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I can't speak directly for the efficiency of the NIF but the Omega laser which is also a Neodymium glass laser is abysmally inefficient. An energy input of many hundreds of Megajoules into the flashlamps that charge up the laser glass only produces ~30 Kilojoules of actual laser output (most of which is absorbed by the target. I suspect the NIF will have Gigajoule scale capacitor banks to fire their flashlamps in order to produce the ~2Megajoules of laser energy on target it is expected to produce.

It's interesting that the NIF first full light is now pushed back to 2014. There's a small chance we may just beat them to ignigion.

I work at the Omega Laser(still the most powerfull in the world at 60 Terawatts! ya!) and there is currently construction going on here to complete what is called Omega EP(extended performance) by ~2007. Omega EP will produce an astounding 2.6 PETAWATTS(million billion watts!!) of power for a around a picosecond (so about 2-3 Kilojoules per shot which is much less than the NIF's megajoule scale shots) making it, by far the worlds most powerfull laser when complete. The new laser will use what's called chirped pulse amplification to produce its incredibly high petawatt scale power.

Using the current 60 beam 60 Terawatt (~30Kj) laser to compress a pellet of hydrogen fuel and then just before the moment of maximum inward compression and then stagnation; the EP petawatt beam will fire, producing an instant injection of Mev scale electrons directly into the center of the collapsing target and hopefully producing high fusion yeilds and perhaps even approaching ignition. The Gekko XII laser in Japan with its 500 terawatt scale CPA lser has validated this scheme, which is called "fast ignition", reporting that with the CPA laser used at maximum compression with their 12 beam 40 terrawat laser they've achieve an increase in neutron output(fusion yield) by 1 to 2 orders of magnitude...Can't wait till we can fire ours up!

It's interesting that the NIF first full light is now pushed back to 2014. There's a small chance we may just beat them to ignigion.

I work at the Omega Laser(still the most powerfull in the world at 60 Terawatts! ya!) and there is currently construction going on here to complete what is called Omega EP(extended performance) by ~2007. Omega EP will produce an astounding 2.6 PETAWATTS(million billion watts!!) of power for a around a picosecond (so about 2-3 Kilojoules per shot which is much less than the NIF's megajoule scale shots) making it, by far the worlds most powerfull laser when complete. The new laser will use what's called chirped pulse amplification to produce its incredibly high petawatt scale power.

Using the current 60 beam 60 Terawatt (~30Kj) laser to compress a pellet of hydrogen fuel and then just before the moment of maximum inward compression and then stagnation; the EP petawatt beam will fire, producing an instant injection of Mev scale electrons directly into the center of the collapsing target and hopefully producing high fusion yeilds and perhaps even approaching ignition. The Gekko XII laser in Japan with its 500 terawatt scale CPA lser has validated this scheme, which is called "fast ignition", reporting that with the CPA laser used at maximum compression with their 12 beam 40 terrawat laser they've achieve an increase in neutron output(fusion yield) by 1 to 2 orders of magnitude...Can't wait till we can fire ours up!

Check out last year's SOSP proceedings for research on OS and hardware support for protected memory spaces.

Of course, being able to shoot in a game is not the same as doing it in real life. But according to this, games can help skills in less direct ways.

Google File System paper

Ghemawat, Gobioff, Leung: Google File System (GFS) (2003)

I think it's good to ask Mr. Undercofler these questions because so far the information about "original content" has been extremely vague. You probably haven't signed a release which would allow the commercial distribution (which is what a deal with Napster would be) of any performance or composition by you so I doubt it's going to "just happen."

The panel is about P2P file sharing and was scheduled before the Napster deal was made (or finalized at least). While having someone from Eastman on the panel might make sense they do have someone from the Yellowjackets to represent the "creatives." The Yellowjackets press and sell CDs which probably makes the topic more relevant to them than to most Eastman students (that's not meant as a value judgement at all).

This wasn't leaked, the link is to a press release from the UofR and Roxio (owns Napster). It's also the top story in the current issue of the Campus Times. Previous issues of the Campus Times have had stories about the university investigating making this kind of deal (the Napster service part, not the "original content" part). You may find this Q&A page informative.

