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For some reason I read that as "The North Will Rise Again!"

2) Definitions in Addiction Medicine,

3) Computer and Cyberspace Addiction,

4) When games stop being fun,

5) Video games: Cause for concern?,

6) Video games: Research, ratings, and recommendations, Contains many references for empirical studies

7) Video games addiction,

8) Are video games really so bad?,

9) Questions Answered,

10) Positron Emission Tomography ,

11) The Biochemistry of Human Addiction, Discusses the role of dopamine in addiction

Check this out and the response of the scientist who anti-global warming stuff is based on and finally this study of peer reviewed journals (ie not armchair science)

There are serious scientists who question the theory that global warming or climate change as it's more properly called now is caused by human activity.

Would you point me to some serious scientific studies that shows this?

Oh, and they missed using Jets to bring down major buildings in New York. Although, to be fair, Tom Clancy came up with that idea earlier.

So did the National Intelligence Council...

There are 10,000 new species discovered every year. Than means 10000/365 = 27+epsilon every day. So Slashdot is now reporting when news hasn't happened?

I hope you don't think that suggests that he should be let off the hook.

No way -- let him rot in jail for 20 years. Good riddence.

i.e. the new Patriot Act information sharing that is now expressly allowed contributed to his down fall.

Yes, but that was under PATRIOT -- what the Administration is doing is outside of PATRIOT and was not authorized in the least by it. I have issues with some (not all) of the PATRIOT act as well, but that's not what we're talking about. The PATRIOT act even calls for judicial review in most instances (and it's the ones that are outside of that purview that I have issue with).

There are strong arguments on the other side, that the administration's actions were completely legal if seldom used Presidential powers.

Thanks for the links -- I'm already familiar with the arguments in the first, but the second was interesting. And while I agree, to a limited extent, that the wiretapping of foreign nationals is legal when it comes to international communications, it is not at all clear that doing so to domestic calls is allowable -- and it's been stated (although not confirmed AFAIK) that the NSA didn't merely tap international calls, but would spider-web out from the domestic end to other domestic taps -- and that's certainly not on stable legal ground. Neither link even tried to address that either.

And keep in mind that both Congress and the Courts were informed that they were doing this.

There's some question as to exactly what Congress was informed of -- several of the senators on the intelligence committee have said that they were not informed as to the nature or scope of the program, and that if they had been aware that they would not have approved of it. Additionally, the security on it was so tight that the senators could not consult with anyone else (staff, lawyers, etc) on it, which makes it questionable that they were able to make a properly informed decision as to its legality.

As for the courts -- what court was informed of it? Certainly not FISA.

But since 2001, the judges have modified 179 of the 5,645 requests for court-ordered surveillance by the Bush administration. A total of 173 of those court-ordered "substantive modifications" took place in 2003 and 2004, the most recent years for which public records are available.

Yes, and note that it's been 5645 requests over 4 years, compared to 13102 requests for the first 22 years. That's a dramatic upswing. And that's not even including the wiretaps we're discussing. That said, I can fully understand the reasons behind the increase -- we were attacked on our own soil after all. So it's entirely understandable.

That said, the FISA court is a freaking kangaroo court -- traditionally all they've done is rubber stamp the requests (which, honestly, I would expect). Heck, in 1980 they modified one request (the only pre-2000 modification) and granted additional powers that weren't requested. The current composition is made up entirely of Bush appointees, and while some of those are fairly recent, it's clear that he had a majority of the appointees in both 2003 and 2004. What that tells me is that the requests were so flimsy or outside the scope of national security that the court wouldn't just approve them. Heck, the court even publicly rebuked Ashcroft in 2002 over false information provided.

Instead of questioning the sudden restraint by FISA, I think it's more reasonable to question the warrants being requested. Particularly given that the court was doing this post-9/11 and with Bush appointed members.

The judges also rejected or deferred at least six requests for warrants during those two years -- the first outright rejection of a wiretap request in the court's history.

