and such.
This is not a problem of what's best for the musician, but of what values are more important for a society as a whole. If musicians can find a way to defend their interests without violating our rights (to put it very generally), they are welcome. And noone is saying "fuck the musicians", we are only saying that the current restrictions are excesive, brutal, and will fall by their own weight if they keep trying to enforce them in their utmost brutality.
well, that dangerous idea is generally called democracy, and yes, it is dangerous, but it's the best idea we have in regards to choosing the rules that govern us. nothing new under the sun here.
Now, with a little more substance, every rule is the outcome of a process of negotiation, and as such, it has winners and losers. i don't see anything too radical there, either.
religion is irrational. As such, it lacks any moving power to make me, or any other being of wich we can only assume rationality, like humans, do Good Things(tm)
there is nothing wrong with doing good things, of course. I fail to see the difference between denying irrational arguments of validity and not doing good things. Am i Evil because of my atheism? bold words, i'd say.
are you affraid of the exercise of trying to support your ethical views with appeal to something we can all understand, as opposed to something that a few "graced" can access, like faith?
Rationality is open. democratic. and we all have some of it. Religion, like magic and superstition, is obscure, elithist and arbitrary. If the only way for us to determine right from wrong is thru appeal to flying spaghetti monsters, maybe we should make a theocracy and let all those do-gooders choose for us heathens. We are evil after all, ain't we?
If you want to believe whatever you want to believe privately, be welcomed. If you want to live your life doing good things because your personal, irrational arbitraty beliefs, please, go ahead. If you want to talk about why should we, as a community, do good things, be prepared to invoke reassons with a little more weight than "some old fellow saw god somewhere and said so".
ever heard of the concept of "res derelicta"? i don't know about you, but at least in our legislature, we have a distinction between "robo" and "hurto", the first being robbery, and the second being gneric theft (there's probably a more specific term for this in english, i don't know).
So material considerations should be taken into account when determining the criminality of an act. Does this automatically make copyright infringement ok? no, of course. but treating it the same as robbery is absurd, for obvious reassons, specially when determining if 1.- it justifies expensive criminal action 2.- it justifies brutal sanctions like the ones the RIAA has tried to pursue.
This of course is related to a broader question: in principle, the means necesary for the protection of intelectual property did not violate the rights of individuals in such a grievious way, even when this violation was legal according to the statutes concernign IP, mainly because the copyright ingringement were so unimportant that copyright holders did not pursue such cases. And they were of course, no criminal offenses. With new laws like we have now, and the MAFIAA watchdog trying to destroy anyone trying to enforce their fair use rights in ways not especifically provided for by the copyright holder, the measures needed to protect such IP are stomping on a lot of individual rights that we (should) hold dearer than property, i the long run.
This is problematic. This implies that the law will criminalize a lot of acts that the society in broad does not consider to be criminal, even if the law says so. This is a broken system. This system needs reform.
My two cents with respect to *that* specific part of your argument, i let the rest slip, if you don't mind:)
ps: IANAL, but i live, dearly love and often discuss this things with one... I3AL
Unless you really believe that direct producers get something above a very very small cut of the wealth in some other capitalist industry. wich you don't, do you?
awh, come on, you mentioned the p3 as an example of a computer that sucked up less juice, presumably because it's slower. But if you really want to save bucks, and GP is right, you should really STOP using that p3, and use your main box, or any newer computer, for the download. Don't take it personal, in any case: i'm just pointing out that if GP is right, your strategy of using the p3 to download is not energy efficient, and you should review it.*hint hint*
by the way, i just moved to a new appartment, and payed up my first month of electricity, with a p4 2.4 with three HDs on 24/7, and the diff between bills is roughly 20 dollars. That's like 75 cent a day, i think. Quite a buck, for my budget. Any suggestions to keep the costs down?
actually, at least in statistics, is a bit more precise, and you normally disregard data points with more than three deviations of the popualtion mean, as "aberrant" cases. The problem is that normally, random values in a vector do not deviate enough from valid cases to be detectable, so the noise produced by a bot cheating could very well cripple the whole project.
