I see net metering as a purposefully over-complicated scheme with a few minor selling points but an all-too-familiar drawback: the added complication allows for all kinds of back-and-forth fenagling, kow-towing, and piles upon piles of legalese to build up. After awhile it will get just as bad as financial securities, savings and loans, and the real estate market in terms of the various ways sneaky language is slipped into the rule set of various regulatory systems interconnected in the network of information that comprises the entire scheme, allowing sudden and surprising financial dambreaks that leave entire regions drained dry -- and all along it will be sold in the form of various political movements "for the common good". In light of how things are already going this way all because of the introduction of the net metering scheme, I say scrap the growing chimera before it emerges from the womb as a defense budget addendum.
I think there might still be some municipalities wherein if two properties share their own independent distribution line, then the power supplied by that distribution has to be isolated from the grid entirely. So you would find two people with solar panels willing to maybe run a line between their back patios but not to the rest of their house.
You should receive compensation from the power company when you manage to generate surplus to return to the grid, and the value should be equal to the cost of power *at that time*.
All of this is a thinly veiled attempt to use solar-power customers as beasts of burden to turn a profit. Seeing that the most vocal support comes in the form of this convoluted, politicized argument about transfer of wealth to the wealthy, I don't doubt at all that this mentality was planted in the local communities by agents of the power companies in question.
I've seen the politics of electric power generation go sour time and time again. In Florida back in the late 90's, some people were told that they would not receive money nor even company credit for their power generation, but instead would receive "eco-vouchers" that ostensibly could be used at participating retailers and services instead of cash. One use of the eco-vouchers was to purchase football stadium tickets. I think there was a proposal to make them exchangeable on the tollways (which Florida is famous for making into a side-industry). This is in a region where it's regular practice for power companies to charge a minimum rate ($200 per month in Lake Worth, FL) no matter how little power the customer uses.
You simply can't trust the energy companies, and we've seen this again, and again, and again.
There's not really enough excess / spare resource left in the world for yet another fresh generation of Americans to be taught the same lesson, especially when things have been so blitzkrieged these last two decades that the previous generation has barely been able to keep the lesson intact.
There's no time left for "let's wait and see".
If there's anything decisive that can be done on behalf of the consumers (who now, in their new role, are producers as well) then it needs to be done now.
This is even less interesting to me than the Wii-U system was (and I didn't think that could be possible.) Why try to push two consoles on me at once? They should just keep doing what they were doing when they were at the height of their success: making a major home console and also making a smaller portable console, two completely separate things. The only possibly way they could improve on that formula would be to make the same line of games work on both consoles. It seems like that's what they *want* to do, but that they run into some kind of barrier getting their. And for Nintendo I can imagine that barrier: their own weird strict demands on themselves. Like when the N64 was still in cartridges because Nintendo was afraid of load times.
Games any more are getting so large, I have to ask what is the realistic future of gaming. Cartridges can only hold so much data without getting unrealistically expensive. But if you want something that will play on both a larger at home console and a smaller portable console, it seems like the way to go.
Of course, mini discs can do the job as well. According to wikipedia, mini blu-ray discs can hold 15 GB. That seems sufficient for the current generation of gaming.
Also, the question rises in my mind as to why a person would want the larger console version when they already have the portable one. I suppose if you want a drive for huge storage and back-up (which I feel like has becoming the market standard) then you have to have a console. But is there any other reason? It seems to me that video driving hardware has been reduced pretty well to a tiny little device, going by the size of my laptop's graphics card that can send a signal out through an HDMI port. So for video purposes, you could just have a wall-wart powered portable with a kickstand and an HDMI port and be good to go if you're not concerned about backing your games up.
And if Nintendo makes the discs cheaply enough, there you go, you don't have to worry about backing them up in case the disc gets damaged. And they could probably focus on that bottom line if they weren't trying so hard to come up with such weird crap.