That's untrue. The court denied a request in 1997. And the article in question is also wrong about the number of denials -- there were 4 requests denied

BTW, thought I'd pick apart your post (even though it is irrelevant to my point about need to worry about US use of GPS).

kept up a pretense of having WMD for over ten years

If by "kept up pretense of having WMD" you mean he repeatedly stated he had gotten rid of all the WMD the US gave him and Iraq no longer has any WMD then you may have a point.

and it was Hussein's unwillingness to submit to the UN resolutions to open up his former WMD plants, etc. for inspection that triggered the invasion.

The best rebuttal to this has to be the UN Quarterly report on weapon inspections just before the invasion. Have a read. Not saying Saddam never had some fun screwing with the inspectors, but if the threat of invasion was enough to get him to stop and all this was going forward so well, why invade?

Had the prior Iraqi regime complied without even the months long final warning process (let alone the ten plus years prior), no bombs, tanks, or other assorted objects that go boom would have ever been needed.

According to your own president, this isn't true. Even though they now know there was no WMD, the invasion was still needed because some day Saddam might have decided to maybe make more WMD.

Speaking of bias and distortion...

This is not a "study by Stanford and UCLA". This is a paper written by two guys who got their PhDs at Stanford, Tim Groseclose and Jeff Milyo. Groseclose is now an associate professor at UCLA and Milyo is one at the University of Missouri.

Neither Stanford nor UCLA have put their imprimatur on this paper, nor endorsed it in any way.

If you actually read the paper you will find that it is a conclusion in search of evidence. Two conservative buddies decided to prove something they already believed and manufactured some relatively weak statistics to back up their beliefs.

And you got modded up. I swear, include a link to anything boring and factual looking, regardless of who wrote it, and Slashdotters will mod you up rather than reading it.

Reminded me of an old comic from the now-defunct The Parking Lot is Full webcomic. (Mirrored here since the original site is acting sluggish.)

The pilots were talking about "self defence" or some other horseshit. Yeah, flying at 10000 feet in the middle of the night you are likely to get hit by a stray bullet. And after they dropped the bomb, they only had to wait about 10 seconds for the air command to tell them they just bombed the Canadians.

I guess it's war then, eh? Shit happens. When bin Laden declared war on the US in 1997 (or there about), then they crashed into World Trace Center, well, maybe by your judgement, well, it was war. Shit happens. People die. Move on. Right?

100,000+ Iraqies dead over the last 2 years? Oh well, shit happens... None of them were your kids so it doesn't really matter..

I just checked my library and they indeed have a copy, albeit in bound journal form. It's marked in the system as "LIB USE ONLY" so it probably means they wouldn't let me out of library with it. Bummer.

I just checked my library and they indeed have a copy, albeit in bound journal form. It's marked in the system as "LIB USE ONLY" so it probably means they wouldn't let me out of library with it. Bummer.

From the article: Brent, who received a $100,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop Qualrus

According to Brent's departmental web page he intends to apply for an NSF award- there is a big difference between applying and getting those awards- those are very hard to get. His personal webpage makes no mention of NSF funding, and an search on the NSF award search site shows no such award. It does appear that there was an old $99,900 NSF award to the company Idea Works where he is president (same address as his home address, BTW), but that award lists someone else as the principal investigator and yet someone else as the former principal investigator, and seems to be for a kind-of related project on coding data. I'm not sure what the story is, but it is clear to me that at least some of the facts are wrong.

From the article: Brent, who received a $100,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop Qualrus

According to Brent's departmental web page he intends to apply for an NSF award- there is a big difference between applying and getting those awards- those are very hard to get. His personal webpage makes no mention of NSF funding, and an search on the NSF award search site shows no such award. It does appear that there was an old $99,900 NSF award to the company Idea Works where he is president (same address as his home address, BTW), but that award lists someone else as the principal investigator and yet someone else as the former principal investigator, and seems to be for a kind-of related project on coding data. I'm not sure what the story is, but it is clear to me that at least some of the facts are wrong.