At this point they're not specifically making the Napster service a part of tuition so in a sense, you may be paying for it. Of course the release says they plan on making the service available to non-dorm residents too. The university has a lot of revenue beyond tuition or room & board. They're also doing this deal to reduce the amount of bandwidth used, thus saving money. I doubt the money saved on bandwidth will cover the cost of the Napster deal but if a significant number of students stop using other means of getting music and switch to Napster, it'll make a real difference.

The Provost of the university has gotten involved at the national level in disussions of peer-to-peer file sharing. This draws attention from companies like Napster and indicates he's interested hearing about their service.

Don't worry, UofR still doesn't have email aliases (the address you get is the address you get), single sign-on (like RIT's DCE), or university web servers that are actually useful to students doing anything beyond static HTML.

After reading the news release for this part of the discussion :

If this didnt get a bit closer to advocating a police state under the rules of the RIAA as far as they care, then this
is at least in my opinion quite fitting for the definition of a police state. You have the encouragment of turning people in,
the monitoring of clear and non traffic for more than just the average security/quality/maintenance problems most universities
have/had, and you're also a private university. The only shining points are with the initial funding of this, but if this sticks,
the students not stuck with it are going to look elsewhere to colleges where they can concentrate on their studies
of their choice versus RIAA indoctrination.

Uh... The Himalayas caused global cooling which reduced temperatures from the time of the dinosaurs to our present chilled condition. You think the Himalayas are carbonate, but actually they are silicate. Silicate weathering is removing a huge amount of carbon dioxide from the air. If ya seal them mountains y'all will warm up. If you want to cool the planet more, nuke the hills and fracture a lot more rock.

This is ancient news, it has been mentioned by me on the ASRG list in November and on my blog. The original new article was published by the Post Gazette, and found by Matt McCay in his blog. Liudvikas Bukys mentioned it in his blog also. You might also want to take a look at the W3C draft on why these visual tests do not work for disabled people. And to end this off, the basic premise of C/R is that the return address is valid. Even if spammers break these visual tests, in order to do that, they must have a valid return address - ergo, making them traceable.

Actually, the German courts told SCO to stick their head up their collective ass. This will just get the courts to push SCO's head further up it's ass, making SCO the first corporate Klein bottle.

Also, check out the Legos version.

http://www.econ.rochester.edu/eco108/ch4/micro04/s ld040.htm

Maybe if we started to realize that in nature, species die off. It happens all the time and hasn't been just recently b/c of humans. Yes, we've caused our share of destruction but has it ever been analyzed against prior species domination?

Hm... yes, I think it has.

Here's a short item on mass extinction vs. background extinction rates. This guy talks about the background rate of extinction of entire marine families; other articles I ran across talked about background extinction rates of individual species, and estimated at around one per decade. We manage at least ten times that now.

I am not sure the indirect drive(you mean laser driven right?) is very promising for much other than the simulation of the high X-Ray fluxes found in nuclear weapons. However, the Direct drive laser implosions done with the addition of the injection of an ultrashort laser pulse at the implostion stagnation time are very promising. We're building one of these ultrashort pulse lines at the OMEGA laser right now.
Even considering the promise this method holds for fusion ignition I can't see how this method will ever be used for producing electricity. It's just not suited for it. The blast from the exploding target destroys the optical quality of your final optics for the lasers after just a hundred shots or so and you're going to need implosion rates of at least a few Hz for practical power generation. Another problem is laser medium heating. In the OMEGA laser you can only take a shot once every hour or so due to the thermal expansion of the Nd:glass medium spoiling the optical quality of the beam. Yet another issue is the abysmal efficiency of the laser itself (barely 1% if I recall), when I said "ignition" earlier keep in mind that means that was done with the actual laser energy hitting the target not the energy used to fire the laser, that's another hundred fold improvement on efficiency (or target gain) you need to account for. I work as a technician on OMEGA and think that it's a really great experimental facility but a power generation plant it never could be.

Ditto. I resent being compared to a theater arts major. Maybe somebody just isn't aware of good poli sci programs, or what might distinguish a good program from a lousy one.

Usually, Opt-in systems have some sort of confirmation mechanism - if an unknown sender sends you mail, your whitelist system will send THEM an email asking them to confirm that they're a human.

