Everyone around here seems to agree that we need to fix broken copyright laws and, if fixing the rules ruins the RIAA/MPAA's business model, then that's their problem for clinging to a model which depends on those broken laws.
Seems to me that the exact same argument should apply here. If ICANN does something to put a stop to domain tasting/kiting, then that's a good thing for the net as a whole and if GoDaddy can't update their business model to handle the change, well, then I guess they can join the buggy-whip makers.
People keep calling it "the PATRIOT Act", but there are three additional letters at the beginning: "USA". Its full, proper name is "the U SAP AT RIOT Act", which isn't really all that bad a description of it (aside from the txtspk).
Sounds like your main problem is that your voicemail interface sucks. When I get voicemail, my phone displays "You have 1 new voicemail message." and sets the soft buttons to 'ignore' and 'voicemail' until I acknowledge it. After the one-touch dial to check voicemail, it sends me straight into the voicemail system (no need to enter a PIN by default when calling from the number the mailbox is attached to) and greets me with "You have one new message. First message:", then plays it back. If there's a phone number, I may listen to it a second time to copy that down, or I may just ignore it and take advantage of the post-message menu's "press 8 to return call" option.
No intermediate SMS messages, no telling me what time the message was left (unless I ask for it - I think there's an option in the post-message menu for that, but I've never wanted to use it, so I'm not sure), none of the headaches inflicted by your voicemail system... On the contrary, my phone/service makes it much more of a hassle to get into a text message and then delete it afterwards than the "one button to call voicemail, one button to delete message" interface I've got for voice messages.
Of course, if the FBI's going to ask the ISPs to do that in a fashion such that the ISPs would agree to do so, I'd really hope that someone at the ISP would be bright enough to suggest that, instead of interrupting service for a huge number of customers, they could try looking up which of their subscribers is currently authenticated on that IP address, then check their customer records to get the subscriber's name and address. This would have the additional benefit of taking less time and narrowing it down to one house rather than a hundred or so. (The issue of locating which (if any) neighbor was using their wireless would remain, but the "rolling blackout" solution doesn't address this either.)
Anyhow, my impression of the review's point on locating the street address corresponding to the IP address wasn't "it can't be done" but rather "the FBI can't just push a button and get that information without contacting the ISP".
Why is there this overriding assumption that people *must* join a union if they exist? Because that's the norm in the US. If you work in a unionized industry, you join the union (frequently with an implied "or else", whether that's "or else you won't get a job at all" or "or else the union members will ostracize and/or harass you"). If union membership isn't de facto mandatory, there generally isn't a union at all.
Government employee? You're in the union.
Work for the local university? They probably have a union, and you're in it.
Run a movie studio? You have the choice of either signing a contract with the Screen Writers' Guild and Screen Actors' Guild saying that you will work only with union members or else members of those unions will refuse to work with you. Either union-only or non-union only, take your pick.
Work for my local telco? A union runs the place, but you're not required to join. But union dues will be taken out of your paycheck even if you don't join, your coworkers will treat you poorly, and, when the union leaders decide to strike, there will be a strike regardless of what you think of the idea whether you're a union member or not, but, if you're a member and vote in favor of striking, you'll get paid at least a portion of your salary during the strike. Not a member or a member, but vote against striking? You're still out of work for the duration ("betraying" the union by working during a strike would be... most unwise), but you don't get paid anything at all.
I believe it was you who mentioned previously that US "unions" tend to operate more like what you call "labor cartels" (a phrase which I had never encountered prior to this discussion) and the use of the same term for both things in the US, but two distinct terms in Europe, may go a long way to explain why the Atlantic is such a dividing line of opinion regarding unions.
That said, I once spent about a year working with a guy who told tales of the union at his previous employer. The one that stands out most in my mind was about a woman who worked there as a receptionist and, as he described her, she was extremely rude and lazy in general. She was also a union member and the union rules stated that you can't fire someone unless they have received three written reprimands within a 6-month period. So she'd go in and be a bitch and refuse to work unless she felt like it, get reprimanded, get a second reprimand... and then suddenly turn polite and hard-working until the 6-month timer ran out and she reverted to her normal self again. She'd been doing this for years, but the union rules wouldn't allow her to be fired.