So I guess what I'm saying is Nintendo should just commit to a portable console that can be plugged into a big screen and act as home entertainment. Why the hell not? Save all that money that would have gone into developing and producing this weird hybrid crap and just make a super powerful portable console. And let the user supply an SD card (preferably not forcing them to use mini-SD) as their memory stick. Then they can have all their game save data in a portable fashion as well.
Another good reason to focus on a single, portable console is that more time and thought can be put into making it use the least amount of power possible so the user gets the most play time out of it.
Any ways I'm not going to give yet another hybrid a second thought any more than I did the Wii-U. All I'm convinced of now is that Nintendo appears to not be learning from their mistakes and might be doomed. That's sad because I was kind of hoping to see the promised Wii 2 eventually.
How many man hours are wasted pen testing or setting up security just so that client after client can fail to remain compliant as time goes by?
How many billions of dollars are wasted every year by large corporations failing to secure their data?
Why not just start writing viruses that go out, patch vulnerabilities, throw a middle finger and erase / kill process?
Target the weakest link and do something about it. In fact I feel if a company is "caught" doing this it shouldn't even be considered illegal. This should be considered the future of anti-malware.
Today I was helping a computer illiterate classmate set up some engineering software, and to make idle chat I tried to explain to her Moore's law. And I had to add the caveat that some people felt Moore's law was breaking down.
And I said, what we need today is to focus not on how recklessly we can double computing power but how responsibly we can mitigate threat. And if you follow any of the bevy of pen testers with twitter accounts you'll read long, long lists of newly discovered vulnerabilities every day, many of them quite sweat-inspiring.
There should be a new "law" that describes the increase of threats across some variable like time, or complexity, or something like that.
Anyways the future of anti-malware is likely to be "vigilante ware" whether we like it or not. Some body will get it up their ass to write things like this that don't come with catches like back doors or other worries, and will just start distributing them as 0-day attacks.
With thousands of new pen testers and potential malware authors trained every year, I don't see how the millionth monkey effect can be avoided.
I see people here posting analogies about breaking into your house and doing your dishes. That's fine but this malware is an easy target because of the back doors.
What if you came home and that ugly dirt patch surrounded with paving stones along the front of your house (what the hell is that thing) had been planted with an appropriate selection of flowers to match your "paint"? How are you even going to pursue charges? Who would you be capable of getting interested in finding out whodunit? Probably nobody.
Eventually vigilante ware will be everywhere and I doubt anybody's going to get all that upset about it.
somebody kick these engineers and scientists in the ass, tell them to stop fucking around and make the nano memristor already. that shit was supposed to be here fucking years ago.
Look, I had you pegged tit for tat on all four points, and especially on point four: you're a crazy, anti-Jew nutter.
Being called out on this forced you into chimp-out mode where you fucking go full-on frothing at the mouth anti-Jewish in addressing every point of the conversation whether the points had anything even remotely at all to do with Jewishness.
Nothing you say anywhere in your response makes any sense, therefore it's not worth going over in any further detail.
Let's see if I can extricate myself from this sensibly.
670mil mph. What was the probe travelling at? 35k miles/ hr?
So...1.34mil over 7.
Well that fucks my ratio up. If their probes are moving as slowly as our fastest probe, then the magnitude of "amplifying" or sense of neighborhood from 120 light years becomes 160 million light years.
Well the Milky Way is only 100,000 light years across. So, hmm.
If I was to sustain the same argument as I was before, I'd be saying that our neighborhood is actually the Virgo supercluster.
It just remains to be asked whether it's plausible that any civilizations that may have arisen within the Virgo supercluster could have reached the point were are at, now, between say 160 million years ago minus some "rise and fall of civilization" time period (15,000 years?). Well... a 15,000 year time period is somewhat slim. It's 1 10,666th of 160 million years.
But, NASA has launched rockets that had better odds than 1:10,666 of failing catastrophically.
Hmm.
Well, I sort of makes looking for space probes kind of stupid, as well.
What's even more stupid is taking several courses in Physics but still not giving enough of a fuck to memorize the speed of light, and then also going online and looking it up only to glance at it and read the units completely wrong.
