Marshall McLuhan might have a comment, but I didn't understand the bulk of his book about the medium being the message, so I'll have to leave that aside.
Telepathy is communication, and communication implies that a message has a sender and a receiver. Sure we can all send now, but is anyone receiving (and if so, even if they agree with me or consider my message important, can they actually do anything constructive about it?).
Thanks to this telepathy, I am now aware that I am a: much sicker, sadder and poorer than I'd be if there was anything remotely sane or fair about the way things work, and b: largely powerless to act on that information in any way. I can complain about it to others (99% of whom are most likely in the same boat), but even if we all send a sharply worded note to the powers that be, they'd just ignore us (see John Key's response to the referendum in which the majority of New Zealanders stated that they didn't want state assets sold to rapacious privateer investors; turns out if he is PM he has a mandate to whatever he wants and tell us it's what we wanted).
Big Telepathic Data might be fun for Google and MIs 1-6, but I can't actually see it doing me any favours.
All I get is huge bills from telcos for the illusion of telepathy.
]]>The potential for subterfuge and false-flaggery is wonderful.
]]>Not for you, not for me, and not for anyone we ever met! Our net benefit from that industry comes in at less than 1%, doesn't it?
]]>It is, militarily, inexplicable. Genghis, Alexander, the Poms, the Russians, pretty much everyone who's ever been to Afghanistan has had their ass handed to them on a plate, which means the point was to start a war that (probably) could not be won, and hence would last a nice loooong time and involve handing lots more of the citizens' money to your friends before it petered out.
No sense in doing something quick, easy and beneficial, like say annexing the Cayman Islands and cleaning out the secret bank accounts of the rich and corrupt. You want duration! More distractions while you loot your home country, and more fat contracts for Hell-i-burton.
]]>Welllll, Icehawk, I guess where I was really going with that is that I fully expect English politics to be constantly derailed by "exciting non-priorities" as ours has been in NZ, with the result that the public have little or nothing to do with any decisions that would really make a difference.
The rich will get ri- OOH! Look! Islamic Lesbian Lemurs Getting Married!!1!eleventybbq!
]]>I too would like to know what a "büroismus" is, and how to cook one properly. Is it a German word for something like "a bureaucracy-gone-mad-with-power"?
]]>Consider the atmosphere we all live in. We have an organ, the ear, which can detect tiny perturbations in that 'field', and we call it sound, and it allows quite good communication.
Pigeons have organs which allow them to sense magnetic fields, and i think cows might too, but definitely pigeons.
Our own nervous system is electric, and ergo induces electromagnetic fields, and if I can tie this all together before my brains fail (it's late), then I don't actually have a hard-science problem with the possibility of an ESP or telepathic effect between humans, or any decent sized vaguely smart vertebrate.
Maybe it's there, but it's very quiet, very weak, no longer selected-for by evolutionary pressure, disbelieved-in (nothing like denial that something could be possible to stop it happening!) and/or drowned out by the much more powerful EMF fields we are bathed in by our mains grid?
It would go a long way towards explaining claims of "the power of prayer" (get a thousand minds sync'd and see what you can do) and other phenomena...then get your psi-implant with the hyperamplifier and solid handwavium flux coils, and start moving that glass!
]]>570: Mass drivers are probably much easier to aim etc when you have weak gravity, little-or-no atmosphere and no random crosswinds?
America did Guantanamo without any (real) hope of profit whatsoever; even if they did sign a treaty forbidding (action x) I have no doubt they'd either dodge or simply renege.
Best movie line from Iron Sky: "Is there anyone that DIDN'T arm their spaceship?"
]]>Certainly in aircraft they have turned out to be better at duralumin than duralumin!
]]>It nearly worked outright and certainly bought them an extra millennium in which to deliver the Grey Goo of Unlimited Appetite or adjust the velocity of a 100km asteroid.
Why the former? Because it was funnier! Just because you're a genocidal race of (justifiably) paranoid megalomaniacal Aliums, doesn't mean you can't have a GSOH. The look on Joseph's face was so priceless that it has been a popular Arcturan Imgur meme for over 2000 years!
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