Despite its effects on the operations of that specific office, this can still be easily rationalized as supporting the interests of the union members: She's a member and it's definitely in her interest to preserve her job security, especially if they choose to come up with a scenario which allows them to claim that, by changing the rules to allow this one abusive employee to be fired, it would also allow 10 other union members to be fired "unfairly" (for some value of "unfair").
But, no, what I've heard about (US) unions seems to indicate that they generally operate for the benefit of the union's officers, not the union's members. By allowing a company to bend the union rules and fire dead weight such as that secretary, they would be ceding some of the union's power to the employer, which is simply unacceptable to them.
A simple situation that unions can and do address is pay, employers often do not want to pay employee's (especially at the lowest level) what they are worth, sure they will pay the minimum legal wage, they may even pay more than the minimum possible wage, however for an employee to take unilateral action (i.e. protest or demand extra pay on threat of leaving) would be pointless, they would be dismissed and the situation would remain the same, the dismissal serving as a disincentive for any other employee considering the same path.
...unless the worker in question is in the IT sector (as are the bloggers). In that case, the employee gladly finds a new employer who pays more reasonably and then the (former) employer complains about how difficult it is to hire and retain IT workers who don't demand the world from them. Or did you miss that story last week? (Young IT Workers Disillusioned, Hard to Retain)
Ah... NO, Gore didn't! He got the plurality of the popular vote in 2000. However, US Presidential elections are not, and have never been, decided by the popular vote. Which has made the electoral college system somewhat unpopular in recent years, but, popular or not, it's still the way the Constitution says elections are to be run. If you don't like it, work on getting the Constitution amended to change it, don't deny that its results are (legally) correct.
Personally, I think the electoral college is one of the lower priorities for election reform in the US, and that it may even work reasonably well if the states allocated their electors in proportion to the popular vote instead of winner-takes-all, but that's just me.
While I agree with your final conclusion, I think it's very believable that it could go unnoticed for quite some time if the backup tapes of old email (or, really, of anything) started disappearing. Aside from the sysadmin staff, nobody ever looks at the backups unless they actually need to restore from them and something's seriously wrong if you're doing restores every hour. (I spent a few years as the sysadmin at a mid-sized company of ~600 employees and only had to do restores about once a year on average.)
For a third take on why the "ban homosexuality" analogy fits... Enforcing effective bans on homosexuality and copyright infringement both require ubiquitous surveillance which destroys the legitimate privacy of law-abiding citizens as the only way to have a realistic chance of catching those who violate the ban.
I absolutely agree. I'm also in my late 30s and I started off with a bunch of crappy "golden rule" temp jobs. When I went on to my first "real" job, I stumbled across the discovery that I didn't have to be a slave to my employer. From that point on (up until I decided to go freelance three years ago), I approached my interaction with employers as a negotiation and made it clear[1] to them that, if they tried to dictate any unreasonable terms to me, then I would walk. It worked out very well for me, yet my bosses always thought I was great and never so much as hinted that they might have felt I was trying to take advantage of them.
[1] By "made it clear", I'm referring to attitude and choice of approach, not to delivering ultimatums. If you feel the need to result to an ultimatum, then your negotiations have already failed and you're only hurting your chances of restoring them.
That wouldn't be anything new. Although I can't provide references, I've heard from a number of sources that, late in the Cold War, US subs got to be too quiet and the Soviets did exactly as you suggested in order to find them.
TFA (specifically, the English translation of the original letter) addresses this point rather directly:
Already there are anonymization services on the market that make the new laws ineffective. For this reason, the Antipiracy Bureau will demand new tools that further intensifies the surveillance of the Internet. The simple truth is that almost all communication channels on the Internet can be used to distribute copyrighted information. If you can use a service to send a message you can most likely use the same service to send an mp3-song. Those who want to prevent people from exchanging of copyrighted material must control all electronic communication between citizens.
Debates over the existince and quality of Swedish pr0n aside, http://www.migrationsverket.se/english.jsp is the central site for Swedish immigration information, although you may wish to contact your local embassy/consulate for more situation-specific information (as I discovered when I called to get the exchange rate to use for calculating the application fee and was told there was a separate site for US applicants that I should have been looking at for those details instead).
Turn the photos over to the parents! What makes all of you people think this wasn't done? By unilaterally taking action against the students, the school deprived the parents of their legitimate role in raising their children. Turning the photos over to the parents should have been the sole action taken by the school, unless and until the parents came back and requested the school to take additional action, as the activities in the photos took place entirely outside of the school's jurisdiction.