Probably only after a lot of rounds, when tendencies are well known and researched, you could devise more precise tests to check the validity of a given record, but if you know so much of the subject already, your new survey will not be of much help.
This is not a trivial problem in statistics, as normally, statistics are all about looking for interesting deviations from "normal" behaviour. With a simple redundancy test, you take the risk of eliminating the interesting part of the information.
And a corollary of the above, is that as you know more about an object, you can test the validity of observations with more precision, but for this exact same reasson, your results are progresively predictable and less valuable. In other words, the more you know about any problem, the more you determine its outcome, and the less valuable the information produced by new data will be. In the end, everything tends to be normal. or predictable.
Im affraid that i, for my part, made the terrible mistake of missing a coma: i did not say that Israel had anything to do with creationism. I only said that as a State, it's religiously fanatical in the exact same sense that iran, as Iran, too, has a political agenda centered on religion, and a fundamentalist government democratically eleceted by its uber-religious population. These ideas were, of course, implied for the sake of rethoric. The alussion to creationism was to illustrate that the US is also religiously fanatical, or at least, has a sufficiently important fanatical and raving population as to be affraid of it as a country. I, at least, am affraid. very affraid. much more than of Iran or any other muslim country.
Now, about religion, i'm fairly open minded about it. I live in a country where religion is a very important part of cultural life, even if most of us don't proclaim themselves religious. My family is deeply religious. But i consider inacceptable to engage in public (as in political) discussion invoking the name of god, as its use as an argument asumes that the other party must participate in a form of access to the truth that is by definition denied to some people, as it's granted "by grace" (at least in cristianism). I don't have faith. I require proofs to be convinced of facts. I only recognize science as a valid and objective way to access truth, and as such, as the only factual argument with validity in a public discussion. In private, you are free to call the name of god as you please. When we are discussing in the public forum, please keep your irrational and arbitrary beliefs out of the discussion. ESPECIALLY, if that discussion involves the liberties and rights of third parties, ie, what we teach to them, or if we bomb them back to the stone age or not.
By the way, I'm truly sorry if anyone got offended by my prior comment, i was only trying to ilustrate that the acusation of "religious fanatics" is partial, subjective, and in no way enough base to apply any kind of sanction against a country. What i was trying to ilustrate, is that countries have a right to be as fanatical as they want not because of the validity of the object of their fanatism, but only as a function of the amount of dollars in their national reserves, the size of their GDP, and the amount of nukes in ther backyards. Israel and the US are religious fanatics for any sensitive observer, but no one is claiming that that fanatism is a threat to World Peace. That is aneccaptable to me. I didn't mean to offend anyone, unless you believe that such fanatism (israel's and us') is OK. Then we have nothing to discuss, i'm affraid, and i truly hope not to fall in the to-bomb list in the future.
And last but not least... creationism as a doctrine is complete and utter bullshit. I can be very open minded about it, but don't expect me to treat it with any more respect than, say, the theory of flogiston, or the assertion that there is a giant intergalactic squid waiting to devore or sun.
ehem, isn't israel "a bunch of religious radicals with nuclear bombs" too? actually... i'd say that a country that even remotely considers discussion of creationist views as part of their science curricula a bunch of religiuos radicals... why is Iran religious radicalness worse than israel's or USA's?
Linux is not ready for the desktop. Yet. But it will be, and there's nothing M$ can do about it. It's rise is inevitable. unstopable. so why bother? give it a few years and it will be ready. for anything. and we can wait. there's no rush.