1. I doubt the world's intelligencia spend much time watching Pinky and the Brain let alone enough to emulate it somehow or to self-identify with the late 90's cartoon.
2. "Any country where Facebook is banned" -- is only relevant to people who are really, really into using Facebook for sensitive shit. Facebook is not typically "mission critical" to anyone who's actually running an internet server. So this piece of advice sucks ass.
3. "Harping" on Holocaust denials? Are you a fucking nutter? No wonder you're posting as A.C.
4. Okay, you're a nutter. You're an anti-semite, right-wing Christian nutter. Judaism grossly predates the advent of Christianity, by several millennia. In actuality the opposite of what you said is true: Christianity is anti-Judaism. If you can read through the Holy Bible (I have, countless times) and not figure out that Christianity is about a revolution against the Jewish religious state, then you deserve to stay behind A.C. because you're fucking DUMB.
All the better reason we should learn how to detect miniscule space probes within our solar system.
If we're assuming we have listenable neighbors inside of 100 light years, why not assume we have space-probing neighbors inside of 1,000 light years and start looking for the probes that would have reached us by now as well?
And space probes are a medium we use to communicate and are gaining importance all the time. NASA has several semi-celebrities, now, who broadcast all the latest news about space probes. You might check our the twitters of Kimberly Ennico-Smith, Emily Lackdawalla, or any of the current or former crew of the International Space Station. All very fascinating daily reads.
Let's admit it, we don't even know what we're looking for. I mean that in the broadest, most philosophical sense. We say we're looking for E.T. but there's no way we can look for something too dissimilar to ourselves so we end up looking for ourselves as an end result.
As many here have pointed out, the RF era may only last a short while. It would be a pretty heady coincidence if we did receive signals from that era from an exo race just at the time we're spending (wasting?) our time looking for such signals.
Consider the law of inverse squares. It doesn't take very many light-years for a radio signal to become a whisper. People are talking about compressed and distributed radio that is indistinguishable from background noise. I haven't seen many people offering a similar argument for AM and FM - not very far away (about 120 light years from some things I'm reading) and the same thing happens to even very strong broadcasts from Earth.
So unless we're really, really blowing on the dice, here, we don't have much hope of finding something this way. We're talking about the coincidence of not only E.T.'s radio era and our listenership, but also the coincidence that E.T. lives extremely, extremely close to our neighborhood. Two coincidences at once, playing out to our whims? I doubt it.
But think about what we broadcast that doesn't get attenuated so easily. Think about our space probes.
Surely even the most technologically advanced races have to give up trying to receive propagating radio signals beyond a certain distance. But space probes always stay the same size (don't quote me on that, cosmogony and quantum mechanics experts) so even if they aren't going at the speed of light, they stay detectable across time and space.
I'm sure it's far easier to pick up a tiny, tiny little pinprick of metal and electrical energy (valuable things in space) for an advanced race than it is to find random signals amidst the background noise of the universe.
Maybe we should learn to apply a similar technology. Maybe we need to develop "sensor arrays" that can quickly and easily detect artificial satellites drifting through space. For all we know, several have gone through our solar system since the advent of, say, radar, and we don't know it because we're not really looking or don't know how to look properly.
If we're so certain that there are exo races out there that have lived in an advanced state for long enough that by now their intelligent creation of radio signals is reaching us, then it's just as safe to assume that by now their space probes are reaching us as well. Voyager is escaping the sun at 38,500mph. Light travels at roughly 300,000mph. So this dramatic leap in assumption is simply a magnitude of ten.
Considering the milky way is 100,000 years across, I think it's okay to play with a magnitude of ten in terms of light years when asking ourselves how big of a "neighborhood" we live in. It's like saying maybe our neighborhood is the size of our subdivision and not just our cul de sac.
When you take all of this into consideration, it looks actually very silly to spend time looking for radio signals. It makes looking for radio signals seem like a sideshow game that some people just happen to be distracted by.