And then they'll pass the confirmation request on to a human trying to get porn.

Doesn't Google use 'big files' rather than a database for storing all its data?

see http://www.cs.rochester.edu/sosp2003/papers/p125-g hemawat.pdf which describes the Google filesystem.

"The multiple file name referencing system maintains in a B-tree an operating system entry containing the operating system formatted name and an application entry containing the application formatted name. Each entry also contains the address of the same file to which both names refer. The multiple file name referencing system converts the operating system formatted file name to the application formatted file name by accessing the B-tree with reference to the operating system entry. Similarly, the multiple file name referencing system converts the application formatted file name to the operating system formatted file name by accessing the B-tree with reference to the application entry. As a result, either file name can be used to directly reference the file without requiring additional file name translation.
"

One wouldn't get tripped up on this part by simply NOT using a B-tree since they don't allude to any other indexing scheme. They do, unfortunately go on to describe in detail the 8.3 name generation scheme (Otherwise known as name mangling...) and their methodology for avoiding conflicts...

"In the preferred embodiment of the present invention, the file name generation process represented by box 200 in FIG. 2 can be applied to generate an application formatted file name (short name) based on a known operation system formatted file name (long name), or vice versa. Although short names are limited to "8.3" format as explained in more detail below, long names can be any length up to 255 characters, and are not restricted by the same rules regarding illegal characters, etc."

However, based on how the whole scheme works (which isn't covered by this Patent...), it's concievable to come up with a different naming algorithm that would work that didn't touch on their algorithm. If that's possible, then you don't get tripped up on that Patent as it is an explicit statement of how MS does the task- if you can come up with an alternate method that does the same thing (or close enough that Microsoft's code doesn't notice that you're not doing it "right"...), you're in the clear on that part of the Patent. I suspect that this is the case, based on my studies on the VFAT scheme.

Now, the real sticking point is the other two. They discuss handling long and short filenames in a common database. The real question is, is it a common database? If it's not, the Patents, while lovely in and of themselves, would not cover the exact situation or a portion thereof, thereby allowing you to avoid issues with them.

So, one would want to answer that question to determine if things look bad for people wanting to implement VFAT systems (We'll get to possible Prior Art issues in a bit...). In order to do that, one would have to do a rough analysis of VFAT to see how it's done up.

Referring to a developer's notes on VFAT (http://www.cs.rochester.edu/u/gchunt/vfat.html), we can see that Microsoft has hacked in a scheme to wedge the LFN into the current directory structure entries, 13 characters of the LFN at a time. Therefore, without prior art involved or

As someone who works in the laser fusion camp(though just as a lowly technician), I feel obligated to point out that there may be something of a dark horse in the race to fusion power currently in the running... Besides the obvious method of magnetic confinement in Tokamaks and Stellarators, which do still have the best chance at becoming true fusion reactors of the future attaining ignition and breakeven; there is another way that inertial confinement fusion using lasers may still hold promise. There are 2 new beams (will be called "Omega EP")currently being built which will be added to the 60 beam 60 Terawatt Omega Laser in the next few years. What is special about these new lasers is they are over 1,000 TIMES more powerful than the old Omega beams at over 1 Petawatt each! The new lasers will be used to ignite a Hydrogen fuel capsule at exactly the moment of highest compression by the old Omega laser, sort of acting like a spark plug effect. The GekkoXII laser in Japan which has a (much weaker) Petawatt laser attached to it's also less powerful compressing laser recently verified this method as increasing fusion yield by a couple orders of magnitude, this puts the Omega laser as having a very high likelihood of igniting it's fusion capsules by using the new laser in conjunction with the old 60 beam Omega. If someone can then figure out how to ramp the laser up to a high pulse repetition rate (burning many capsules/second) possibly using a diode pumped Nd:glass system then you have a real contender for a fusion power plant.