Ever heard of http://anothersky.org/? That's exactly tyhe kind of "bussiness" model they propose: a return to the old ways, cutting out the middle man. From their site:
Our mission is to subvert the traditional publishing paradigm and do it our way. Our mission is to put the artist and audience in direct connection with each other, removing the middlemen. Our mission is to believe in the altruism of others. Our mission is to spread culture for the good of all, not control it for profit. Our mission is to dismantle the world and reassemble it in a more aesthetically pleasing manner. Our mission is to prove it can be done.
i take back my last post. i misunderstood your previous point. i agree with you in this: this specific form of searching for ET life is flawed. I was previosuly refering to the question itself, in general, rather than the actual premise they are trying to test (they are not testing any, you are right there). My bad. I confused two different discussions, as you made a different point that the one made by the OP, wich escaped me:P
the crucial aprt of the above argument is "technical reassons". you are confusing two kinds of hypothesis, or statements, actually. One of them is about a phenomena that has no empirical expression of any kind and is thus, logically, not translatable to a crucial test, beacuse there is no premise that depends on it to be tested. This are what Weinberg and the other neo-positivistics determined to be "not scientific", and metaphysical. The other kind are statements that do indeed have empirical ramifications, but this empirircal ramifications are beyond our TECHNICAL research capabilities. Most of sub-atomic physics fell on this category until only a few decades, for example, and they are not considered a-scientific problems.
"We are not alone" is NOT an ilogical, metaphysical statement, not susceptible of true or false analysis, and thus not-scientific, it is only a valid scientific wuerstion currently beyond our current possibilities to deploy an exahustive and determinant crucial test. That says NOTHING regaarding its scientific status, it only tells you about the nature of the problem.
Saying that searching for extraterrestrial life is "not scientific" is the same as saying that the search for ET life is the same as the search for the flying spaghetti monster. I thik that the absurdity of such a point is self-evident.
Now, we can argue about the *pertinence* *efficiency* or convenience of this particularly limited and difficult scientific problem, but that's another story, and would take us in the direction of discussing how many dollars are actually spent on SETI and where should these be spent instead. Something which, in theory, is already done as people decide to donate to the project, or its request for grants analysed in fair competition with other scientific projects.
you seem to have a very shallow comprehension of the scientific method. The fact that one particular hypothesis can not be reduced to a simple critical test for technical reassons does not make that particular hypothesis a-scientific, it only points out the limitations of the research possibilities open to that particular question.
You are calling "scientific method" to only one critical, final step of scientific research. Before that, much much much work and dollars have been poured looking for phenomenoa, exploring and searching for possible explanations (or not... serendipities happen, but you never know before they do, so...).
It is only in the final steps of research in a given field that critical test can be formulated and executed, and this applies ONLY to theory validation, wich is only one aspect of scientific activity.
i laugh my ass off everytime i see this kind of comment. It would seem that people form the "developed world" think that everywhere else people live in the jungle sorrounded by monkeys. Electricity!? pleeeease.
Now, of course there ARE people living in huts in the jungle in some "developing" countries, but these ARE NOT the target population of the OLPC initiative, they are the UN's peace keeping operations and humanitarian initiatives target population
You may be right, and as a matter of fact i find your reasonng preetty convincing, but i must point a common mistake when people discuss social tendencies and factoids, regarding causality.
Japanese, aparently, smoke a lot, drink a lot, get drunker when they drink the same amount of alcohol than other people, have low birth rates, commit suicide more often, are smaller and live much longer (Incidentally, their dental health is quite horrible:P).
I have no sources for this, part form what i heard people say all the time when i was in japan, but let's asume that these are truthful apreciations. Now the problem is that we have a lot mixed in that bag, from genetic composition (it's a known fact that their reduced ressitance to alcohol is caused by the lack of an enzyme in their digestive system) to cultural trends (fertility rates have always much more to do with family background and social values than with genetic predisposition or biological fertility factors, suicide rates could be the same), and we have *no way of knowing* if the statistical data we observe (the "trends" or "tendencies") point to biologically relevant differences or cultural ones. In the japanese case, this is exemplary, given the trends discussed above.