The one exception is that the article mentions The Minnesota State High School League requires student athletes to sign a pledge that they will not drink alcoholic beverages. Depending on the strength of the evidence in each student's invididual photos and the timeframe (i.e., not including any incidents prior to their involvement in that league), I can see a good argument for enforcing whatever penalties are stipulated by the league for breaking that pledge. The article, however, also has quotes from a student who isn't involved in that league and the school acted against her as well. There is no indication that she has made any commitments to the school regarding what she will or won't do outside of the school environment, so I see no legitimate reason for them to have done anything other than informing her parents.
If it's to the point where they absolutely reek of beer or weed, that's when you suspend them, call the police, etc But that is not their job. Isn't that right? If they reek of beer or weed at school, then that's something taking place within the school's jurisdiction, so it is then absolutely their job to deal with it accordingly, issuing warnings, suspensions, expulsions, etc. per the school's policy. But if the principal happens to pass a student on the street on a Saturday afternoon and the student reeks of beer, then, no, that's outside of the school's jurisdiction and we're right back to my previous paragraph: Inform the parents and/or call the police, just like any other responsible adult might (probably "should") do in that situation, but it's not within the scope of the school's authority, so bringing the school's power to bear on that student is not appropriate.
Singular "their" etc., was an accepted part of the English language before the 18th-century grammarians started making arbitrary judgements as to what is "good English" and "bad English", based on a kind of pseudo-"logic" deduced from the Latin language, that has nothing whatever to do with English. (See the 1975 journal article by Anne Bodine in the bibliography.) And even after the old-line grammarians put it under their ban, this anathematized singular "their" construction never stopped being used by English-speakers, both orally and by serious literary writers. So it's time for anyone who still thinks that singular "their" is so-called "bad grammar" to get rid of their prejudices and pedantry! - http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/austheir.html
Our modern confusion stems from eighteenth-century grammarians who analysed English according to the structures of Latin and imposed stringent and irrelevant rules (such as the one about not splitting infinitives) that have bedevilled everybody since. In this case, they proposed that he should instead be the standard in cases in which the sex of the person referred to isn't known. - http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-the2.htm
So, do you choose to reject the dogma of those grammarians who tried to impose Latin rules upon English which claims that singular "they" is incorrect or embrace the teachings of those same grammarians which state that "he" is the appropriate gender-inspecific pronoun? If you choose to reject the latter rule by considering the use of "he" to be horribly sexist, then you can just as easily reject the former and accept "they" as a valid singular pronoun.
I'm not talking about running apps remotely... What I am talking about is remote storage between sessions. While logged in your apps would run on the local workstation, only reading your profile from your remote store when logging in, and writing changes back when logging out.
Yes. As the GP said, unix was doing that 15 years ago, in the form of NFS-mounted home directories. (15 years is actually a rather conservative estimate, but that's beside the point.) Works great for applications running on the local workstation, whether command-line or X-based, but it's not really a secure enough solution to run across today's internet. (I know there are more secure remote filesystem technologies out there these days, but I don't have direct experience with doing this over any of them.)
Personally, while I think that kind of portable data/settings arrangement is great, I have no interest in the internet-based versions embraced by the current trend for the simple reason that I'm not interested in entrusting my data (much less my secrets) to $RANDOM_CORPORATION, no matter how convenient that may make things. Get a well-developed standard along these lines, allow me to set up my own server to store it all, and I may well do so, but I see no benefit in entrusting such things to a third-party repository which are not more than offset by the inevitability that, at some point, the repository's interests may differ from my own.
People in the armed forces should have to worry about acting out in uniform, a FedEx employee shouldn't have the same fears.
I disagree insofar as I believe that FedEx has just as much of a legitimate interest in what their employees do while in uniform as the army has in what their soldiers do while in uniform. But (and I think we agree at this point) that interest stops when you're off-duty, out of uniform, and there's basically no obvious connection between you and your employer to the casual observer.
Fair enough. I was making the (all too common) mistake of assuming everyone here is in the US, where the original versions are not-at-all well-known.