Meanwhile, our solar system could be bristling with tiny little space probes that we ignore because we haven't learned how to effectively differentiate them from rocks.
Maybe that's because we really actually fear the universe. Our biggest concern about exo objects is space rocks because we're so afraid that a big one is going to slam into our planet.
It reminds me that a lot of people have argued that we should be learning how to mask our signals and to stop sending out calling card broadcasts in the hope of gaining an audience.
I shared this exact same view just a few years ago. But as I've been watching the International Space Station crews and their broadcasts, I took more of an interest in the latest space exploration developments.
As it turns out, many companies have come to believe that it is going to be relatively easy to reach out and grab asteroids and mine them, and to mine resources from other bodies such as moons and planets in our solar system.
There is actually a lot of matter in space. Perhaps not relative to the vast emptiness of space itself, no, but compared to the resources we are constrained to here on Earth there is a lot more waiting for us "out there". And many scientists and corporate leaders are now convinced that those resources represent a significant return on investment.
Which is actually great news for the rest of us who are stuck on Earth. If one of our greatest concerns for the future of humanity is the potential for sudden escalation of consumption and therefore scarcity of resources (spoiler: it is), then one of the best things we can do is spent x*y*z of those resources and get ax*by*cz back (where x, y, z are resources and a, b, c are scalars greater than 1), where "back" means "back here on Earth where they can be used".
I spent a number of years telling people we should defund NASA and that the last thing we should attempt is some expensive, far-out journey to putting astronauts uselessness and senselessly on the surface of Mars. I've since changed my mind and if anything is obvious it's that space mining operations are going to be an inevitable part of our relatively near future.
I think our concerns and bickering, now, and the energy we put behind those, should be directed at concern for our welfare and well-being in our imminent space-mining future. Already, we're seeing trends where whomever can achieve some progress on the corporate mission to mine space is congratulated, no matter what the invisible costs. Case in point, India being congratulated on very cheaply getting a satellite into orbit -- in American newspapers. How many Americans reading those newspapers recalled having their jobs outsourced to India? How many reading those newspapers laughed because it's easy to keep things cheap in a country where most people don't have clean water and 3/5 of the country don't enjoy what are considered basic human rights?
If we don't watch closely what's happening and get with the program, we'll just get squashed, all but manacled and forced into "one-way-ticket" space programs where we spend months stranded on drifting asteroids waiting for the cargo pick-up to arrive.
If you don't think it's a grim future think again. Everything about space travel has its closest analog in seafaring. And seafaring is a horrible occupation under any but the most disciplined forms of organization. And corporate bottom lines are not very good examples by which to discipline an organization.
I remember when Hawking said that basically black holes must radiate "information" somehow.
Before that idea, the thinking was that if you could somehow reverse the direction of time, plenty of things in the universe would go in reverse but one thing that you would never see is something that went into a black hole coming back out again.
Hawking felt that this was counterintuitive, or something, and came up with this idea: something goes into a black hole, and information about that thing comes out. Somehow.
He never really described how that's supposed to happen. So, fast forward to today.
So, basically he tacked one additional sentence onto an already pretty short statement -- IMHO.
It's not all that exciting unless you're a really excitable theoretical physicist.
Slashdot Mirror
I see net metering as a purposefully over-complicated scheme with a few minor selling points but an all-too-familiar drawback: the added complication allows for all kinds of back-and-forth fenagling, kow-towing, and piles upon piles of legalese to build up. After awhile it will get just as bad as financial securities, savings and loans, and the real estate market in terms of the various ways sneaky language is slipped into the rule set of various regulatory systems interconnected in the network of information that comprises the entire scheme, allowing sudden and surprising financial dambreaks that leave entire regions drained dry -- and all along it will be sold in the form of various political movements "for the common good". In light of how things are already going this way all because of the introduction of the net metering scheme, I say scrap the growing chimera before it emerges from the womb as a defense budget addendum.
I think there might still be some municipalities wherein if two properties share their own independent distribution line, then the power supplied by that distribution has to be isolated from the grid entirely. So you would find two people with solar panels willing to maybe run a line between their back patios but not to the rest of their house.