As someone who works in the laser fusion camp(though just as a lowly technician), I feel obligated to point out that there may be something of a dark horse in the race to fusion power currently in the running... Besides the obvious method of magnetic confinement in Tokamaks and Stellarators, which do still have the best chance at becoming true fusion reactors of the future attaining ignition and breakeven; there is another way that inertial confinement fusion using lasers may still hold promise. There are 2 new beams (will be called "Omega EP")currently being built which will be added to the 60 beam 60 Terawatt Omega Laser in the next few years. What is special about these new lasers is they are over 1,000 TIMES more powerful than the old Omega beams at over 1 Petawatt each! The new lasers will be used to ignite a Hydrogen fuel capsule at exactly the moment of highest compression by the old Omega laser, sort of acting like a spark plug effect. The GekkoXII laser in Japan which has a (much weaker) Petawatt laser attached to it's also less powerful compressing laser recently verified this method as increasing fusion yield by a couple orders of magnitude, this puts the Omega laser as having a very high likelihood of igniting it's fusion capsules by using the new laser in conjunction with the old 60 beam Omega. If someone can then figure out how to ramp the laser up to a high pulse repetition rate (burning many capsules/second) possibly using a diode pumped Nd:glass system then you have a real contender for a fusion power plant.

As someone who works in the laser fusion camp(though just as a lowly technician), I feel obligated to point out that there may be something of a dark horse in the race to fusion power currently in the running... Besides the obvious method of magnetic confinement in Tokamaks and Stellarators, which do still have the best chance at becoming true fusion reactors of the future attaining ignition and breakeven; there is another way that inertial confinement fusion using lasers may still hold promise. There are 2 new beams (will be called "Omega EP")currently being built which will be added to the 60 beam 60 Terawatt Omega Laser in the next few years. What is special about these new lasers is they are over 1,000 TIMES more powerful than the old Omega beams at over 1 Petawatt each! The new lasers will be used to ignite a Hydrogen fuel capsule at exactly the moment of highest compression by the old Omega laser, sort of acting like a spark plug effect. The GekkoXII laser in Japan which has a (much weaker) Petawatt laser attached to it's also less powerful compressing laser recently verified this method as increasing fusion yield by a couple orders of magnitude, this puts the Omega laser as having a very high likelihood of igniting it's fusion capsules by using the new laser in conjunction with the old 60 beam Omega. If someone can then figure out how to ramp the laser up to a high pulse repetition rate (burning many capsules/second) possibly using a diode pumped Nd:glass system then you have a real contender for a fusion power plant.

I submitted this earlier today, but was rejected. So here's what I had to say. It contains a bit more information.

After the University of Rochester announced last week in its school newspaper that students there would be offered legal music downloads starting the spring semester, Penn State President Graham B. Spanier announced today that his University has signed an agreement with Napster to launch a program in which Penn State will make Napster's Premium Service available at no cost to its students. This comes from the annual EDUCAUSE meeting of thousands of information technology administrators from universities around the country. Most notably are the panelists who are part of a P2P file sharing disscussion. They include, Cary Sherman of the RIAA, Jack Valenti of the MPAA, the Provost of the University of Rochester, and the President of Penn State. Too bad it's Napster and not iTunes.

I submitted this earlier today, but was rejected. So here's what I had to say. It contains a bit more information.

After the University of Rochester announced last week in its school newspaper that students there would be offered legal music downloads starting the spring semester, Penn State President Graham B. Spanier announced today that his University has signed an agreement with Napster to launch a program in which Penn State will make Napster's Premium Service available at no cost to its students. This comes from the annual EDUCAUSE meeting of thousands of information technology administrators from universities around the country. Most notably are the panelists who are part of a P2P file sharing disscussion. They include, Cary Sherman of the RIAA, Jack Valenti of the MPAA, the Provost of the University of Rochester, and the President of Penn State. Too bad it's Napster and not iTunes.

I submitted this earlier today, but was rejected. So here's what I had to say. It contains a bit more information.

After the University of Rochester announced last week in its school newspaper that students there would be offered legal music downloads starting the spring semester, Penn State President Graham B. Spanier announced today that his University has signed an agreement with Napster to launch a program in which Penn State will make Napster's Premium Service available at no cost to its students. This comes from the annual EDUCAUSE meeting of thousands of information technology administrators from universities around the country. Most notably are the panelists who are part of a P2P file sharing disscussion. They include, Cary Sherman of the RIAA, Jack Valenti of the MPAA, the Provost of the University of Rochester, and the President of Penn State. Too bad it's Napster and not iTunes.