As for where I got the eye-pecking bit from, I have a dead-tree copy of "Grimm's Complete Fairy Tales", which is where I first saw it, but the first hit on a google search for "grimm cinderella" (http://www.fln.vcu.edu/grimm/cinderella.html) appears to have the same version, which concludes:
When the wedding with the king's son was to be celebrated, the two false sisters came and wanted to get into favor with Cinderella and share her good fortune. When the betrothed couple went to church, the elder was at the right side and the younger at the left, and the pigeons pecked out one eye from each of them. Afterwards as they came back the elder was at the left, and the younger at the right, and then the pigeons pecked out the other eye from each. And thus, for their wickedness and falsehood, they were punished with blindness all their days.
You know, those old fairy-tales by the Grimm Bros. were rather cruel, but still parents read them to their children, because they teach them something about consequences.
No, they don't, actually. Find yourself a copy of the Grimm versions. While they are recognizable as basically the same stories as we know today, I've never heard any modern parents telling their kids about Cinderella's stepsisters chopping bits off their feet and shoving the remaining bloody stumps into the prince's glass slipper or a pair of pigeons pecking out an eye from each of them on their way to Cinderella's wedding and the other eye on their way home afterwards.
It's only been about 100 years since Marconi invented the radiotelegraph. Even if we assume that they would be 100% certain to pick up any signal we've sent, no matter how weak, and that they would be 100% able to recognize it as carrying meaning, any civilization more than 100 light years or so away would still have no inkling of our existence based on unnatural radio transmissions. A 100 light year sphere is a pretty small chunk of space compared to the rest of our galaxy. Much too small of a chunk to draw strong conclusions from, IMO.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone around here seems to agree that we need to fix broken copyright laws and, if fixing the rules ruins the RIAA/MPAA's business model, then that's their problem for clinging to a model which depends on those broken laws.
Seems to me that the exact same argument should apply here. If ICANN does something to put a stop to domain tasting/kiting, then that's a good thing for the net as a whole and if GoDaddy can't update their business model to handle the change, well, then I guess they can join the buggy-whip makers.
People keep calling it "the PATRIOT Act", but there are three additional letters at the beginning: "USA". Its full, proper name is "the U SAP AT RIOT Act", which isn't really all that bad a description of it (aside from the txtspk).
Sounds like your main problem is that your voicemail interface sucks. When I get voicemail, my phone displays "You have 1 new voicemail message." and sets the soft buttons to 'ignore' and 'voicemail' until I acknowledge it. After the one-touch dial to check voicemail, it sends me straight into the voicemail system (no need to enter a PIN by default when calling from the number the mailbox is attached to) and greets me with "You have one new message. First message:", then plays it back. If there's a phone number, I may listen to it a second time to copy that down, or I may just ignore it and take advantage of the post-message menu's "press 8 to return call" option.
No intermediate SMS messages, no telling me what time the message was left (unless I ask for it - I think there's an option in the post-message menu for that, but I've never wanted to use it, so I'm not sure), none of the headaches inflicted by your voicemail system... On the contrary, my phone/service makes it much more of a hassle to get into a text message and then delete it afterwards than the "one button to call voicemail, one button to delete message" interface I've got for voice messages.
It's even more dangerous to be reading text messages while driving(or anything other than sitting down),
Some of us like to live dangerously. On the rare occasions when I get text messages, I read them standing up.
Of course, if the FBI's going to ask the ISPs to do that in a fashion such that the ISPs would agree to do so, I'd really hope that someone at the ISP would be bright enough to suggest that, instead of interrupting service for a huge number of customers, they could try looking up which of their subscribers is currently authenticated on that IP address, then check their customer records to get the subscriber's name and address. This would have the additional benefit of taking less time and narrowing it down to one house rather than a hundred or so. (The issue of locating which (if any) neighbor was using their wireless would remain, but the "rolling blackout" solution doesn't address this either.)
Anyhow, my impression of the review's point on locating the street address corresponding to the IP address wasn't "it can't be done" but rather "the FBI can't just push a button and get that information without contacting the ISP".
Government employee? You're in the union.
Work for the local university? They probably have a union, and you're in it.
Run a movie studio? You have the choice of either signing a contract with the Screen Writers' Guild and Screen Actors' Guild saying that you will work only with union members or else members of those unions will refuse to work with you. Either union-only or non-union only, take your pick.
Work for my local telco? A union runs the place, but you're not required to join. But union dues will be taken out of your paycheck even if you don't join, your coworkers will treat you poorly, and, when the union leaders decide to strike, there will be a strike regardless of what you think of the idea whether you're a union member or not, but, if you're a member and vote in favor of striking, you'll get paid at least a portion of your salary during the strike. Not a member or a member, but vote against striking? You're still out of work for the duration ("betraying" the union by working during a strike would be... most unwise), but you don't get paid anything at all.
