While it's always good to elevate evidence-based knowledge above "woo" or "belief", it's not healthy to close your mind off completely against anything that isn't currently proven. We might know that we don't know a lot of things, but the most interesting thought experiments happen in the area that concerns the things we don't know that we don't know.
One can go to /r/UFOs and see plenty of "interesting thought experiments" happening in that area, and while that might be entertaining, it isn't compelling.
I think closing one's mind off 99.999% to "it's aliens" is perfectly healthy and justified. When you remove the folklore, memes, psyops and apply Occaam's Razor to the "evidence" and sort out mistaken natural phenomena, misinterpreted data, classified but terrestrial technology and outright hoaxes, you aren't left with much of anything, and certainly nothing definite. There is no reason to assume the phenomenon mentioned in the linked paper demonstrates the presence of alien spacecraft but the UFO community is going to run with it anyway.
Call me when David Grusch comes through with that "catastrophic disclosure" we were promised or when Lue Elizondo can tell the difference between a starship and a chandelier. This is just Bob Lazar and Majestic-12 all over again.
When an engineer tells me he built a car that runs on water, he'd better bring some pretty amazing evidence. And no, I'm not going to waste time reading his paper looking for the inevitable flaw, either.
I've heard "evidence" of aliens my entire life. Guess how many panned out. Zero. But that never seems to discourage anyone from believing that an artifact on a photo must have the most implausible explanation ever - aliens!
Where do you draw the line? Time travel? Teleportation? Astrology? Fortune tellers? Razor blade sharpening? Reincarnation?
Well, I don’t agree with any laws like that, they’re all silly.
Nobody under 16 should be on social media for their own good, but it’s their parent’s job to prevent them from rotting their brains, not some governing body.
> but it’s their parent’s job to prevent them from rotting their brains, not some governing body.
The counter argument is that even if you want to do that as a parent, it’s hard when all your kid’s friends use the thing you’re prohibiting. It makes their life harder, and yours too in the process.
It’s worth noting the first initiatives to gate kids from social media did come from parents, who organised locally and collectively agreed on a course of action.
As a parent, you have direct control over who your kid’s friends are.
We used to say, “If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you?”.
Now we say, “Well, the kids are going to jump off a cliff anyway, I can’t stop them, so the government should make a law about it!”
I don’t think that’s the way to handle things. Parents who are bad at parenting will raise kids that fraternize with kids who jump off of cliffs. Maybe theirs will too, one day. Unfortunate, but the kids at the top of the cliff, who were actually raised, will excel.
You do not have control of who your childrens' friends are unless you spend all hours with them. And most people are happy nobody can legally sell smokes, booze, and drugs to 12 year olds.
Surely you can see how requiring ID for a physical cigs, drugs, and alcohol purchases is different from requiring ID to use a website?
“Think of the children” is the exact tool fascists use to erode liberties. Governments worldwide salivate at the idea of having a registry of what every individual is doing online at any given moment.
Don't forget "dynamic hires" and "sliced HAM", two software modes that were really only useful for static images.
Dynamic hires ran at 640x400x16 colors, but changed the palette on every single scanline, which could allow display of all 4096 colors in hires). Sliced HAM did the same thing, but in 320x400 HAM (the base palette was 16 colors and could be used directly without fringing, so changing those 16 colors every line would reduce fringing while still allowing more than 16 colors to appear on a scanline).
Nothing stopped people from using this dynamic palette technique with 32-color lores or 64-color EHB as well. But it was most commonly used in the two forms I mentioned.
By the time HAM8 came around in the AGA chipset, this wasn't really needed, as HAM8 fringing was much less noticeable, having a base palette of 64 colors. There's no reason you couldn't do sliced HAM8 however, although I'm not sure if you could change all 64 base colors for each scanline.
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