Arecibo Observatory Facing Massive Budget Cuts 171
SirLurksAlot writes "Many supporters of the SETI@home project have recently received a message informing them of impending budget cuts for the Arecibo Observatory and asking them to show their support for the project by writing to Congress. The letter also informs supporters that there are currently two bills (Senate bill 2862 sponsored by Senator Hillary Clinton, and a similar House bill, H.R. 3737), which are intended to secure funding for the project. According to The Planetary Society, the current plan for the Arecibo Observatory involves cutting funding by more than 60% from $10.4 million to just $4 million by 2011."
What? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I support funding Aricebo for use to search for NEO's, but I don't want my tax money going to SETI. I'm sorry, but as cool as it would be to either confirm the 'WOW' signal or find a signal from an ET, it shouldn't be a priority for using tax dollars.
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Are you saying that it isn't worthwhile, or that it should be done by the private sector? Because I just don't see how it could exist without government funding given there is no realistic potential for a monetary return on investment.
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Because I just don't see how it could exist without government funding given there is no realistic potential for a monetary return on investment.
Philanthropy. There are whole organizations pouring money into Africa. What's their expected return?
Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
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For one thing, they get to not listen to annoying "Just a dollar a day" commercials on TV. They don't have to read depressing news stories about what's happening in other countries, or if they do (and this is probably the key) they get to feel good about themselves for doing something about it.
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Tax write-offs for charitable donations. Every year, big corporations and wealthy individuals give billions of dollars to charity in order to lower their taxes. As long as this is run by a non-profit organization, donations are eligible for this. All that's needed now, is a little publicity in the right places and the donations will start rolling in.
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I agree. I read a while back that SETI went through their entire spectrum twice and hasn't found anything yet.
I've also read how over the years, despite the fact that we have begun broadcasting more signals over the years, the Earth has gotten "quieter" in that our signals are more focused and don't travel as far. Even if there was intelligent alien life out there, and even if they broadcast radio signals, it seems unlikely they'd broadcast them far enough for us to pick them up.
I don't want tax dollars g
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
The seti receiver is separately and primarily privately funded and operates in a tag-a-long mode so the seti operations don't interfere with other more traditional operations at Arecebo. When there is an observation going on the seti receiver just takes in what-ever the main telescope is looking at slightly off axis; very rarely is the telescope pointed at an object for a specifically seti observation. Additionaly the kinds of signals that Seti finds interesting are generally signals that when shown to be naturaly caused give astronomers decades of research material!
I remember when Pulsars were designated LGMs for litlle Green Men.
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Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
Profitability of the war in Iraq (Score:4, Interesting)
Meanwhile, the Iraq War has cost the average taxpayer about $12,000 each over the last five years.
If we assume a baseline 100M taxpayers, and an Iraq war cost of 100B a year, then, we're really talking only about $1000 a year on average. Notice, though, that 90% of the taxes in the USA are paid by people making over $250,000 a year, so really, we average stiffs are probably not even paying for the war at all.
Now, let's say that the Iraqis come through and increase their oil production to first 3m bbls/day, and then to 5m / bbls a day, and the benefits of this production increase result in additional 50 billion a year in profits to American companies, PLUS, a reduction in gasoline costs. We can calculate the ultimate profitability of the war based upon a reduction in the price of gasoline per person, knowing that in the USA the per capita consumption of gasoline is about 10 barrels per person per year. Source [statemaster.com], and thus, about 30 barrels per taxpayer per year. So we say at 30 x 45 gets us about 1200 gallons of gas per year per taxpayer. We can thus calculate that if the war in Iraq is victorious, AND, nets a global price reduction of about a $1 / gallon, then, each taxpayer would come out ahead about $200 per year, even if the cost of continuing the war is born indefinitely. If, on the other hand, the USA wins the war and a stable semi-US-friendly government emerges and thus we can withdraw the troops, and Iraq still pumps enough to lower the price of gasoline by a $1 a gallon, then the war would basically pay for itself in about 5 years, and then after that, it would be pure profit for the USA. Hey, imperialism can be profitable, which is why countries do it!