I believe it was you who mentioned previously that US "unions" tend to operate more like what you call "labor cartels" (a phrase which I had never encountered prior to this discussion) and the use of the same term for both things in the US, but two distinct terms in Europe, may go a long way to explain why the Atlantic is such a dividing line of opinion regarding unions.
That said, I once spent about a year working with a guy who told tales of the union at his previous employer. The one that stands out most in my mind was about a woman who worked there as a receptionist and, as he described her, she was extremely rude and lazy in general. She was also a union member and the union rules stated that you can't fire someone unless they have received three written reprimands within a 6-month period. So she'd go in and be a bitch and refuse to work unless she felt like it, get reprimanded, get a second reprimand... and then suddenly turn polite and hard-working until the 6-month timer ran out and she reverted to her normal self again. She'd been doing this for years, but the union rules wouldn't allow her to be fired.
Despite its effects on the operations of that specific office, this can still be easily rationalized as supporting the interests of the union members: She's a member and it's definitely in her interest to preserve her job security, especially if they choose to come up with a scenario which allows them to claim that, by changing the rules to allow this one abusive employee to be fired, it would also allow 10 other union members to be fired "unfairly" (for some value of "unfair").
But, no, what I've heard about (US) unions seems to indicate that they generally operate for the benefit of the union's officers, not the union's members. By allowing a company to bend the union rules and fire dead weight such as that secretary, they would be ceding some of the union's power to the employer, which is simply unacceptable to them.
Ah... NO, Gore didn't! He got the plurality of the popular vote in 2000. However, US Presidential elections are not, and have never been, decided by the popular vote. Which has made the electoral college system somewhat unpopular in recent years, but, popular or not, it's still the way the Constitution says elections are to be run. If you don't like it, work on getting the Constitution amended to change it, don't deny that its results are (legally) correct.
Personally, I think the electoral college is one of the lower priorities for election reform in the US, and that it may even work reasonably well if the states allocated their electors in proportion to the popular vote instead of winner-takes-all, but that's just me.
While I agree with your final conclusion, I think it's very believable that it could go unnoticed for quite some time if the backup tapes of old email (or, really, of anything) started disappearing. Aside from the sysadmin staff, nobody ever looks at the backups unless they actually need to restore from them and something's seriously wrong if you're doing restores every hour. (I spent a few years as the sysadmin at a mid-sized company of ~600 employees and only had to do restores about once a year on average.)
As I recall, taking exactly the suggested reading time also brought on a reprimand for being a smart-ass.
For a third take on why the "ban homosexuality" analogy fits... Enforcing effective bans on homosexuality and copyright infringement both require ubiquitous surveillance which destroys the legitimate privacy of law-abiding citizens as the only way to have a realistic chance of catching those who violate the ban.
the people behind torrent sites ...
Stick to the 'we're not providing content, only torrents' line.
The Pirate Party != The Pirate Bay.
Yes, both are Swedish. Yes, they have similar names. But they're still not the same thing.
Hell... Even if it doesn't exist there's a fetish for it.
I absolutely agree. I'm also in my late 30s and I started off with a bunch of crappy "golden rule" temp jobs. When I went on to my first "real" job, I stumbled across the discovery that I didn't have to be a slave to my employer. From that point on (up until I decided to go freelance three years ago), I approached my interaction with employers as a negotiation and made it clear[1] to them that, if they tried to dictate any unreasonable terms to me, then I would walk. It worked out very well for me, yet my bosses always thought I was great and never so much as hinted that they might have felt I was trying to take advantage of them.
[1] By "made it clear", I'm referring to attitude and choice of approach, not to delivering ultimatums. If you feel the need to result to an ultimatum, then your negotiations have already failed and you're only hurting your chances of restoring them.
That wouldn't be anything new. Although I can't provide references, I've heard from a number of sources that, late in the Cold War, US subs got to be too quiet and the Soviets did exactly as you suggested in order to find them.
Debates over the existince and quality of Swedish pr0n aside, http://www.migrationsverket.se/english.jsp is the central site for Swedish immigration information, although you may wish to contact your local embassy/consulate for more situation-specific information (as I discovered when I called to get the exchange rate to use for calculating the application fee and was told there was a separate site for US applicants that I should have been looking at for those details instead).