Well, she's certainly going to be the most popular geek girl on the block after having a pic where you can see up her skirt posted on SLASHDOT!

After building their l33t pumpkin server, the geeks settled down to some D&D. After rolling a 26 and casting a spell of protection, a curious odor could be smelled wafting around the room. It wasn't the usual unwashed geek, it had a decidedly female scent.

They put down their die and walked toward the room with their pumpkin server. The door creeked open and a haunting sight was in their midst. Some of them passed out, others began weeping uncontrollably. The more dauntless of the group stepped closer, and closer to......

THE REAL LIVE GIRL!!!!!!! AIEEEEEEE!

Also check out the University of Rochester Computer Interest Floor's Linux pumpkin here.

David

Prior Screenshot with dots

Here is a webpage that will quickly convert your mailto link into a form that bots will miss.

• enter your email adress HERE
• click OK!

You have to consider the trade-off of the inconvenience of your readers/customers with the amount of spam you get.

I have a few websites with my email address all over them, in mailto links. I "mask" the email very lightly, by escaping most of the characters, and it has worked beautifully.

Here is a webpage that will quickly convert your mailto link into a form that bots will miss.

Could a bot be written that would be able to harvest these email messages? YES. But would it be worth the spammer's time to code it? NO, so it probably won't happen.

Put yourself in the spammer's shoes (or slime-covered bedroom slippers). Why would you want to go to a lot of work to build a bot that will harvest the email addresses of the very people you don't want to get your spam, because they will report you to spamcop, harass your ISP, and even hack your computer and post some very unattractive pictures of you on the internet?

No, they want the chumps, and they want to find them without needing to check every webpage for dozens of patterns.

Sure, in Soviet Russia, a beowulf cluster imagines Natalie Portman naked, but what really petrifies my hot grits is that we can talk about a single-atom cesium laser for 140 posts, without even one mention alt.cesium, you insensitive clods!

Here's a somewhat offbeat indirect reference (although I'm suspicious of the date, because a Committee report only a year later said "the substitution of inanimate for animal power, in draught on common roads, is one of the most important improvements in the means of internal communication ever introduced").

That gave me a name, Nicholas Wood, and this amusing-in-hindsight quote: "It is far from my wish to promulgate to the world that the ridiculous expectations of the enthusiastic specialists, that we shall see locomotives travelling at the rate of 12, 16, 18 or 20 miles an hour; nothing could do more harm towards their adoption, or general improvement, than the promulgation of sich nonsense." From this expert opinion, it's possible to adduce that the cluelessness of the people was indeed legendary. "Enthusiast" in those days carried connotations akin to "zealot" or possibly even "madman". (-:

I'm a bit busy, else I'd dig out the paper version and key a chunk of it in for you.

Oh, your system is great at nutrition and has no problem with hunger, women are safe, and causes no health problems.

because their "goverments" are stupid and evil

Hm, yes, we should bring these international criminals to justice. Oh, wait...

there's a plank in your eye.

Conductive ink on bendable material including printable, disposable antennas seem to be right around the corner. Here's a pdf from Rochester with all the chemistry that goes into making the substrates. And an article from Business 2.0 on Plastic transistors (Google cache) and how they will change UPS tracking and WalMart's forever.

The most interesting aspect for me is that these sensors (or even on-chip flash) will be powered and read in the presence of an RF field, like how most RFID tags work. We might one day have tons of passive sensors 'waiting' to be read with an active energy source.

my submission for this story was way more informative "2003-08-20 17:11:37 Using Ultrahigh Power Lasers to "Burn" Rad (science,science) (rejected)" damnit!

anyway a beowulf cluster of vulcan lasers will probably look something like what's being built at the University of Rochester right now called Omega EP. Which will be nearly 10 times as powerfull as Vulcan. :-)

"In case you don't already know, the Mossbauer spectrometer is a rediculously cool instrument..."

I knew. :-)

Your post was still very informative though, and the part about the software you're developing for the mission...cool!

There is something I don't understand however. I thought that since the linewidth of metastable iron 57's hyperfine transition was so incredibly narrow that unless the nuclei are fixed in a crystal and the crystal lattice vibrations(phonons) are quantized by cooling it to cryogenic temps. then the frequency shift imparted by the recoil of the emitting nuclei destroy any resonance with potentially absorbing sample Fe nuclei. How is the emitter cryogenically cooled on mars!?