You should receive compensation from the power company when you manage to generate surplus to return to the grid, and the value should be equal to the cost of power *at that time*.
All of this is a thinly veiled attempt to use solar-power customers as beasts of burden to turn a profit. Seeing that the most vocal support comes in the form of this convoluted, politicized argument about transfer of wealth to the wealthy, I don't doubt at all that this mentality was planted in the local communities by agents of the power companies in question.
I've seen the politics of electric power generation go sour time and time again. In Florida back in the late 90's, some people were told that they would not receive money nor even company credit for their power generation, but instead would receive "eco-vouchers" that ostensibly could be used at participating retailers and services instead of cash. One use of the eco-vouchers was to purchase football stadium tickets. I think there was a proposal to make them exchangeable on the tollways (which Florida is famous for making into a side-industry). This is in a region where it's regular practice for power companies to charge a minimum rate ($200 per month in Lake Worth, FL) no matter how little power the customer uses.
You simply can't trust the energy companies, and we've seen this again, and again, and again.
There's not really enough excess / spare resource left in the world for yet another fresh generation of Americans to be taught the same lesson, especially when things have been so blitzkrieged these last two decades that the previous generation has barely been able to keep the lesson intact.
There's no time left for "let's wait and see".
If there's anything decisive that can be done on behalf of the consumers (who now, in their new role, are producers as well) then it needs to be done now.
This is even less interesting to me than the Wii-U system was (and I didn't think that could be possible.) Why try to push two consoles on me at once? They should just keep doing what they were doing when they were at the height of their success: making a major home console and also making a smaller portable console, two completely separate things. The only possibly way they could improve on that formula would be to make the same line of games work on both consoles. It seems like that's what they *want* to do, but that they run into some kind of barrier getting their. And for Nintendo I can imagine that barrier: their own weird strict demands on themselves. Like when the N64 was still in cartridges because Nintendo was afraid of load times.
Games any more are getting so large, I have to ask what is the realistic future of gaming. Cartridges can only hold so much data without getting unrealistically expensive. But if you want something that will play on both a larger at home console and a smaller portable console, it seems like the way to go.
Of course, mini discs can do the job as well. According to wikipedia, mini blu-ray discs can hold 15 GB. That seems sufficient for the current generation of gaming.
Also, the question rises in my mind as to why a person would want the larger console version when they already have the portable one. I suppose if you want a drive for huge storage and back-up (which I feel like has becoming the market standard) then you have to have a console. But is there any other reason? It seems to me that video driving hardware has been reduced pretty well to a tiny little device, going by the size of my laptop's graphics card that can send a signal out through an HDMI port. So for video purposes, you could just have a wall-wart powered portable with a kickstand and an HDMI port and be good to go if you're not concerned about backing your games up.
And if Nintendo makes the discs cheaply enough, there you go, you don't have to worry about backing them up in case the disc gets damaged. And they could probably focus on that bottom line if they weren't trying so hard to come up with such weird crap.
So I guess what I'm saying is Nintendo should just commit to a portable console that can be plugged into a big screen and act as home entertainment. Why the hell not? Save all that money that would have gone into developing and producing this weird hybrid crap and just make a super powerful portable console. And let the user supply an SD card (preferably not forcing them to use mini-SD) as their memory stick. Then they can have all their game save data in a portable fashion as well.
Another good reason to focus on a single, portable console is that more time and thought can be put into making it use the least amount of power possible so the user gets the most play time out of it.
Any ways I'm not going to give yet another hybrid a second thought any more than I did the Wii-U. All I'm convinced of now is that Nintendo appears to not be learning from their mistakes and might be doomed. That's sad because I was kind of hoping to see the promised Wii 2 eventually.
How many man hours are wasted pen testing or setting up security just so that client after client can fail to remain compliant as time goes by?
How many billions of dollars are wasted every year by large corporations failing to secure their data?