I would say that the study refered to in TFA suffers form the same problem, on top of the measurement problems that BMI inherently has. If you consider sportspeople (pardon my english) and body builders and generally people who work aout and do a lot of exercise to be overweight and find them healthy, i wouldn't say that they are healthier BECAUSE of their weight.
As a statician, i must say that: Thou shalt not confuse Correlation with Causality. Thou shalt avoid spoureous associations between variables.
Now, i'm NOT saying that your points about the japanese are wrong, i repeat i find them quite reasonable and it's just what i heard them say when i was over there, i'm only waying that we have no way of knowing what comes first by observing at the data only (unless we made some extremely complex experiment design and controlled cultural factors apart form genetic ones and whatnot, but that's a whooooole different story
so according to you any moving of data modulating frequencies is broadband, disregarding the actual width of the spectrum available (wich in turn determines the amount of data that can be transmitted)?
you realize that that is absurd, don't you?
Red Hat _could_ cat all the source code that makes the RHEL distro into one giant text file. In doing so, they would still comply with the requirements of the GPL, but would totally bork folks like CentOS who are making derivitive distributions from it
IANAL, but isn't "making derivative distributions" one of the explicit objectives of the GPL? i would think that taking steps to prevent the making of derivative anything (work/distributions/binaries, whatever...) would be indeed a violation of the GPL.
isn't the GPL kinda a contract? if such, it is regulated by the "good faith" principles of civil law, isn't it? I'd think that such schemes would be a violation, as their sole purpose good be to humper or technically prohibit the modification or work upon of the licensed work, wich is what the GPL specifically aims to protect.
"An encyclopedia, or (traditionally) encyclopædia, is a comprehensive written compendium that contains information on all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge" (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia, actually)
All branches of knwledge is quite ambitious, if you ask me. The reassons for the EB not to have an article on X are not enough to "blow arguments in puffs of logic", but material/political/editorial reassons.
I don't give a rat's ass what EB decide to put in or leave out of their encyclopedia; their decision doesn't affect what an encyclopedia is or what logical conclusiones follow from the (formal) definition of the object of the discussion.
And thus, your argument is blown away by a puff of logic.
An encyclopedia aims to do it all. Not doing it all is only the result of a selection process when a criteria must be selected. Tipically, beacuse of material limitations to the maximum size available for articles. If such constraints are not relevant, then an encyclopedia should, in fact, do it all. in other words... if you can have it all, why select? hard drive space is cheeeeeaaaaap!!!
It's very funny how people, specially Americans, often show a very shallow comprehension of what "rights" and "liberties" are. Every rigth, whatevere it is about, *implies* restrictions on freedom: it restricts my freedom to do whatever i would do to violate your rights. Right to life means "rigth to be not murdered", eg, a prohibition on me to murder you.
This is specially obvious regarding proprerty. Declaring that someone has a "right" to property is EXACTLY the same as saying that that person has the right to restrict the uses of others of whatever she is a proprietor of.
So, as a corollary, to defend any right, whatever its nature, we must impose restrictions on other people's freedom. Thinking otherwise is either naive (like thinking that there "natural" rights, or "divine" rights), or wicked: you *say* you believe in peoples right, but you don't take any action tyo make them materially relevant, eg, neglecting the critical freedom-restricting process each right implies.
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yup. sure thing. you said it. That's the way it works. Actually, in some countries, legislation is being passed, allegedely by the most democratic of nations, to supress the civil liberties of some citiznes, as we speak. I know of a few countries where being muslim and trying to get in a plane is a direct ticket to an 8 hour interrogation room, or where magically, because of your race or religion, and being at the wrong place at the wrong time, they throw you in a concentration camp in Cuba, or they shoot you in the subway with no explanation whatsoever. So yes, actually, its just the way it works in your country (i asume you are from the us, as we already are a majority over here, and have been for the last 500~ years) too!