When a Freshman at Mizzou asked an Upper Classman which professor to choose for Sociology, the befuddled Freshman was left with the reply:

"Get Bent"

I go to the University of Missouri. I wouldn't want to be in his class either. Hmm, I don't have enough of the keywords in my paper? How about you actually read the paper you made me write?

http://sociology.missouri.edu/Faculty_and_Staff/Fa culty/Edward_Brent.html

The Plame case is different for a very important reason: The very act of revealing her name was, itself, a crime. A crime to which the ONLY witnesses were journalists. And because, as defined by our federal laws, that crime was in fact Treason.

Actually, nobody is claiming treason in the Plame case. The law they are using is the http://foi.missouri.edu/bushinfopolicies/protectio n.html Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. The law in the ThinkSecret case is the http://nsi.org/Library/Espionage/usta.htm Uniform Trade Secrets Act, which California has adotped. The two cases are actually somewhat similar.

link, second source

From the NYT article:
Federal authorities made a total of 1,727 applications last year before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the secret panel that oversees the country's most delicate terrorism and espionage investigations, according to the new data.

The total represents an increase of about 500 warrant applications over 2002 and a doubling of the applications since 2001, the Justice Department said in its report, which was submitted to the federal courts and to Vice President Dick Cheney as required by law.

All but three of applications for electronic surveillance and physical searches of suspects were approved in whole or part by the court....

The F.B.I. told the commission that "there is now less hesitancy" in seeking the intelligence warrants, the report said. Nonetheless, it added, "requests for such approvals are overwhelming the ability of the system to process them and to conduct the surveillance."

I don't remember exactly what the number of warrants requested were before sept 11th, but I know it was very few. 1,727 is a lot of warrants - more than the number killed in Iraq. To put that in perspective, if you know of somebody killed in Iraq, you are more likely to know somebody whom the FBI is watching.

Just get an X-10 firecracker set, download the BottleRocket X-10 linux controlling software, and write a cgi to run on your webserver that allows users to turn the lights on/off. Going through the whole hoax thing sounds like MORE work..

Not faster than a 911 Turbo. As a long-time Porsche fan, I feel the need to set the record straight. . .

We freak about purified water that comes from a questionable source, yet most of us probably think nothing about cooking with tap water (I certainly have no idea where my tap water comes from, other than the faucet).

It's funny that those same blogs don't fact-check the Bush administration as much as they do the Kerry campaign. Here is an administration that has told more lies to the public (in the few press conferences that they've had; they're also very secretive) than any that I can remember (Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II).

"Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, and we know where they are."
"Saddam is in cahoots with al Qaeda, and could give WMD to them."
"We went to war for the freedom of the Iraqi people."
"These tax cuts are going to stimulate the economy and create many new jobs by stimulating investment."
"We've inherited a recession from Clinton."
"You don't need to know who Cheney spoke to in his secret energy policy meetings."
"We're going to whole-heartedly support fighting AIDS in third-world countries."

It's so funny that I could cry.

It's funny that those same blogs don't fact-check the Bush administration as much as they do the Kerry campaign. Here is an administration that has told more lies to the public (in the few press conferences that they've had; they're also very secretive) than any that I can remember (Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II).

"Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, and we know where they are."
"Saddam is in cahoots with al Qaeda, and could give WMD to them."
"We went to war for the freedom of the Iraqi people."
"These tax cuts are going to stimulate the economy and create many new jobs by stimulating investment."
"We've inherited a recession from Clinton."
"You don't need to know who Cheney spoke to in his secret energy policy meetings."
"We're going to whole-heartedly support fighting AIDS in third-world countries."

It's so funny that I could cry.

If there was any value to what you suggest, how did we get this far without copyright at all prior to about 300 years ago (starting with the Statutes of Anne etc.). Are you suggesting no one painted before 1700AD, or wrote books, or came up with new ideas and so on? Why cling to such a scarcity worldview? See James P. Hogan's sci-fi novels (like Voyage from Yesteryear) for another perspective.

the installer for Firefox 0.9 on Linux strongly recommends that I exit all Windows programs??? Don't believe me? Look here...