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90% of the taxes in the USA are paid by people making over $250,000
[citation needed]
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Err ... American oil under all that Iraqi sand, eh? Who knew!
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I guess you don't know what an NEO is. I didn't say shut down Aricebo. I said spend the money on looking for Near Earth Objects rather than alien intelligence.
Mod parent and grandparent down... (Score:4, Insightful)
SETI@home is at the present time entirely funded by donations. Any time SETI@home uses at Arecibo is piggybacked on searching for pulsars or mapping the Galaxy in the 21cm line.
Or are you suggesting that because Arecibo spends any effort on a project you dislike it should be shut down?
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Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Oh, like I want to know that I'm going to die next week. Really, knowing about some global catastrophic event in advance would probably just cause massive panic and unrest before we all die. What good is that? Where's the return?
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Anything that tracks NEOs gives you a return on your tax dollar in that it keeps you aware of any catastrophic threats.
Just like this rock I hold in my hand is keeping bears away.
Tell me when we actually have the ability to destroy and or deflect NEOs---or, even better, when we have actually detected an NEO that is a real threat.
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Ensuring that there's no imminent repeat of this [wikipedia.org] on a more populated area?
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That implies that humanity has the ability to take some kind of preventative action if a collision is imminent. As far as I know, we do not.
Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, we probably couldn't shoot down an incoming meteoroid, but given enough warning time, we could at least begin an evacuation of the impact zone. Additionally, knowing that a sudden, shock explosion was due to a natural occurrence rather than a terrorist or "rogue state" could help prevent WWII being touched off...
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Additionally, knowing that a sudden, shock explosion was due to a natural occurrence rather than a terrorist or "rogue state" could help prevent WWII being touched off...
1939 called. You're almost 70 years too late.
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D'oh! As always, I blame the font... (Either that, or I accidentally declared WWI to be non-canon...)
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If you really study the History WW II was basically a re-escalation of WW I anyways
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Oh....hang on a second....
In all seriousness, and as a cynical way to get more funding, someone should point out that whilst it may not be possible to avoid a collision, you could very well change the point of impact given some warning. Imagine if Bush had the option - strike off the east coast of the US, or delay it for
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Yup, exactly. The one to watch out for, however, is the increasing aggression of a Nazi run Germany leading to the annexation of Poland, which could very conceivably start WWIII.
Er, that already happened. More than 4 years ago [idlewords.com]!
Re:What? (Score:5, Interesting)
As an honest question, what useful things has Aricebo produced?
How about a Nobel prize? (Amongst a bunch of other excellent bits of radio astronomy, aeronomy, and planetary science).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSR_B1913+16 [wikipedia.org]
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We obviously overspent on your "knowledge", fool.
It has produced massively distributed computing (Score:5, Informative)
Much of basic research does not always produce immediately tangible results. SETI + Aricebo have produced massive distributed computing which is widely used now by many EXTREMELY worthwhile projects (protein folding, cancer research, etc). This is a basic tool now, and I'd say that's pretty valuable and productive.
Just because it isn't directly dumping 200 MPG cars into your lap, or producing a magic fat dissolving drug, doesn't mean that it isn't helping you somehow.
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A biggie was the radar return of the distance to Venus, which instantly corrected our measurements of the Earth-Sun distance, which then instantly changed the size of the Universe.
You could just look at http://www.naic.edu/~nolan/radar/AUSAC.html [naic.edu]. Some big stuff there. Rotation rates of Mercury (which was in error) and Venus, for instance. Radar maps of the topography of Venus. All cheaply done. All this for twenty minutes in Iraq.
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Mod parent funny. (Score:2)
Create an account on the SETI forum and get to know those guys that run the place. They do squat there for what they're paid. I wish I could take a vacation like those guys. They're biggest decision is "What country do you want to go spend a month at?" Shit I'd be playing WOW all day too! Get to know them before you wish them (mine and your) millions.
Yes, all three of the people who work for SETI@home are billionaires from their SETI salaries. Did you ever try to run a scientific project and a web site visited daily by a few hundred thousand people with a staff of three part time employees? Are you on call for your job every hour of every day?
