No? I think it's rude to be excessively loud so I don't, especially not at night. I don't see this as really any different than "Does no one here cut in line?".
I'm saying that many people dislike flats because their neighbours make noise, but not many people are saying they dislike flats because they themselves wish to make noise (which they can only politely do in a house).
I think Hereditary would be a great movie if the ending were completely different. I was never sure exactly what was real and I really enjoyed that. Then that ending pops up like it was spliced from something else. I'm not sure if "jumping the shark" or "showed the monster" fits better.
This isn't new. The US has been regularly doing these kinds of tests since the 90s and two took place last year. I'd be surprised if this was a specific response to Russia instead of something that's been planned for months.
>In general, why do individuals and companies appear (to an outsider) to have so much influence in the USA to 'press charges'?
They don't. Individuals and companies cannot bring charges against someone. They can report a crime (like Comcast did in this case) and then the government can determine if they want to prosecute. Someone saying they want to press charges is just signaling that they are willing to cooperate with the prosecution. Likewise saying that you wont press charges is just signalling that you won't cooperate with the persecution. In either case they don't actually have to listen to you.
>since a large company like Comcast could churn out hundreds of vaguely plausible but socially inconsequential claims of fraud
Filing a false police report is a crime. If Comcast actually testified in court then it would be perjury. They'd also likely be subject to lawsuits from everyone they falsely accused once this was all discovered.
Commercial airlines apparently experience crashes at a rate of 6 per 100,000,000 flights. I wasn't able to find a figure from the testimony as to how many craft are claimed to have been recovered. The best I could find was an anonymous quote from a Vox article of 12+. Applying the commercial airline stat to 12 crashes over 80 years results in almost 7,000 alien flights per day (just over the US). There are 25,000 flights per day (again in the US). A ratio of alien:commercial flights of 1:4 is really hard to buy. The alternative is that these alien craft are incredibly more advanced and yet somehow worse at flying than human aircraft. To play devil's advocate, maybe the government is intentionally shooting them down. But how? With what? Human knock-offs of their own weapons?
I'm asking if alien craft are a safer method of transport than air liners. Alternatively, if we replaced air liners with these craft, would fewer people die? If they are safer then the sky should be flooded with them to result in 12 crashes so far. This doesn't seem to be the case so there must instead be a smaller number of more dangerous craft to result in 12 crashes. So either the sky is flooded with invisible alien craft or their craft are a more dangerous method of travel than our air liners.
I mean sure. Cars, for example, are significantly more dangerous than airliners and people crash all the time. But if alien craft are as safe as cars then that just leads back to my original point that airliners are better at traveling safely through our atmosphere than physics-defying alien craft.
Your logic is based on the assumption that those alien crafts were intending to come to Earth. Perhaps they were intending to go somewhere else, and crashed into Earth mistakenly? Then the volume of total flights could be much larger, and the proportion of crashes could be much smaller.
So instead of thousands of craft flying daily over the US, there are potentially millions commuting past Earth? And those crashes still happen despite an abundance of help nearby?
I can't quite put my finger on why, but somehow these exchanges with fringe theorists strongly remind me of one-sided versions of those "who would win" arguments that people have between Star Trek technology versus Star Wars. The real objective seems to be to show off one's ability to creatively avoid being pinned down by argument from scientific knowledge while affecting that one's own claims are grounded in it.
I'm not sure if you're directing that at me, or the parent comment. But I'm not a fringe theorist, and I don't believe that aliens have been crashing into Earth either. I find the parent comment's argument very unconvincing.
It makes assumptions which don't seem reasonable in the context of the subject matter at hand. If aliens did exist, they could be much more numerous than humans. Their spacecraft could be more dangerous than airplanes to operate. Their method of travel could perhaps result in collisions with Earth even if it wasn't their intended destination.
My overall point is that we should minimize the assumptions we make here. There's no point in assuming various things and then proposing arguments based on those predicates.
We can't assume that getting "help" is trivial just due to the volume of travel. Commercial airplanes can't rescue each other, just as an example.
I don't believe that aliens are making contact with Earth. But I don't find your argument against that possibility convincing either.
In my mind, a much better argument would simply be that with 7 billion people on this planet, the likelihood of alien crashes staying secret seems miniscule. We would have solid conclusive evidence already if it had happened multiple times, like alledged.
Unless you're using Haskell or something similar, mathematical functions and what most programming languages call "functions" are very different and are better referred to as procedures. Mathematical functions don't have any concept of some basic constructs like variables (state in general), I/O, or even sequential computation. Pure functional languages have to use things like monads to model procedures.
Sure, but you know what has state? ODEs and their discrete-time analogue, recurrence relations. You first meet ODEs in calculus. Even if you say “who cares about continuous time, my computer is fundamentally discrete!” you won’t have a concept of limiting behaviors without calculus.
> Humans are overwhelmingly social creatures by nature and virtually every study of happiness shows a correlation to healthy relationships in your life.
Do these studies actually show that there aren't people who, for lack of a better word, are non-responders? Imagine if 95% of people require relationships to be happy and 5% don't. I would expect most studies to show the correlation exists, but it doesn't mean that 5% doesn't exist. What kind of upper bound do these studies provide here?
> Once you reconnect with nature, your immediate instinct is to reconnect with others.
I have the complete opposite experience. I spend as much of my vacation time as possible hiking, camping, and backpacking alone. I go to places where the landscape is so beautiful that it makes me weep; where seeing the unusual flora makes me feel like I'm home; where the night sky is like diamond dust on black velvet. These places don't make me want to reconnect with others. They make me want to build a cabin and get away from everybody else.
I'm skeptical of this idea in general especially with examples of people like John Muir. If reconnecting with natures gives you the immediate instinct to reconnect with others then why do people like him have to be coaxed away from it?
I think you might be seeking escape rather than reconnecting with nature. Those are two opposing desires. One is the desire to escape the monotony of everyday life by getting back into nature. The other is losing oneself to nature. No going back. Only forward. Akin to hiking the Appalachian trail or the PNW trail in one go. It’s not an escape, it’s a calling or yearning for growth.
Granted, I'm not very familiar with the math behind things like compression and I skimmed a few sections, but this seems to be a criticism of the authors' methods and not the general idea. They show that there are other ways to produce these quantifications of complexity that are better than what's in the original paper. But these also show that certain biological materials score substantially higher than the abiotic samples.
Some of the criticisms also seem to be nit-picking, mainly the mention of beer scoring very high on these measures, as if it's a fault. That just means it's a measure of how biotic something is, not necessarily if it's alive. Beer requires the interaction of at least three species (human, yeast, and wheat) so why shouldn't it score highly?
> You could get a false positive from a pre-biotic but molecularly complex planet, such as Earth in the 100 million years before the origin of the first self-replicating genetic-information-containing entity.
That would still be incredibly useful. 100 million years is only 2% of the Earth's age, for comparison, so it's very unlikely that any given planet would be in this state. Even if it were, it's hard to imagine biologists would balk at a chance to study a bona fide pre-biotic environment.