Many years ago I wanted to have my own Orac too, so I customised my Pentium 1 with some of these sound bites.
When my machine was shutting down it said, "I am closing down, I have much to do, you engaged my circuits on your petty affairs for far too long!"

Many years ago I wanted to have my own Orac too, so I customised my Pentium 1 with some of these sound bites.
When my machine was shutting down it said, "I am closing down, I have much to do, you engaged my circuits on your petty affairs for far too long!"

I believe they are illegal in Canada and for use on public property (such as roads) in much of the US. We were talking about it on the MLUG mailing list recently. Many drivers evidently feel it's their ride to have all of the road and so there is a lot of pressure to keep these off the roads and even out of bicycle lanes. To bad, they are all most of us need for going to work or to grab a loaf of bread and would save us a lot of money.

The way I read it is the site somehow has something against a 5th grade teacher Why they would want to ship her off is anyones guess.

Except it isn't. At least, not in sniper rifle form.

Though it does remind me of IMIPAK. The only proposed defense against it was slavery.

It should also be made available via the Freedom of Information Act because we have a right to know that our information is being protected. Good luck. Hell if non top-secret energy documents are kept from the public, you should know that they'll throw a "We're protecting the infrastructure from terrorists... Even mother nature (sorry I can't get over the mother nature humor)

I think our main divergence is in the efficiency of conversion of sucrose to ethanol, in terms of net energy. I guessed 50%, meaning 2.5% photosynthesis results in 1.25% of insolation available to the fuelcell, you say 0.1%. That's 12.5-fold difference between our models. All the numbers I find say my 50% efficiency is, if anything, low. So your numbers turn into 780m^2, 28m on a side, for that week of gas. That also means about $90:Km^2:week, $400:month, $4800:year. Farm profit per acre of even livestock farms is about $7400:Km^2:year, about 1.5x the profit on this seacane. But seacane farms could be much larger, so the profit would be higher, even if the profitability is 33% lower.

As for costs of litigation, we have to consider that the oil industry is willing to spend billions of dollars, and to get the government to spend billions of dollars, and (some would say) thousands of lives, every year to maintain an unsustainable status quo. The money invested in the switchover from imported fuel would pay off very well in turning a scarce imported resource into a plentiful homegrown one. And remember, we're just talking about sugarcane, not an aquatic species with a >8% photosynthetic efficiency, which is worth looking for. If we found one with even 12%, we'd have per-acre profitability equivalent to average farm profitability, which is very lucrative in large scale agribusiness. If we found or bred one with >20%, we'd be directly competitive with PV solar cells, and really be on top of the world in both the energy and farming businesses once again.

PDF available here.

(posting anonymous - just say no to karma whoring)

If you're surprised by this, THAT's the news, not what the White House is doing with this information control. Click here for a list of the White House's policies with restricting FOI and other related requests since Sept 11th.

This isn't partisan politics, either. The Republican party has been trying to keep Bush from violating the Presidential Records Act.

Yes, yes, the country's at war. Makes you wonder why Bush doesn't want anybody to know about communications between Reagan and his advisors.

"Ashcroft is actually now teaching local law enforcement how to misapply anti-terror legislation to petty crime"

can you link me to some articles concerning this revelation?

A little Google never hurt anyone.

Not only is Ashcroft spending thousands on drapes to cover lady Justice, but he has printed glossy brochures inviting people to lectures on how to extend the PATRIOT Act! And he's been going on tour on our dollars!

Here are some more choice selections for you. Remember the missing WMD in Iraq? Maybe it was Crystal Meth!

"Cause if your customs are attaching leeches to your veins to cure yourself, you're not exactly in a good place to begin with."

Slightly off topic, but that is actually still in practice in modern (even North American!) hospitals. I believe it's often used when reattaching extremities. The leeches prevent clotting, and keep blood flowing.

