sipior's comments

I hope I live long enough to see one of the various SETI initiatives pan out into such an amazing discovery. As a child, I thought it inevitable; pushing fifty, I'm rather less sanguine.

It's a philosophical difference that doesn't mean a great deal practically. Often, European undergraduate programs are five years in length, although that's been changing as many European institutions now seem to be moving towards four-year programs. I'm not really sure what's driving that shift, but I think it's done partly in an effort to standardise what it means to have a "bachelor's degree" in terms of what employers can expect between Europe and North America, &cet.

I'm also a little unclear on what Ugandan fundraising has to do with this. Does taking money for Vim development preclude charity? After all, Bram himself took donations for his work on Vim for some time. From the Vim.org sponsor page (http://www.vim.org/sponsor):

Fixing bugs and adding new features takes a lot of effort. To show your appreciation for the work and motivate Bram and others to continue working on Vim please send a donation.

Since Bram is back to a paid job the money will now (after March 2006) be used to help children in Uganda. This is the charity recommended by Vim's author. The money is used for a children centre in the south of Uganda, where AIDS has caused many victims. But at the same time donations increase Bram's motivation to keep working on Vim!

I don't see the problem here.

To be fair, the one example you give is from a person not directly (to my knowledge) associated with the neovim fork. There was more than a bit of discontent, I think, at the slow rate of progress Vim was making compared to more modern options. I've been using Vim about as long as you have, and I have to say that I welcome the options neovim brings to my favourite editor.

I suppose it's impossible to have any fork of such a well-worn, fundamental piece of software without some feeling the need to be partisan. I have to say, though, that Mr Arruda has regularly conducted himself with a great deal of courtesy and professionalism, at least in every instance I have seen. I'm quite happy to be throwing his team a few bucks every month.

And my thanks for your concern about downvotes, but I'm not very much bothered about them. What's the point of writing for the approval of a largely anonymous group of others? My only concern might be that my words would be construed as disrespectful to the late Dr Nash, but on a second reading I don't really see that. If some folks choose to disagree using some arbitrary points system instead of arguing properly, I guess that's their own affair.

Of course, we have laws that all children must be suitably restrained in a motor vehicle because, hey, they're not adults. And we have laws that drivers must wear a seat belt because...well, I blame the insurance companies for that one. But America hopes you'll wear one anyway, because it's the smart thing to do.

The corollary, if you'll forgive my noticing, is that your government doesn't think you're smart enough to wear one on your own.

And so it's not really a "moral stance", but rather a general preference that our government not treat us like a bunch of ignorant monkeys. America wants you to live a long, happy life, but hey, you take your chances. Because you're an adult. And America will be sad if you fuck up and don't wear a seat belt, but life goes on. Mostly.

And now you may point out all the places where this convenant breaks down. The Drug War. The "Broken Windows" model of policing. The (up and coming!) Surveillance War. Well, fair point. Sure, we're flawed, remember? And so we try to make it better, over the long slog of decades. Sometimes it even works.

But the key idea, I think, is that by letting people fail, by letting them do stupid things, by treating them as fallible but sovereign citizens rather than a bunch of ape-men that need to be continually managed, they might become better, all on their own.

We'll let you know how it goes.

I hope this helps.

A "beam of light" is governed by the inverse-square law every bit as much as radio signals are, both being propagating electromagnetic waves. It might be "laughably inefficient" (compared to what, though?), but it seems to be what we're stuck with. "Perhaps advanced civilisations use magic to communicate", is what you're basically suggesting. Well, maybe they do. Ultimately, we can only search for ETIs with the physics we actually know.

So, you're right to say that Fermi's "paradox" (always a bit of a misnomer) doesn't prove the nonexistence of ETIs, but you can't wave away fundamental physics because it gives an uncomfortable answer, either.

I also wanted to note in passing that it's a bit funny to obsess about efficiency and then throw out a statement like "maybe they communicate with gravitational waves". The state of the art gravitational wave detectors are targeted at finding signals generated by the merging of pairs of supermassive black holes at cosmological distances, and possibly neutron star or black hole mergers at galactic ones. If a civilisation is capable of smashing black holes together to send signals out a few megaparsecs, I would submit that efficiency is the very last of their considerations. Gravity is much, much weaker than electromagnetism.

Indeed, there are a lot of reasons to think that radiofrequency communication would be preferred. The galaxy is largely transparent to radiation at the hydrogen hyperfine transition at 21cm, a very useful way to cut through the crap and dust of the interstellar medium. By contrast, at optical frequencies the extinction from our environs to the galactic centre is about thirty-five magnitudes, roughly a loss of 10^14 in signal power. Radio receivers are relatively inexpensive and cheap to make and operate. The Arecibo dish itself could communicate with a similar setup thousands of parsecs away. Probably more now, after the receiver upgrades from a few years back.

But you're right that we shouldn't focus on radio communication with ETIs to the exclusion of everything else. Some folks have been discussing "optical SETI", looking for laser/maser signals whilst piggybacking on other observations. The SETI folks aren't stupid. But they're not well-funded, either, and they do what they can.

They're not like radio waves where you can listen in. That's actually the very reason why they're so inefficient, they're broadcast omnidirectional and that takes a lot of power - wasted power.

Radio dishes are not in any sense omnidirectional. They have a beam pattern which dictates the sensitivity of the instrument as a function of distance off-axis. You're right that broadcasting an omnidirectional signal would be a tremendous waste of power, which is why no one does that when sending signals over great distances.

For my part, I would say that the parent made a couple of statements which were weakly-linked to the content of the article, and then ended it with what sounded like a victory lap ("Looks like progressive policies with healthy government regulation always works better than the free market."), which sounded kind of smug given that there seemed to be a few steps of the proof missing.

As an American living in the Netherlands, I've thought quite a bit about the different approaches taken to social welfare here and at home. If anything, my experiences have left me with much less certainty about which strategy is "best". They seem to optimise for different value systems.