I used the most recent drivers as of the day I tested. Doesn't mean they're any good, but they're the best available.
I'm desperately hoping the increased attention surrounding Linux, Ubuntu in particular is getting a lot of mainstream press lately, will lead to more native or Wine based support for games.
Vista has one great selling point as far as I'm concerned: DX10. It's inevitable that games will eventually require it, though so far it's not exactly a big deal.
So I notice Crysis has a "Very High" setting that's disabled for me in XP. Ok, I think, the first half or so of the game runs ok with High settings, so maybe it might just barely be playable on Very High. Just to be able to see what it looks like.
I boot into Vista and install the game there. Lo and behold, it runs at almost exactly half the FPS on High compared to in XP. Had to drop it to Medium to be even remotely playable. Needless to say, Very High is what I'd need to be to enjoy it with everything at max.
Is the culprit crap drivers for my hardware, general performance drain by Vista, or DRM using everything it can to make sure I'm actually allowed to use the computer today? I don't know, but I do know Vista has made me seriously try a Linux on a desktop for the first time (only used it for servers until now). If only more games supported it, or ran under Wine, I'd be happy as can be.
Everything for the C-64 was on diskette or (rarely) cartridge. Not in my area/reality it wasn't. I wore out two cassette players for my C64. The only one in the neighborhood with a 1541 was a spoiled brat that got a C128 + 1541. I can't remember ever going to a store and not being able to get a given game on tape. I can't really say if they had diskette versions of everything, but I'd be willing to bet a bit they were mostly stocked up on tapes.
Many at my office has spent years working at our US offices. In brief, they did not come home with much of an appreciation of this particular part of the system there. At times people came in to work to find their keycard not working. That was the first sign of them possibly not having a job still.
After years there, it was still nothing short of bizarre. Compare that to back home where there's usually a card passed around for signing, along with an envelope for a buck or two for a goodbye gift, for a week or two before quitting time. And half an hour or so worth of cake eating and goodbyes for the department on quitting day.
As to your post, I don't get it. You state you'd take it as an employee. On the other hand you're saying the employer would rather be without qualified staff for the 2-3 months it takes to train the replacement? Granted, the law is in place largely to protect the employee, but it has a clear benefit for the employer as well. People can't just up and leave overnight leaving projects stranded.
Goodness. It can't be more than a month or two ago I either read or heard (documentary/news) that the ozone layer was clearly in much better shape and giving the Montreal Protocol credit for it.
I guess this is a prime example of why I couldn't care less about the current environment/global warming hysteria. Hopefully they'll eventually calm down and start to make sense, as in talking as if they actually thought things through instead of the current knee jerk reactions. It's just political "look, we care!" posturing at the moment.
For example, the total car pool of the country I live in apparently contribute something like 0.000000012% of yearly man made CO2 emissions. Yet it's virtually the only thing politicians talk about. Way to shift focus away from there being a huge energy production boost to be gained from our hydropower plants by updating the turbines, thus reducing dependency on importing power produced by oh so environmentally friendly coal power plants.
Another example is an article that stated "we don't understand why the ice is melting as quickly as it is, it defies all our models", then later in the same article "there can be no doubt this is caused by mankind".
I think the truth is infinitely closer to "we don't have a clue but it sure gives us lots of column space" than anything else. Doesn't hurt to be conscious of our emissions and work to reduce them either way, but the way the politicians and media is handling this is hurting more than helping imo. I'm not the only one that stopped caring long ago.
There are some pretty nifty keyboard phones available at the moment. The HTC S710 for example (Opera supposedly works on it). That's what I'm getting. iPhone is too much bling, too little... phone.
Oh yeah, and after getting burned by the 3G iPod battery, I'm not getting anything Apple again unless it comes with user replacable battery.
Re:Can't Start My Car After Mouthwash
on
BioShock Review
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· Score: 1
In a few years, you might not have a choice about buying a car that checks your blood alcohol level for you. It is already in the works. Update us in a few years time when this is a reality. And your son just stumbled on top of a knife and your car will not let you start because you had half a beer for dinner or the the breathalyzer malfunctions.
Actually I think such a device being mandatory would be illegal here under current laws. While driving after so much as thinking about alcohol is illegal, you can make a judgment call to ignore that law in an emergency.
Let's use another analogy. Why have Police? Can't we trust the majority of people not to do things that are wrong? Let me complete that analogy for you. Why are people complaining about having to wait for the police to arrive and telling them it's ok to drive? Or not being able to drive at all because the police did not have time to come and enable their car for that evening?