Now, in a more serious vein, a society should decide democratically how to set up rules to protect all of its precious values. Liberty being one, property being another. If, in the pursuit of protection of one of this values, ie property, we incurr in unaceptable violations to other values, and the majority of the people agree on that, THAT SYSTEM NEEDS TO BE REFORMED, in accordance to the way democracy works.
and that means? who cares if the musicians have X or Y interest, the point is that in our society, the protection of the rights of a few record labels and musicians is being used as a fundament for the violation of the individual rights of a lot of people. Since this violations only tend to increase in scope and absurdity, a moment wil come when society is gonna realize that the rules that enable said violations are wrong and need to be reformed.
I for my part have heard a lot more musicians, and more fervently, attacking copyright systems, than defending it, probably *because* they do not have any alternative. Specially with those democratic and competitive practices form the RIAA that prohibits playback of non-RIAA music to radios, and such.
This is not a problem of what's best for the musician, but of what values are more important for a society as a whole. If musicians can find a way to defend their interests without violating our rights (to put it very generally), they are welcome. And noone is saying "fuck the musicians", we are only saying that the current restrictions are excesive, brutal, and will fall by their own weight if they keep trying to enforce them in their utmost brutality.
well, that dangerous idea is generally called democracy, and yes, it is dangerous, but it's the best idea we have in regards to choosing the rules that govern us. nothing new under the sun here.
Now, with a little more substance, every rule is the outcome of a process of negotiation, and as such, it has winners and losers. i don't see anything too radical there, either.
???
religion is irrational. As such, it lacks any moving power to make me, or any other being of wich we can only assume rationality, like humans, do Good Things(tm)
there is nothing wrong with doing good things, of course. I fail to see the difference between denying irrational arguments of validity and not doing good things. Am i Evil because of my atheism? bold words, i'd say.
are you affraid of the exercise of trying to support your ethical views with appeal to something we can all understand, as opposed to something that a few "graced" can access, like faith?
Rationality is open. democratic. and we all have some of it. Religion, like magic and superstition, is obscure, elithist and arbitrary. If the only way for us to determine right from wrong is thru appeal to flying spaghetti monsters, maybe we should make a theocracy and let all those do-gooders choose for us heathens. We are evil after all, ain't we?
If you want to believe whatever you want to believe privately, be welcomed. If you want to live your life doing good things because your personal, irrational arbitraty beliefs, please, go ahead. If you want to talk about why should we, as a community, do good things, be prepared to invoke reassons with a little more weight than "some old fellow saw god somewhere and said so".
well, all /. discussion has the usual anonymous coward trying to appear as a victim of the irresponsible, childish, and fanatical /. crowd.
Too though for ya, boy? go somewhere else and stop crying about the moderation system or how this forum is infested by pimply teen geeks. who cares?
ever heard of the concept of "res derelicta"? i don't know about you, but at least in our legislature, we have a distinction between "robo" and "hurto", the first being robbery, and the second being gneric theft (there's probably a more specific term for this in english, i don't know).
:)
So material considerations should be taken into account when determining the criminality of an act. Does this automatically make copyright infringement ok? no, of course. but treating it the same as robbery is absurd, for obvious reassons, specially when determining if 1.- it justifies expensive criminal action 2.- it justifies brutal sanctions like the ones the RIAA has tried to pursue.
This of course is related to a broader question: in principle, the means necesary for the protection of intelectual property did not violate the rights of individuals in such a grievious way, even when this violation was legal according to the statutes concernign IP, mainly because the copyright ingringement were so unimportant that copyright holders did not pursue such cases. And they were of course, no criminal offenses. With new laws like we have now, and the MAFIAA watchdog trying to destroy anyone trying to enforce their fair use rights in ways not especifically provided for by the copyright holder, the measures needed to protect such IP are stomping on a lot of individual rights that we (should) hold dearer than property, i the long run.
This is problematic. This implies that the law will criminalize a lot of acts that the society in broad does not consider to be criminal, even if the law says so. This is a broken system. This system needs reform.