The one exception is that the article mentions The Minnesota State High School League requires student athletes to sign a pledge that they will not drink alcoholic beverages. Depending on the strength of the evidence in each student's invididual photos and the timeframe (i.e., not including any incidents prior to their involvement in that league), I can see a good argument for enforcing whatever penalties are stipulated by the league for breaking that pledge. The article, however, also has quotes from a student who isn't involved in that league and the school acted against her as well. There is no indication that she has made any commitments to the school regarding what she will or won't do outside of the school environment, so I see no legitimate reason for them to have done anything other than informing her parents. If it's to the point where they absolutely reek of beer or weed, that's when you suspend them, call the police, etc But that is not their job. Isn't that right? If they reek of beer or weed at school, then that's something taking place within the school's jurisdiction, so it is then absolutely their job to deal with it accordingly, issuing warnings, suspensions, expulsions, etc. per the school's policy. But if the principal happens to pass a student on the street on a Saturday afternoon and the student reeks of beer, then, no, that's outside of the school's jurisdiction and we're right back to my previous paragraph: Inform the parents and/or call the police, just like any other responsible adult might (probably "should") do in that situation, but it's not within the scope of the school's authority, so bringing the school's power to bear on that student is not appropriate.
So, do you choose to reject the dogma of those grammarians who tried to impose Latin rules upon English which claims that singular "they" is incorrect or embrace the teachings of those same grammarians which state that "he" is the appropriate gender-inspecific pronoun? If you choose to reject the latter rule by considering the use of "he" to be horribly sexist, then you can just as easily reject the former and accept "they" as a valid singular pronoun.
I'm not talking about running apps remotely... What I am talking about is remote storage between sessions. While logged in your apps would run on the local workstation, only reading your profile from your remote store when logging in, and writing changes back when logging out.
Yes. As the GP said, unix was doing that 15 years ago, in the form of NFS-mounted home directories. (15 years is actually a rather conservative estimate, but that's beside the point.) Works great for applications running on the local workstation, whether command-line or X-based, but it's not really a secure enough solution to run across today's internet. (I know there are more secure remote filesystem technologies out there these days, but I don't have direct experience with doing this over any of them.)
Personally, while I think that kind of portable data/settings arrangement is great, I have no interest in the internet-based versions embraced by the current trend for the simple reason that I'm not interested in entrusting my data (much less my secrets) to $RANDOM_CORPORATION, no matter how convenient that may make things. Get a well-developed standard along these lines, allow me to set up my own server to store it all, and I may well do so, but I see no benefit in entrusting such things to a third-party repository which are not more than offset by the inevitability that, at some point, the repository's interests may differ from my own.
People in the armed forces should have to worry about acting out in uniform, a FedEx employee shouldn't have the same fears.
I disagree insofar as I believe that FedEx has just as much of a legitimate interest in what their employees do while in uniform as the army has in what their soldiers do while in uniform. But (and I think we agree at this point) that interest stops when you're off-duty, out of uniform, and there's basically no obvious connection between you and your employer to the casual observer.
As for where I got the eye-pecking bit from, I have a dead-tree copy of "Grimm's Complete Fairy Tales", which is where I first saw it, but the first hit on a google search for "grimm cinderella" (http://www.fln.vcu.edu/grimm/cinderella.html) appears to have the same version, which concludes:
You know, those old fairy-tales by the Grimm Bros. were rather cruel, but still parents read them to their children, because they teach them something about consequences.
No, they don't, actually. Find yourself a copy of the Grimm versions. While they are recognizable as basically the same stories as we know today, I've never heard any modern parents telling their kids about Cinderella's stepsisters chopping bits off their feet and shoving the remaining bloody stumps into the prince's glass slipper or a pair of pigeons pecking out an eye from each of them on their way to Cinderella's wedding and the other eye on their way home afterwards.
It's only been about 100 years since Marconi invented the radiotelegraph. Even if we assume that they would be 100% certain to pick up any signal we've sent, no matter how weak, and that they would be 100% able to recognize it as carrying meaning, any civilization more than 100 light years or so away would still have no inkling of our existence based on unnatural radio transmissions. A 100 light year sphere is a pretty small chunk of space compared to the rest of our galaxy. Much too small of a chunk to draw strong conclusions from, IMO.