To be serious, pay at SETI@home is, like typical university pay, about 70% of industry wages for the same work. And given that they aren't getting enough in donations to fund the three employees they have, the
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One man's crap is, of course, another's caviar. When people use the term "special interests," they mean "every interest but mine, which is legitimate."
If Congress had the balls - well, the Speaker is a woman, so choose your own euphemism - EVERYONE'S pet project would be trimmed, EVERYONE would walk away slightly piss
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So your argument is... (Score:2)
I disagree - instead of writing Congress, those who want Aricibo funded should donate money directly, instead of trying to use the power of government to force everyone else to pay through taxes.
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How many minutes of the Iraq boondoggle, fuster cluck, invasion/occupation, meddling in the middle east once again would it cost to keep Aricebo running at the current, or higher, budget?
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Yes, stop spending on inconsequential things... just not MY inconsequential things.
Cycles or cents? (Score:2)
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Perspective (Score:5, Interesting)
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Well - kinda (Score:5, Insightful)
The F-22 does stuff TO people, Aricebo does stuff FOR people.
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Personally, I like the P-51 Mustang, those must be real cheap these days. You could probably get 20 for the price of one of those newfangled jets, plus it'd be much more cost effective for the coming slapdown of the American people by the military after everything goes haywire due to Global Warming or the latest panic.
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If they're not going to be used why has the US spent $62 billion on them?
If think it's more likely you could get 200 P51s for the price of one f22. Interestingly, according to wikipedia, they originally cost $50k each to build, which is about $500k today (probably not far off their current price as antiques) so relatively speaking, state of the art in 1945 cost 1/300th of state of the art in 2008. They probably use a lot less fuel too, so when oil hits $300 a barrel they might be able to afford to fly the
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The F-22 does stuff TO people, Aricebo does stuff FOR people.
Aricebo doesn't do anything for me at all. It's useless.
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Aricebo doesn't do anything for me at all. It's useless.
But you believe it will find aliens, there is a statistically significant chance that it will.
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Seeing that the US wont sell the "real" version to any other country, the F22 will most likely kill innocents for bad, corrupt people.
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or a couple of fancy public restrooms in some Congressman's district for a park any rarely uses.
Earmarks alone consume more science money than we can imagine. Look, the DOD will always be here, its a requirement to maintain our standard of living and be able to scare the pants of petty 3rd world dictators who think neighboring countries are new areas to invade or people of certain ethnic traits need to die.
The real crime in our government is earmarks, essentially buying their seats of power with our tax do
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Did you read the article you linked for the bathroom. They claimed the price was so high because they were building it to withstand vandals; it sounds like you'll need a jackhammer to damage anything. You can say that using the same toilets as prisoners is insulting, but too expensive? Won't it save money in the long term?
The funding also is coming from the city, not Congress. It wasn't an earmark at all.
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Or to put it another way, provide health care for 1,768 people
Many supporters of the SETI@home project have.... (Score:2, Funny)
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Haha, I suppose I could've phrased that better. I should've said SETI@home sends message of impending doom.......
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for Arecibo Observatory budget.
Running out of money, solution (Score:2)
quick, claim you almost discovered the Higgs Boson!
Art Bell (Score:2)
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DANG IT! (Score:3, Funny)
"Many supporters of the SETI@home project have recently received a message..."
And my heart leapt into my throat!
The rest of the article was REALLY a big let-down after that, let me tell you.
No profit (Score:2)
Anything which doesn't make a profit will be purged. Its inevitable. We will end up being a society that churns out nothing but burgers and shit movies because those are the most profitable things.
And you, all of your, helped make it happen. Give yourselves a pat on the back.
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You might think it's valuable. I wonder why we're wasting millions of dollars on looking for aliens (and utterly failing) when we have bigger concerns much closer to home.
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Arecibo is valuable. It's SETI I have problems with.
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Click on my signature to find out how SETI is really funded.
I don't understand the US government (Score:2)
We know for a fact there are weapons of mass destruction [wikipedia.org] in space. Doesn't cutting funding to space research mean that the asteroids have won?