Why not just start writing viruses that go out, patch vulnerabilities, throw a middle finger and erase / kill process?
Target the weakest link and do something about it. In fact I feel if a company is "caught" doing this it shouldn't even be considered illegal. This should be considered the future of anti-malware.
Today I was helping a computer illiterate classmate set up some engineering software, and to make idle chat I tried to explain to her Moore's law. And I had to add the caveat that some people felt Moore's law was breaking down.
And I said, what we need today is to focus not on how recklessly we can double computing power but how responsibly we can mitigate threat. And if you follow any of the bevy of pen testers with twitter accounts you'll read long, long lists of newly discovered vulnerabilities every day, many of them quite sweat-inspiring.
There should be a new "law" that describes the increase of threats across some variable like time, or complexity, or something like that.
Anyways the future of anti-malware is likely to be "vigilante ware" whether we like it or not. Some body will get it up their ass to write things like this that don't come with catches like back doors or other worries, and will just start distributing them as 0-day attacks.
With thousands of new pen testers and potential malware authors trained every year, I don't see how the millionth monkey effect can be avoided.
I see people here posting analogies about breaking into your house and doing your dishes. That's fine but this malware is an easy target because of the back doors.
What if you came home and that ugly dirt patch surrounded with paving stones along the front of your house (what the hell is that thing) had been planted with an appropriate selection of flowers to match your "paint"? How are you even going to pursue charges? Who would you be capable of getting interested in finding out whodunit? Probably nobody.
Eventually vigilante ware will be everywhere and I doubt anybody's going to get all that upset about it.
And no, this is not a manifesto.
god damnit.how did i hit ""log in to comment" under one article and then end up at another article i never even intended to viait?
i'll say it again, slashdot: fuck your mobile site.
"Only" hope?
Obviously Someone has not heard about John McAfee 2016.
Zuck real smart. But me have doubts. Internet for evreybody, that sound like a lot of clocks zuck. Mebbe Zuck think twice about this.
somebody kick these engineers and scientists in the ass, tell them to stop fucking around and make the nano memristor already. that shit was supposed to be here fucking years ago.
Look, I had you pegged tit for tat on all four points, and especially on point four: you're a crazy, anti-Jew nutter.
Being called out on this forced you into chimp-out mode where you fucking go full-on frothing at the mouth anti-Jewish in addressing every point of the conversation whether the points had anything even remotely at all to do with Jewishness.
Nothing you say anywhere in your response makes any sense, therefore it's not worth going over in any further detail.
You're a nutter.
Your tired ass also fucked up the ratio.
120 * (1.34mil over 7) = 23 mil
Okay so not the Virgo supercluster. But still, it's a larger neighborhood than I expected to justify.
I guess a larger number like that might mean a higher likelihood of finding probes within our own galaxy. Who knows.
Oh, terribly bad on my part. Let's see.
186,000 miles / sec.
Let's see if I can extricate myself from this sensibly.
670mil mph. What was the probe travelling at? 35k miles/ hr?
So...1.34mil over 7.
Well that fucks my ratio up. If their probes are moving as slowly as our fastest probe, then the magnitude of "amplifying" or sense of neighborhood from 120 light years becomes 160 million light years.
Well the Milky Way is only 100,000 light years across. So, hmm.
If I was to sustain the same argument as I was before, I'd be saying that our neighborhood is actually the Virgo supercluster.
It just remains to be asked whether it's plausible that any civilizations that may have arisen within the Virgo supercluster could have reached the point were are at, now, between say 160 million years ago minus some "rise and fall of civilization" time period (15,000 years?). Well... a 15,000 year time period is somewhat slim. It's 1 10,666th of 160 million years.
But, NASA has launched rockets that had better odds than 1:10,666 of failing catastrophically.
Hmm.
Well, I sort of makes looking for space probes kind of stupid, as well.
What's even more stupid is taking several courses in Physics but still not giving enough of a fuck to memorize the speed of light, and then also going online and looking it up only to glance at it and read the units completely wrong.