You can google it, but I found this for starters.

(Somehow there is an extra space added in the URL between the k and the b - it shouldn't be there.)

The space is due to Slashdot's lameness filter. It inserts spaces into very long unbroken lines of text so that they will wrap in your browser window and not make the window too wide. For the links, the easy fix is just to create a clickable one like this:

http://www.math.missouri.edu/~stephen/software/#xk bset

Then it doesn't matter if a space is inserted because you can just click it to follow.

They do indeed--but that has precious little to do with why the sky is (usually) blue. Refraction occurs when light passes from a medium with one refractive index into another, and bends in so doing. There are lots of websites on the topic. The amount of bending that occurs depends on the material and on the wavelength of the light. Typically, materials have a higher index of refraction for shorter wavelengths--this dependence of refractive index enables prisms to separate light into component colours.

The apparent colour of the sky depends not on refraction (air has an index of 1.003, only a shade more than vacuum's 1.000) so light bends very little passing through the atmosphere. The important effect is Rayleigh scattering. Light with shorter wavelengths is scattered much more strongly--red and yellow light from the sun follows a fairly direct path to the viewer, so the sun appears as a yellow disc. Blue light is scattered repeatedly by the atmosphere, resulting in a diffusely blue sky. Interestingly, if you take a long exposure photograph on a moonlit night, the sky will still show up as blue from scattered moonlight.

Incidentally, I would call the 'sky' blue, even though the gases of the atmosphere are (except around cities) colourless. That's the colour you see when you look up, in the direction of what a layperson would call the sky. Oh, and I am a physicist.

If you look at a blue ball through the edge of a prism and it looks red, is the ball still blue? I think so.

If you look at a 'blue' ball through the edge of a prism, it will look blue or black--if it reflected large amounts of red light, then it wouldn't appear blue without the prism in the first place.

I would call you a pedant, if you were right.

I would still call you a pedant--and a condescending one, at that--even though you're a little iffy on scattering of light. If you would like some further pedantry, I would be pleased to explain why the sky is red at sunset.

OK, how bout next time you do your research, too. A quick google search turned up this story from the LA Times (mirror here)

Quote from the story:

The lifetime accident rate for the Marines' AV-8B is 11.44 per 100,000 hours of flight, well over the combined rates for other attack and fighter planes flown during those years by the Marines, the Navy and the Air Force.

The AV-8B had 12 major accidents per 100,000 hours flown during the decade. The three similar Harrier models flown by the Royal Air Force during that time had accident rates ranging from 12 to 19 when the U.S military standard is applied.

Because there are fewer Harriers in Great Britain, and they fly fewer hours, they've had fewer crashes and fatalities.

The Harrier is not a safe aircraft. The RAF knows it, that is why they are part of the Joint Strike Fighter program. That program aims to create a VTOL aircraft without the problems of the Harrier.

This is the way voting is done where I live: Columbia, Missouri. The circles are a lot bigger than the standard scantron, and you bubble them in with a Sharpie marker. It sort of makes sense, with Columbia being a college town, after all, but it may freak out some college students who have seen too many Scantrons!

How many political dissidents are in US prisons? I mean besides the people who are there because they ingested drugs or because they don't have the huge sum of money to pay bail even 'tho it's a good chance they are innocent. I mean actual dissidents - like someone who goes online at a widely read journal and calls the president a parasite.

Russia's only non-government controlled TV network has been dissolved by order of that government. In fact, Putin would like to have the head of the network "putin" jail despite the fact another court (outtside the jurisdiction of the kremlin) found he had commited no actual crime.

The other states are no longer part of the FSU, of course, but in other now "democratic" countries (like Ukraine) criticizng the government in the press may not even get you due process - instead you may be found hanging like a side of rotting beef. Or maybe even beaten to death in the street.

It's getting bad... but it's not nearly as bad here as it could get.