My two cents with respect to *that* specific part of your argument, i let the rest slip, if you don't mind
ps: IANAL, but i live, dearly love and often discuss this things with one... I3AL
"in almost every other industry does this occur".
There, fixed that for ya.
Unless you really believe that direct producers get something above a very very small cut of the wealth in some other capitalist industry. wich you don't, do you?
awh, come on, you mentioned the p3 as an example of a computer that sucked up less juice, presumably because it's slower. But if you really want to save bucks, and GP is right, you should really STOP using that p3, and use your main box, or any newer computer, for the download. Don't take it personal, in any case: i'm just pointing out that if GP is right, your strategy of using the p3 to download is not energy efficient, and you should review it.*hint hint*
by the way, i just moved to a new appartment, and payed up my first month of electricity, with a p4 2.4 with three HDs on 24/7, and the diff between bills is roughly 20 dollars. That's like 75 cent a day, i think. Quite a buck, for my budget. Any suggestions to keep the costs down?
actually, at least in statistics, is a bit more precise, and you normally disregard data points with more than three deviations of the popualtion mean, as "aberrant" cases. The problem is that normally, random values in a vector do not deviate enough from valid cases to be detectable, so the noise produced by a bot cheating could very well cripple the whole project.
Probably only after a lot of rounds, when tendencies are well known and researched, you could devise more precise tests to check the validity of a given record, but if you know so much of the subject already, your new survey will not be of much help.
This is not a trivial problem in statistics, as normally, statistics are all about looking for interesting deviations from "normal" behaviour. With a simple redundancy test, you take the risk of eliminating the interesting part of the information.
And a corollary of the above, is that as you know more about an object, you can test the validity of observations with more precision, but for this exact same reasson, your results are progresively predictable and less valuable. In other words, the more you know about any problem, the more you determine its outcome, and the less valuable the information produced by new data will be. In the end, everything tends to be normal. or predictable.
Im affraid that i, for my part, made the terrible mistake of missing a coma: i did not say that Israel had anything to do with creationism. I only said that as a State, it's religiously fanatical in the exact same sense that iran, as Iran, too, has a political agenda centered on religion, and a fundamentalist government democratically eleceted by its uber-religious population. These ideas were, of course, implied for the sake of rethoric. The alussion to creationism was to illustrate that the US is also religiously fanatical, or at least, has a sufficiently important fanatical and raving population as to be affraid of it as a country. I, at least, am affraid. very affraid. much more than of Iran or any other muslim country.
Now, about religion, i'm fairly open minded about it. I live in a country where religion is a very important part of cultural life, even if most of us don't proclaim themselves religious. My family is deeply religious. But i consider inacceptable to engage in public (as in political) discussion invoking the name of god, as its use as an argument asumes that the other party must participate in a form of access to the truth that is by definition denied to some people, as it's granted "by grace" (at least in cristianism). I don't have faith. I require proofs to be convinced of facts. I only recognize science as a valid and objective way to access truth, and as such, as the only factual argument with validity in a public discussion. In private, you are free to call the name of god as you please. When we are discussing in the public forum, please keep your irrational and arbitrary beliefs out of the discussion. ESPECIALLY, if that discussion involves the liberties and rights of third parties, ie, what we teach to them, or if we bomb them back to the stone age or not.
By the way, I'm truly sorry if anyone got offended by my prior comment, i was only trying to ilustrate that the acusation of "religious fanatics" is partial, subjective, and in no way enough base to apply any kind of sanction against a country. What i was trying to ilustrate, is that countries have a right to be as fanatical as they want not because of the validity of the object of their fanatism, but only as a function of the amount of dollars in their national reserves, the size of their GDP, and the amount of nukes in ther backyards. Israel and the US are religious fanatics for any sensitive observer, but no one is claiming that that fanatism is a threat to World Peace. That is aneccaptable to me. I didn't mean to offend anyone, unless you believe that such fanatism (israel's and us') is OK. Then we have nothing to discuss, i'm affraid, and i truly hope not to fall in the to-bomb list in the future.
