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CIA declassifies hundreds of UFO documents

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Re: CIA declassifies hundreds of UFO documents

#201

Post by talmand »

hodwik wrote: post #183
talmand wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did this myself just a few weeks ago. The complaints was that search results would often come back fast enough that the user may not understand anything was done if the results happen to be the same.

Saw a form recently with search-as-you-type that included a fake button that when pressed would write "Search Complete" to the screen, but had no other function, for users who didn't comprehend search as you type.

I would have to link that up to analytics just to see how many people clicked on it.

Re: CIA declassifies hundreds of UFO documents

#202

Post by krapp »

Laaw wrote: post #120
krapp wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a big difference between learning that they exist, and learning that they exist here. If some alien force with incomprehensible power and an unknown agenda, has been acting at will on Earth for who knows how long, then humans are not the dominant form of intelligent life on Earth, and have possibly never been in charge of their own destiny. What are we, then? Animals in a zoo? Specimens in a lab? Play…

Like I said, we can speculate over what might or might happen all day, but do we have any evidence ? Just seems like you're doomsday fantasizing...

>but do we have any evidence?

I'm not aware of any. The problem is, this would be such a unique occurrence that, like speculating on the nature of alien life based on Earth life, anything worth calling evidence might be impossible to find.

Re: CIA declassifies hundreds of UFO documents

#203

Post by clock_tower »

ild wrote: post #185
forgetsusername wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's also beyond ridiculous to think that a superpower like the USSR couldn't completely evaluate any material that came their way. Communist Russia was coming apart at the seams, and it took the US many years to realize it. There's a lot of complexity.

USSR. Russia has never been falling apart. Calling USSR Russia is HLN/Fox level discussion.

The terms were interchangeable back in the Cold War, everywhere outside academia; and there are interesting continuities between the Tsars and the Soviets. "Glasnost" and "perestroika" were first used in reference to Peter the Great's policies, and Great Russia (Russia proper) was known as Red Russia as far back as, I think, the 1400s.

Also: _The Structures of Everyday Life_ and _Simplicius Simplicissimus_ both touch on Russia, in ways that suggest that the country (post-Mongol-conquest) always did have a certain amount of proto-Sovietness to it -- alcohol sales as a state monopoly, for example, or arms always coming from royal treasuries.

Re: CIA declassifies hundreds of UFO documents

#204

Post by jrumbut »

newman314 wrote: post #114
T-hawk wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This actually hit my previous company in a software context. We would number hotfixes sequentially. Customers would be notified when hotfixes were to be deployed to their sites. One savvy client noticed the hotfix numbering sequence and worked out both that we had a lot of hotfixes (tens per week) and that they didn't get them all right away (if you don't ask for it, it comes to you in the next quarterly trunk releas…

Why is it an issue for alerting about hotfixes? Wouldn't it make sense to get fixes out sooner rather than later? Or maybe I'm missing something here.

There may be a decision making process on the client's side about whether to accept the new hotfix, maybe they have a workaround for the broken functionality or maybe it's just not worth the risk to them.

Then you might create another hotfix while that decision making process is going on, and both you and the client need to evaluate whether it's possible and desirable to apply the first one, second one, or both.

It's why versioning, source control, build process automation, and client communication are so important to get right from the outset.

Re: CIA declassifies hundreds of UFO documents

#205

Post by ild »

clock_tower wrote: post #203
ild wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USSR. Russia has never been falling apart. Calling USSR Russia is HLN/Fox level discussion.

The terms were interchangeable back in the Cold War, everywhere outside academia; and there are interesting continuities between the Tsars and the Soviets. "Glasnost" and "perestroika" were first used in reference to Peter the Great's policies, and Great Russia (Russia proper) was known as Red Russia as far back as, I think, the 1400s. Also: _The Structures of Everyday Life_ and _Simplicius Simplicissimus_ both touch…

It was used during the Cold War, because it was important to simplify, demonize the enemy. Russian Ivan with bottle of vodka, in a tank, driven by a brown bear with ushanka creates an a lot more simple image; you add Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Armenians, dozen of languages, without profound racial discrimination - and people will start having the Thoughts; counterproductive for the narrative of the Cold War.

Re: CIA declassifies hundreds of UFO documents

#206

Post by Scarblac »

LordKano wrote: post #186
jimrandomh wrote: post #22

I'm surprised they're continuing the misdirection so many years later. "Unidentified flying object" means an aircraft, usually a military one (because civilian aircraft are easier to identify). A UFO over US soil would usually be a USAF plane, but the CIA ran (runs?) a reporting hotline because they might occasionally be foreign spy planes instead. But of course, the Soviets were very interested (or the US believed t…

An apparently metallic or luminous object in the sky at any time after the 1940s could possibly be explained away as experimental terrestrial craft but we have reports of such things going back much further in history. It's funny how today many people call them "flying saucers" due to a misunderstanding of Kenneth Arnold's description of the objects that he claims to have seen in 1947 because more than 800 years ago,…

But, as some XKCD notes, nowadays all of humanity walks around with great photo cameras all the time and nobody is taking pictures of UFOs with them.

Re: CIA declassifies hundreds of UFO documents

#207

Post by LordKano »

Scarblac wrote: post #206
LordKano wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An apparently metallic or luminous object in the sky at any time after the 1940s could possibly be explained away as experimental terrestrial craft but we have reports of such things going back much further in history. It's funny how today many people call them "flying saucers" due to a misunderstanding of Kenneth Arnold's description of the objects that he claims to have seen in 1947 because more than 800 years ago,…

But, as some XKCD notes, nowadays all of humanity walks around with great photo cameras all the time and nobody is taking pictures of UFOs with them.

People take a lot of pictures of UFOs.

Most of them are eventually identified as mundane.

Re: CIA declassifies hundreds of UFO documents

#209

Post by hodwik »

talmand wrote: post #201
hodwik wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saw a form recently with search-as-you-type that included a fake button that when pressed would write "Search Complete" to the screen, but had no other function, for users who didn't comprehend search as you type.

I would have to link that up to analytics just to see how many people clicked on it.

Yeah, I'm not sure.

It was pretty hilarious.

I got a bug-fix from the form developer that his button wasn't working, and I kept trying to explain to him that it couldn't possibly work, it didn't do anything.

Finally he explained that if the user had clicked the fake button already, and then changed their search to a search that reported the same results, it wasn't pretending to search again, and this was causing a lot of bug reports from his client.

I helped him rewrite the fake button to make a bigger deal about (fake) searching again, and apparently the bug reports went away.

Re: CIA declassifies hundreds of UFO documents

#210

Post by golergka »

kls wrote: post #163
golergka wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physics as a field doesn't have the same pressures and people aspiring to it as intelligence military analytics.

While I agree intel and physics are apples to oranges, the soviets had a pretty good intelligence arm and quite capable analytics. The soviets where very good at Human Intelligence: http://sputniknews.com/military/20150928/1027670037/kgb-cia-...

Yeah, nothing tells true stories about KGB like the face of modern Russian propaganda machine.
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