How many political dissidents are in US prisons? I mean besides the people who are there because they ingested drugs or because they don't have the huge sum of money to pay bail even 'tho it's a good chance they are innocent. I mean actual dissidents - like someone who goes online at a widely read journal and calls the president a parasite.

Russia's only non-government controlled TV network has been dissolved by order of that government. In fact, Putin would like to have the head of the network "putin" jail despite the fact another court (outtside the jurisdiction of the kremlin) found he had commited no actual crime.

The other states are no longer part of the FSU, of course, but in other now "democratic" countries (like Ukraine) criticizng the government in the press may not even get you due process - instead you may be found hanging like a side of rotting beef. Or maybe even beaten to death in the street.

It's getting bad... but it's not nearly as bad here as it could get.

I would suggest taking a look at the following sites for what other online schools (many are brick & mortar divisons) have to offer.

Peterson's E-Learning Programs: http://www.petersons.com/distancelearning/

U.S. New's E-Learning Graduate Programs 2003-2004: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/elearning/tables/ edu_reg.htm

Educational Technology Web-based & Distance Education / Associations etc.: http://www.btinternet.com/~iberry/html/et.htm#eta

Regards, Robin

.Murphy's Law: There is never enough time to do it right; but there is always time to do it over.
---------
Portfolio: http://www.missouri.edu/~ryh352/portfolio
Homepage: http://www.geocities.com/flatfilsoc/
~ Our Future arrived Yesterday! ~

Unfortunately, human learning theory is not that simple. Depending on which learning style theory one selects for categorization, there are 3 -5 different styles of learning. The major point is we all do not all learn in the same way and under the same conditions -- particularly regarding subject matter and learning environment.

In fact, success in graduate school is somewhat dependent on being a solitary (as opposed to a social learner). The traditional lecture format so loved in higher education is the most ineffective way to teach (therefore learn) since it is works best for auditory learner and thus wasted on upwards of 90% or more of the typical college audience. Effective instructors, vary their teaching styles to accomodate diverse learning styles.

Online learning is great for social learners and solitary learners depending on how the class is structured. As matter of fact, one of the strengths of the online environment is the opportunity for social interaction which is important to effective human learning -- it just not need be face to face.

Murphy's Law: There is never enough time to do it right; but there is always time to do it over.
---------
Portfolio: http://www.missouri.edu/~ryh352/portfolio
Homepage: http://www.geocities.com/flatfilsoc/
~ Our Future arrived Yesterday! ~

Your posts and along with others point out what I think the original thread author alludes to is the problem is not with University of Phoenix but with the instructor as with many college instructors whether online or brick and mortar.

There is an "inside joke" among the reformers of higher education that basically goes --

college teaching is the only profession where one can still be rewarded for ignoring the best practices and standards in complete disregard of the research.

Since the late 1980's after Chickering and Gameson published the now classic Seven Best Teaching Principles for Undergraduate Education * after extensive research, there has been a quiet revolution to reform college teaching practices and promote effective teaching practices including eliminating the famous "dancing with the blackboardâ so common in the math and science departments and replace it with pedagogically, effective active learning.

I am finishing an online post-Masters degree (Specialist) in preparation of a doctoral studies both from the University of Missouri and it has been an excellent experience. Of course, it helps that it is offered by the College of Education, a radical departure for me since my previous three degrees are from the Business School. It has taught me a great deal about human learning theory and effective teaching practices on my way to earning a PhD in the sociology of knowledge. I have been teaching college and adult education part-time for almost 20 years and for the most part, I have been doing things right. I just know why now and how to be more effective. As a statistics instructor, I vowed to face my students and talk to them and not the chalkboard the first time I taught in 1984 because I always hated that when I was a student.

My suggestion to anyone including the original thread author is to make sure you complete the student evaluations with specific comments. The best time to improve the course is early in the course. Write the instructor and tell them what you arenâ(TM)t receiving and what you would change. If that doesnâ(TM)t work go to the next level. Instructors do take evaluations seriously but without feedback and specific remarks from students about what to change; they cannot âoetweak the course.â The online classroom really lends itself to provide a rich learning environment but if the students do not tell the instructor he/she is doing a lousy job, how does the instructor know? Since the UofP is in the business to make money, believe me they are going to give your student feedback even more weight then the average institution.