And last but not least... creationism as a doctrine is complete and utter bullshit. I can be very open minded about it, but don't expect me to treat it with any more respect than, say, the theory of flogiston, or the assertion that there is a giant intergalactic squid waiting to devore or sun.
ehem, isn't israel "a bunch of religious radicals with nuclear bombs" too? actually... i'd say that a country that even remotely considers discussion of creationist views as part of their science curricula a bunch of religiuos radicals... why is Iran religious radicalness worse than israel's or USA's?
something it's done: it's called metamoderation.
Amen, brother!
Linux is not ready for the desktop. Yet. But it will be, and there's nothing M$ can do about it. It's rise is inevitable. unstopable. so why bother? give it a few years and it will be ready. for anything. and we can wait. there's no rush.
That's exactly tyhe kind of "bussiness" model they propose: a return to the old ways, cutting out the middle man. From their site:
i take back my last post. i misunderstood your previous point. i agree with you in this: this specific form of searching for ET life is flawed. I was previosuly refering to the question itself, in general, rather than the actual premise they are trying to test (they are not testing any, you are right there). My bad. I confused two different discussions, as you made a different point that the one made by the OP, wich escaped me :P
the crucial aprt of the above argument is "technical reassons". you are confusing two kinds of hypothesis, or statements, actually. One of them is about a phenomena that has no empirical expression of any kind and is thus, logically, not translatable to a crucial test, beacuse there is no premise that depends on it to be tested. This are what Weinberg and the other neo-positivistics determined to be "not scientific", and metaphysical. The other kind are statements that do indeed have empirical ramifications, but this empirircal ramifications are beyond our TECHNICAL research capabilities. Most of sub-atomic physics fell on this category until only a few decades, for example, and they are not considered a-scientific problems.
"We are not alone" is NOT an ilogical, metaphysical statement, not susceptible of true or false analysis, and thus not-scientific, it is only a valid scientific wuerstion currently beyond our current possibilities to deploy an exahustive and determinant crucial test. That says NOTHING regaarding its scientific status, it only tells you about the nature of the problem.
Saying that searching for extraterrestrial life is "not scientific" is the same as saying that the search for ET life is the same as the search for the flying spaghetti monster. I thik that the absurdity of such a point is self-evident.
Now, we can argue about the *pertinence* *efficiency* or convenience of this particularly limited and difficult scientific problem, but that's another story, and would take us in the direction of discussing how many dollars are actually spent on SETI and where should these be spent instead. Something which, in theory, is already done as people decide to donate to the project, or its request for grants analysed in fair competition with other scientific projects.
you seem to have a very shallow comprehension of the scientific method. The fact that one particular hypothesis can not be reduced to a simple critical test for technical reassons does not make that particular hypothesis a-scientific, it only points out the limitations of the research possibilities open to that particular question.
You are calling "scientific method" to only one critical, final step of scientific research. Before that, much much much work and dollars have been poured looking for phenomenoa, exploring and searching for possible explanations (or not... serendipities happen, but you never know before they do, so...).
It is only in the final steps of research in a given field that critical test can be formulated and executed, and this applies ONLY to theory validation, wich is only one aspect of scientific activity.
i laugh my ass off everytime i see this kind of comment. It would seem that people form the "developed world" think that everywhere else people live in the jungle sorrounded by monkeys. Electricity!? pleeeease.
Now, of course there ARE people living in huts in the jungle in some "developing" countries, but these ARE NOT the target population of the OLPC initiative, they are the UN's peace keeping operations and humanitarian initiatives target population
You may be right, and as a matter of fact i find your reasonng preetty convincing, but i must point a common mistake when people discuss social tendencies and factoids, regarding causality.
Japanese, aparently, smoke a lot, drink a lot, get drunker when they drink the same amount of alcohol than other people, have low birth rates, commit suicide more often, are smaller and live much longer (Incidentally, their dental health is quite horrible :P).