1. I doubt the world's intelligencia spend much time watching Pinky and the Brain let alone enough to emulate it somehow or to self-identify with the late 90's cartoon.
2. "Any country where Facebook is banned" -- is only relevant to people who are really, really into using Facebook for sensitive shit. Facebook is not typically "mission critical" to anyone who's actually running an internet server. So this piece of advice sucks ass.
3. "Harping" on Holocaust denials? Are you a fucking nutter? No wonder you're posting as A.C.
4. Okay, you're a nutter. You're an anti-semite, right-wing Christian nutter. Judaism grossly predates the advent of Christianity, by several millennia. In actuality the opposite of what you said is true: Christianity is anti-Judaism. If you can read through the Holy Bible (I have, countless times) and not figure out that Christianity is about a revolution against the Jewish religious state, then you deserve to stay behind A.C. because you're fucking DUMB.
That's suspicious in itself, the fact that they're so quiet that Wikileaks has nothing on them. Haven't you ever heard of "too quiet"?
Lineland. They'll see your point but they'll never get the whole picture.
Right? Because spies could never, ever break in while you're out and get physical access to your machine.
That's like saying an exploration team is "nutter" for keeping a point scout ahead of the exploration party.
All the better reason we should learn how to detect miniscule space probes within our solar system.
If we're assuming we have listenable neighbors inside of 100 light years, why not assume we have space-probing neighbors inside of 1,000 light years and start looking for the probes that would have reached us by now as well?
And space probes are a medium we use to communicate and are gaining importance all the time. NASA has several semi-celebrities, now, who broadcast all the latest news about space probes. You might check our the twitters of Kimberly Ennico-Smith, Emily Lackdawalla, or any of the current or former crew of the International Space Station. All very fascinating daily reads.
And also, some babies have been raised on the tenderness of wolves.
Let's admit it, we don't even know what we're looking for. I mean that in the broadest, most philosophical sense. We say we're looking for E.T. but there's no way we can look for something too dissimilar to ourselves so we end up looking for ourselves as an end result.
As many here have pointed out, the RF era may only last a short while. It would be a pretty heady coincidence if we did receive signals from that era from an exo race just at the time we're spending (wasting?) our time looking for such signals.
Consider the law of inverse squares. It doesn't take very many light-years for a radio signal to become a whisper. People are talking about compressed and distributed radio that is indistinguishable from background noise. I haven't seen many people offering a similar argument for AM and FM - not very far away (about 120 light years from some things I'm reading) and the same thing happens to even very strong broadcasts from Earth.
So unless we're really, really blowing on the dice, here, we don't have much hope of finding something this way. We're talking about the coincidence of not only E.T.'s radio era and our listenership, but also the coincidence that E.T. lives extremely, extremely close to our neighborhood. Two coincidences at once, playing out to our whims? I doubt it.
But think about what we broadcast that doesn't get attenuated so easily. Think about our space probes.
Surely even the most technologically advanced races have to give up trying to receive propagating radio signals beyond a certain distance. But space probes always stay the same size (don't quote me on that, cosmogony and quantum mechanics experts) so even if they aren't going at the speed of light, they stay detectable across time and space.
I'm sure it's far easier to pick up a tiny, tiny little pinprick of metal and electrical energy (valuable things in space) for an advanced race than it is to find random signals amidst the background noise of the universe.
Maybe we should learn to apply a similar technology. Maybe we need to develop "sensor arrays" that can quickly and easily detect artificial satellites drifting through space. For all we know, several have gone through our solar system since the advent of, say, radar, and we don't know it because we're not really looking or don't know how to look properly.
If we're so certain that there are exo races out there that have lived in an advanced state for long enough that by now their intelligent creation of radio signals is reaching us, then it's just as safe to assume that by now their space probes are reaching us as well. Voyager is escaping the sun at 38,500mph. Light travels at roughly 300,000mph. So this dramatic leap in assumption is simply a magnitude of ten.