Anyway, cool talking to you, I work here so if you have any questions about giant lasers... :-)

Funny you said that, 'cause I just was reading this page of the site:

Debunking Debunker's Arguments - Occam's Razor.

By the way, The Scientific Method.

Whatever I think the history is, is confirmed by sources...

Source 1
Source 2
Source 3

If you can show me some research or a source that says different, You might gain some credibility.
Think about the POINT of binary, what is the REASON for a base 2 number system? What are its mathematical origins? Learn the PHILOSOPHY behind the idea and get rid of your annoying sig.

At the end, I could tell you the boundary conditions at a air/reflector interface, but I couldn't tell you where the damn mirror actually focused the light.

I've been working with one of the Physics profs at my school (U of Rochester) for the past year, helping him update the software they use for cosmic particle experiments. We use a data aquisition board and particle detectors designed by FermiLab. The software runs on Linux, and accesses the DAQ board through the serial port. My job has mostly been adding a GUI to the program, so that the students running the experiments can concentrate more on getting results than understanding the weird command line interface for the program. For more info on the project, see the FermiLab page for the QuarkNet project, and the PARTICLE project page at the university.

is that with games you are honing your center vision, able to track more objects in a limited field of view. however, this would mean you have lower peripheral vision capabilities.

This was actually the exact opposite of what they found in the study. You should read the article itself if you want to see how exactly they tested this (article linked here). But basically they tested the recognition of a shape with a distracting shape next to it, both video game players and non-video game players reaction times were slower when the distractor shape was different from the target shape. However, gamers were ALSO affected when the distractor shape was on the opposite side of the screen, in their periphery, while non-gamers did not even process the image (yes, you can determine this based on reaction times...read the article to find out more, I'm just summarizing).

The way to test this, of course, is to test the groups' visual abilities first at the onset of the experiment, then have them play the games extensively for a lengthy period of time (several weeks, months, or years depending on how long such neurological structures take to emerge), then test those abilities again.

They did do this, if you go read the full text of the article (linked off their lab webpage here) you can see exactly what the experiments were and what their claims are.

For those of you who don't want to read a scientific journal article, basically what they did was to have non-gamers play MOHAA for 10 days straight, an hour a day, and they then re-tested the non-gamers using the same tests and they did remarkably better.

"They just did better because they had already done it" you say? Another control group of non-gamers played tetris (not very demanding) for the same period, one hour a day, and they got NO better when they performed the experiments again.

I don't fault you for not knowing this because there was no way to read the full text article unless you paid Nature, or live with the experimenter and have access to the paper and know where the PDF resides. (It helps that the main researcher is my roomate and i was a subject in the study)

side note: the experimenters did not claim that this leads to better driving, they claim that it shows that people who play FPPOV games can better focus on multiple objects in their field of view, especially items in your periphery...and yes, this SHOULD then logically mean they are better able to process quickly moving and changing objects in their field of view, objects that are very common while driving a car.

My roomate did this study and I was going to wait to post it on /. until today when they were allowed by Nature to post the full-text of the article, but here it is, as a measly reply:

The effect of video games on visual attention

As a side note:
The guy who did the study is a 22-year old fellow gamer who wondered why his performance in visual attention tasks was so much higher than the average, and decided to start this as his senior research, which ended up taking 2.5 years to complete.

...yeah, and I reckon you need to go back and rethink something called "The Scientific Method."

You changed too many things at once = confounding variables.

Thank you, drive through. - Beavis

That's the wordplay (AFIK) that spawned (if you'll excuse the pun) the UNIX name.

And then Asimov went the opposite direction in wordplay when creating the fictional Multivac. Wonder if he got that idea from the transition from Multics to Unix?

AFAIK (it still says it on the LLE webpage) The Laboratory for Laser Energetics here at UR already houses the world's most powerful ultraviolet laser, the Omega Laser. Apparently these new petawatt lasers will make it the most biggest laser of any kind. Anyone know what it will be edging out?

Here's a mirror for ya (shouldn't go down either ;-)

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.