I have no sources for this, part form what i heard people say all the time when i was in japan, but let's asume that these are truthful apreciations. Now the problem is that we have a lot mixed in that bag, from genetic composition (it's a known fact that their reduced ressitance to alcohol is caused by the lack of an enzyme in their digestive system) to cultural trends (fertility rates have always much more to do with family background and social values than with genetic predisposition or biological fertility factors, suicide rates could be the same), and we have *no way of knowing* if the statistical data we observe (the "trends" or "tendencies") point to biologically relevant differences or cultural ones. In the japanese case, this is exemplary, given the trends discussed above.
I would say that the study refered to in TFA suffers form the same problem, on top of the measurement problems that BMI inherently has. If you consider sportspeople (pardon my english) and body builders and generally people who work aout and do a lot of exercise to be overweight and find them healthy, i wouldn't say that they are healthier BECAUSE of their weight.
As a statician, i must say that: Thou shalt not confuse Correlation with Causality. Thou shalt avoid spoureous associations between variables.
Now, i'm NOT saying that your points about the japanese are wrong, i repeat i find them quite reasonable and it's just what i heard them say when i was over there, i'm only waying that we have no way of knowing what comes first by observing at the data only (unless we made some extremely complex experiment design and controlled cultural factors apart form genetic ones and whatnot, but that's a whooooole different story
so according to you any moving of data modulating frequencies is broadband, disregarding the actual width of the spectrum available (wich in turn determines the amount of data that can be transmitted)? you realize that that is absurd, don't you?
Red Hat _could_ cat all the source code that makes the RHEL distro into one giant text file. In doing so, they would still comply with the requirements of the GPL, but would totally bork folks like CentOS who are making derivitive distributions from it
IANAL, but isn't "making derivative distributions" one of the explicit objectives of the GPL? i would think that taking steps to prevent the making of derivative anything (work/distributions/binaries, whatever...) would be indeed a violation of the GPL.
isn't the GPL kinda a contract? if such, it is regulated by the "good faith" principles of civil law, isn't it? I'd think that such schemes would be a violation, as their sole purpose good be to humper or technically prohibit the modification or work upon of the licensed work, wich is what the GPL specifically aims to protect.
"An encyclopedia, or (traditionally) encyclopædia, is a comprehensive written compendium that contains information on all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge" (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia, actually)
All branches of knwledge is quite ambitious, if you ask me. The reassons for the EB not to have an article on X are not enough to "blow arguments in puffs of logic", but material/political/editorial reassons.
I don't give a rat's ass what EB decide to put in or leave out of their encyclopedia; their decision doesn't affect what an encyclopedia is or what logical conclusiones follow from the (formal) definition of the object of the discussion.And thus, your argument is blown away by a puff of logic. An encyclopedia aims to do it all. Not doing it all is only the result of a selection process when a criteria must be selected. Tipically, beacuse of material limitations to the maximum size available for articles. If such constraints are not relevant, then an encyclopedia should, in fact, do it all. in other words... if you can have it all, why select? hard drive space is cheeeeeaaaaap!!!
Where are the free food advocates? How about the free house advocates? where have you been for the last hundred and fifty years!?
It's very funny how people, specially Americans, often show a very shallow comprehension of what "rights" and "liberties" are. Every rigth, whatevere it is about, *implies* restrictions on freedom: it restricts my freedom to do whatever i would do to violate your rights. Right to life means "rigth to be not murdered", eg, a prohibition on me to murder you. This is specially obvious regarding proprerty. Declaring that someone has a "right" to property is EXACTLY the same as saying that that person has the right to restrict the uses of others of whatever she is a proprietor of. So, as a corollary, to defend any right, whatever its nature, we must impose restrictions on other people's freedom. Thinking otherwise is either naive (like thinking that there "natural" rights, or "divine" rights), or wicked: you *say* you believe in peoples right, but you don't take any action tyo make them materially relevant, eg, neglecting the critical freedom-restricting process each right implies.