Considering the milky way is 100,000 years across, I think it's okay to play with a magnitude of ten in terms of light years when asking ourselves how big of a "neighborhood" we live in. It's like saying maybe our neighborhood is the size of our subdivision and not just our cul de sac.
When you take all of this into consideration, it looks actually very silly to spend time looking for radio signals. It makes looking for radio signals seem like a sideshow game that some people just happen to be distracted by.
Meanwhile, our solar system could be bristling with tiny little space probes that we ignore because we haven't learned how to effectively differentiate them from rocks.
Maybe that's because we really actually fear the universe. Our biggest concern about exo objects is space rocks because we're so afraid that a big one is going to slam into our planet.
It reminds me that a lot of people have argued that we should be learning how to mask our signals and to stop sending out calling card broadcasts in the hope of gaining an audience.
I shared this exact same view just a few years ago. But as I've been watching the International Space Station crews and their broadcasts, I took more of an interest in the latest space exploration developments.
As it turns out, many companies have come to believe that it is going to be relatively easy to reach out and grab asteroids and mine them, and to mine resources from other bodies such as moons and planets in our solar system.
There is actually a lot of matter in space. Perhaps not relative to the vast emptiness of space itself, no, but compared to the resources we are constrained to here on Earth there is a lot more waiting for us "out there". And many scientists and corporate leaders are now convinced that those resources represent a significant return on investment.
Which is actually great news for the rest of us who are stuck on Earth. If one of our greatest concerns for the future of humanity is the potential for sudden escalation of consumption and therefore scarcity of resources (spoiler: it is), then one of the best things we can do is spent x*y*z of those resources and get ax*by*cz back (where x, y, z are resources and a, b, c are scalars greater than 1), where "back" means "back here on Earth where they can be used".
I spent a number of years telling people we should defund NASA and that the last thing we should attempt is some expensive, far-out journey to putting astronauts uselessness and senselessly on the surface of Mars. I've since changed my mind and if anything is obvious it's that space mining operations are going to be an inevitable part of our relatively near future.
I think our concerns and bickering, now, and the energy we put behind those, should be directed at concern for our welfare and well-being in our imminent space-mining future. Already, we're seeing trends where whomever can achieve some progress on the corporate mission to mine space is congratulated, no matter what the invisible costs. Case in point, India being congratulated on very cheaply getting a satellite into orbit -- in American newspapers. How many Americans reading those newspapers recalled having their jobs outsourced to India? How many reading those newspapers laughed because it's easy to keep things cheap in a country where most people don't have clean water and 3/5 of the country don't enjoy what are considered basic human rights?
If we don't watch closely what's happening and get with the program, we'll just get squashed, all but manacled and forced into "one-way-ticket" space programs where we spend months stranded on drifting asteroids waiting for the cargo pick-up to arrive.
If you don't think it's a grim future think again. Everything about space travel has its closest analog in seafaring. And seafaring is a horrible occupation under any but the most disciplined forms of organization. And corporate bottom lines are not very good examples by which to discipline an organization.
Really? Obama's health care joke has done more damage to the affordability of health care than anything else so far.
... Conspiracies, if they exist, are "fact" as you put it -- they're real things, collusions of real people with real goals.
I think you meant to say, "it's not a conspiracy theory, it's a conspiracy fact".
* not all buddhism is zen buddhism
* there's nothing buddhist or enlightened about the mentioned policies and approaches
* fucking shit eating headline, it should be forcibly changed just for the stereotypes
I remember when Hawking said that basically black holes must radiate "information" somehow.
Before that idea, the thinking was that if you could somehow reverse the direction of time, plenty of things in the universe would go in reverse but one thing that you would never see is something that went into a black hole coming back out again.
Hawking felt that this was counterintuitive, or something, and came up with this idea: something goes into a black hole, and information about that thing comes out. Somehow.
He never really described how that's supposed to happen. So, fast forward to today.
So, basically he tacked one additional sentence onto an already pretty short statement -- IMHO.
It's not all that exciting unless you're a really excitable theoretical physicist.