-Regards, Robin

Murphy's Law: There is never enough time to do it right; but there is always time to do it over.
---------
Portfolio: http://www.missouri.edu/~ryh352/portfolio
Homepage: http://www.geocities.com/flatfilsoc/
~ Our Future arrived Yesterday! ~

* NOTES:
Chickering, A.W. and Gamson, Z.F. (1987; Reprint 1991). Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education . http://www.hcc.hawaii.edu/intranet/committees/FacD evCom/guidebk/teachtip/7princip.htm

What is going to happen now is that ISPs are going to enact corporate policies against keeping logs.

Lots of libraries and bookstores are doing this in protest of the Patriot act, which forces libraries and bookstores to furnish, if possible, lists of who buys or borrows which books. One of many articles can be read here

This may end up not being any different for ISPs

There are a LOT of places though that don't set these records, and filtering out these sites will drop a LOT of emails that actually might be valid.

I've dug deep into my extensive bookmarks library to find some links that might be appropriate to this story.

Scott Crevier's Home Interface
Home Automation.org
Perl AUtomation System (PAUS)
UK Rocketman
BottleRocket

Thank you.

Not entirely true. Under ideal conditions the life cycle is egg-->L1 larva-->L2 larva-->L3 larva-->L4 larva--L5 adult but if conditions are not so good (overcrowding, lack of food etc.) Caenorhabditis can turn into something called a dauer larva which doesn't feed, doesn't move around much, and can survive for much longer.

This is based on the analysis of one single biosphere. Again, generalizations based on a sample set of one.

No, it is based on the analysis of every chemical in the universe, most likely. This is confirmed by astrospectroscopy.

The possible chemical interactions of these elements are well understood. Only carbon permits sufficiently complex molecules, with other important attributes like flexibility. Silicon, a closely related element, is the nearest in suitability, but it is much more limited.

And you have excluded planets that are really no less likely to have "life" than the ones you are keeping in your list.

I disagree.

This is an even wilder assumption (unwarranted generalization). To attempt to apply the number of years that something took place on Earth to other planets and other systems we know nothing about.

The Earth existed for around 1.5-2 billion years before it was remotely suitable for life. These are mostly straightforward physical processes such as cooling and atmosphere formation.

Many of the brighter stars you can see in the night sky have total lifespans before extinction of less than one billion years. Others are so variable as to produce very unsuitable conditions for carbon based lifeforms. Others are in multiple star systems where stable planetary orbits are impossible.

These are largely the types of systems that have been eliminated from the initial search (emphasis mine).

The best candidate stars will be from the F, G, K, and M classes of stars. See the Hertzsprung-Russel Chart

If you are looking for intelligent life out there, throwing a dart at a star chart while blindfolded makes as much sense.

Nope. See above.

What you are doing might make sense if you are looking for the Trekkie "class M" planet with the afro alien chicks with go-go boots.

It'll be very interesting how close alien "DNA" is to terrestrial DNA. It is quite a stretch to think that carbon-based, intelligent aliens would even be bipedal, much less humanoid. I'd suggest that the variety of life on Earth argues otherwise, and that the octopus is arguably the second best design for intelligent life on this planet (other than the Great Apes).

Think how different life on Earth might be if the some of the early extinction events hadn't occurred here. For instance, the Permo-Triassic Extinction. A brief quote:

"Over a span of 5-10 million years, it is estimated that between 75 and 90 percent of all preexisting species were lost, including 80-96% of all marine species and approximately 57% of all marine families."

However, shouldn't the goal be too look for life, rather than just a much more limited and unlikely type of life?

All the evidence suggests that other types of life are likely to be "more limited and unlikely". That is exactly the point.