Or better yet, don't write Congress (Score:5, Interesting)
We've already had one near-miss, when Hillary Clinton tried to force some budget language funding Arecibo in the weeks before the Puerto Rico primary. She didn't earmark new funding, she just added a mandate that existing funding go there. Oddly enough, the legislation didn't mention which other ground-based program would be cut to free up the funds...
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Aricebo is to radio telescopes what hubble and spitzer are to optical .
It's the most sensitive EM listening post on the planet.
I don't see what makes it "uncompetitive"
Re:Or better yet, don't write Congress (Score:4, Insightful)
They've actually moved a large fraction of Arecibo's time over to survey efforts: "We'll do the same piece of sky, but with a flux limit 3 times deeper!" Sorry, but there are too many programs with the potential for transformative new discoveries to keep a major observatory open purely for incremental science.
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let's replace Arecibo with "hubble" or "spitzer"..
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Spitzer: Transitional disks. ULIRGs. Exoplanet secondary transits. Star formation, period. Direct imaging of free-floating planetary-mass objects.
See? It's not that hard, even if you don't stray too far outside your (or your colleagues') field of specialization. There really are a lot of important (and sexy) science cases floating around, they just don't really require Arecibo.
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or we could use the dilbert catchphrase
"you're not CUTE anymore!"
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There is no compelling science case for Arecibo that can't be pursued with other telescopes, especially since the frontier of radio astronomy has mostly moved from sensitivity (requiring big apertures) to resolution (requiring long-baseline arrays), or to shorter mm/submm wavelengths that Arecibo can't handle.
Sorry, but that is not true. Radio astronomy needs improvement in a wide variety of areas in order to tackle the tremendously wide variety of science that is done at radio bands. Examples include sensitivity, field-of-view, dynamic range, image fidelity, resolution, and wavelength coverage. But sensitivity is one of the most important. That is why the SKA is on the table to be the world's next generation decameter/centimeter wave radio telescope. The most important thing it provides is sensitivity (i.e
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Hmmmm.. theres the VLA, the VLBA .. SKA on the way and many
other radio scopes/arrays. Sometimes one has to let go.
And I might add I would prefer to see funding restored to Iter than Aricebo.
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What is Arecibo's credible competition in the radio-bucket field, and particularly in the radio-transmitting field for planetary radar?
You've listed a load of optical instruments, including ATST which is explicitly to study the Sun; the only radio one is the ATA whose area is about a sixth of Arecibo's and who can't benefit from elaborate ultra-low-noise receiver technology unless you want to build 350 dilution refrigerators to cool 350 copies of your instrument.
The Square Kilometer Array isn't built yet, a
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My argument, which also applies to Scott Ransom's post, is that there are so many science cases that are truly transformative, just doing reasonable sc
"Scientific hedonism" (Score:3, Insightful)
In times of recession the lawmakers get allergic to basic research, which they think is a kind of scientific hedonism. The thought pattern here seems to be that science is a shabby garden run by elitist weirdos. You water this garden with money and then you can pick the new drugs, weapons and consumer electronics growing on its trees. The lawmakers attempt to tidy up this garden in order to improve the yield of goodies by cutting down the trees that don't bear fruit. This can only be harmful in the end, because they don't have a faintest idea about gardening...
The irony of SETI (Score:2)
Desperately trying hard to find the slightest evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence while astronauts [wikipedia.org], pilots [wikipedia.org] and radar operators [hyper.net] witness UFO events that can hardly be explained by anything but what we're looking for so hard in the sky.
But I guess that the term UFO inspires such a lack of credibility that we have to look hard to the sky where we won't see anything while ignoring what takes place in our atmosphere.
Outrageous (Score:2)
I think it is outrageous that we can spend trillions on Bushs war of lies and deciet in iraq but we cannot come up with $11 million for aricebo. It shows how corrupt the government has become, when Bushs wars of aggression of killing and death are more important than expanding human knowledge.
Hmm... (Score:2)
Can't be too hard, right? I could probably have it done in less than a day. Geek power!
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yeah like helping the PharmaCo's create the next wonder-drug that nobody without insurance will be able to afford.
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... for 17 years.
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Good. Maybe soon, all the BOINC users wasting time searching for non-existent aliens will move on to something useful [worldcommunitygrid.org]!
World Community Grid is a boinc project [berkeley.edu] , no Seti@home no boinc, no boinc no World Community Grid.
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Seti@home was started for several reasons
the SETI project was interesting and computationally amenable to distributed processing
Originally the SETI@home was intended more as a proof of concept rather than the finally goal and it popular success surprised even the SETI team.
boinc was a restructuring of the 1st gen SETI@home software and is designed to be much more modular and versatile framework t
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Bah, maybe that cancer just doesn't want to be cured...
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Why did we spend a dime going to the moon? Mars? Why do we do anything that doesn't directly line our pockets with more money? Are we human beings?
I'm sorry, but just as the parent noted, the extraordinary amounts of money we spend on far less lucrative endeavors sure makes a few pennies a citizen for even the possibility of finding intelligent life elsewher
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Why did we spend a dime going to the moon? Mars?
Politics and more politics.
With all that money NASA spent going to the moon, what practical benefit have we gained (that's related to actual landing on the moon, rather than, you know, the general research that goes on at NASA).
I suppose Mars is in the news now with all those stories of water being found. But, really, who cares? What practical benefit does that have for those of us who live on Earth?
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I suppose Mars is in the news now with all those stories of water being found. But, really, who cares? What practical benefit does that have for those of us who live on Earth?
Besides incresing our common knowledge of the universe we live in, or the new technologies [nasa.gov] developed by the space program? Saying "i don't care, i live on Earth" is like saying "why would i ever leave home? the fridge is stuffed."
Science brings knowledge. And knowledge is one of the most intangible assets human kind posseses, but perha
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I don't see why the government has to pay for it. Why not start a non-profit that takes donations and uses the money to do the research? That way you and other people who think it's important can donate as money as you want, and the people who don't care can keep their money.
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That way you and other people who think it's important can donate as money as you want, and the people who don't care can keep their money.
Because government has to address the needs of every citizen. It's all about the greater good, and the government should (and in fact, has) to work towards that goal. In the end, you're funding science. It's important, and too cheap to ignore.
And the "there's people who don't care" argument is a controversial one. Some people don't beleive they should support poor or une
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The government working for the greater good is the definition of socialism. In a democratic society the government is there to protect against injustice and let the people worry about doing what's best for themselves, even if they don't always know what that is. Th
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Besides incresing our common knowledge of the universe we live in, or the new technologies [nasa.gov] developed by the space program? Saying "i don't care, i live on Earth" is like saying "why would i ever leave home? the fridge is stuffed."
So, you are saying that I can actually visit Mars now?
Until there is an actual tourism of those places select few (or robots) are going, what do I care?
And really, if I were telecommuting and the fridge were full, I would stay at home and not care about what happens outside my home (save for when I am traveling either for business or pleasure).
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perhaps a more prudent use of resources would be folding@home. You know, curing cancer instead of holding our head to the ground to listen for non-existent buffalo...
Now - why can't we have both? Dissing the opportunity of discovering extraterrestrial life because "we're most probably alone" or whatever is retarded, specially considering the percentage of the US budget allocated to Arrecibo.
A better question is this. Why isn't your government funding protein folding research and Seti when both could be cove
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Next fiscal year (9): "Consider this a military coup. You will be allowed to stay on as long as you help us maintain the peace. We need extra funds to hire the extra manpower to help crush the tax-payer revolts. Sign here."
The good thing about U.S. government (despite all its failings) is, a civilian (the President of the U.S.) is the commander in chief.
I honestly do not think a military coup (which would be ... some general *not* the commander in chief somehow getting enough support from his colleagues) is possible in the U.S.
I'll believe it when that happens, but I don't think it will in my lifetime.
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The greatest thing about the US is that anybody can be president.
The worst thing about the US is that anybody can be president.
The two statements are not mutually exclusive. And by the way, you already had your coup d'etat. Bush wasn't elected. The electoral college Ohio votes were fraudulent, so it's already happened in your lifetime.
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They probably use the same server app as Slashdot which IIRC is open source.