Steam is an online content delivery system. It does not prevent me from installing it or its games as many times as I like. At least that's how it was/I thought it was until Bioshock.
It does require I maintain backups in case they go out of business and I can no longer install from them. I'm fine with that.
The HL2 shitstorm was due to the launch day protection. The game shipped encrypted and you needed to download the decryption key to get it running.
I never said I was born with a "don't buy DRMed" principle. Nor did I take the time to nuance it. From what I can remember though, I did not buy HL2 before I learned of Steam's offline mode. Which wasn't exactly perfect back then, but that's more of a technical issue.
From my point of view, Steam is not a copy protection system. It's a content delivery system. It lets me install Steam and its games as many times as I like (until Bioshock came along) on as many computers as I like. The fact I have to keep my own backups in case Steam goes out of business is a choice I made when I went with an online option for buying games.
While I sorta agree with the current Troll moderation, I don't think it was blatantly meant that way so I'll respond.
This was a very well thought out and tight conclusion to your post. Unfortunately it points out exactly why you should NOT have a problem with protected titles. No, it illustrates the fact that digital restrictions do nothing to prevent or, in virtually all cases, even slow piracy. The only considerable and consistent effect it has is to annoy the legit consumer.
They are, and this is why they are making it increasingly difficult to pirate their games. But they're not. Sure, once every few years someone comes up with a new idea that the crackers take a week or so to figure out as opposed to half an hour as with a well known protection scheme. But that's about it. It's not gotten more difficult for the consumer. Heck, I'd argue it's gotten easier. Back in the day you'd have to physically exchange floppies. Now everybody knows of gamecopyworld and the likes, and everybody has instant access.
Also, some take a different route and don't protect their games at all. Paying for a protection scheme that does nothing is money out the window. Heck, even the record labels are (veeery slooowly) finally realizing DRM does not and will never work.
Automobiles that made you fasten your seatbelt before they would start. Automobiles that make you pass a breathilizer test before you can start the car. An annoying car ding-dong sound until you stuff something into the seatbelt lock is analogous to a piece of software arbitrarily deciding you pirated it and choosing never to function again... how?
Don't even go there trying to attack cars that attempt to determine if you are too drunk to drive. I don't need to. It's not relevant. There are numerous very heavy reasons to object though.
What if you lost your serials to the Battlefield 1942 install discs? Again, relevance? Unless I'm mistaken, BF is an online game (and purely that). Bioshock is not.
Let's take Half-Life as an example instead, since I actually have that. Now, losing the product itself is not what we're talking about, so I'll discard the "would you whine if you lost your serial" argument. Half-Life requires a serial to install. Which is pointless in itself, but the real purpose of it is/was to prevent pirates from using official servers if you went online. I would have preferred the serial to only be required if you choose to go online with the game, but since it in no way hinders me from installing the game 40 years from now (assuming I can find an OS that'll run it), and it's only done once on install, I don't mind much.
I think it also has a cd-in-drive requirement, of which my view goes without saying.
So, to repeat my point with regards to cracks. Pirates get the better product. I must rely on a crack to secure myself access to the product I bought. That just should not ever be an issue.
Re:Why no mention?
on
BioShock Review
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· Score: 5, Insightful
A better question would be, why are you re-installing so often? No.. I really do think the question is why I should ever have to worry about a product I bought suddenly deciding I cannot install it. For any reason other than a technical one.
Accepting this type of digital restrictions on anything is a bad idea.
In Bioshock's case I unfortunately did not learn of it until unlock day. It just didn't occur to me that a Steam title would have anything like that. Had I picked up on it earlier I would've voted with my cash and canceled my preorder. I don't buy protected titles as a rule. And vice versa, I buy some unprotected titles just to show support.
Thankfully, there's always a crack. But I'm really fed up with the pirates consistently getting the better product than the legit customers.
Considering most things of decent value in such stores are either locked in the store area, or in the cage at the register, I fail to see how that scenario would be feasible. Not to mention I've yet to have anybody try to search my backpack when leaving such a store. It would hold a whole lot of hard drives.
Heck, I've been to stores where $20 items were locked items that a clerk had to come along and unlock, and then escort me to the register and watch me pay for.
Good thing labor is cheap in the US or it would be impossible to buy anything at all.
Circuit City did not have a legal right to check the contents of his bag or the receipt. It's voluntary. The police officer did not have a legal right to demand a drivers license (he was not operating a vehicle). The officer did have a legal right to demand he identify himself by name, which he did.
I'm not a US citizen, but I have traveled there a fair bit. I always wondered how the stores expected checking my bag and jotting a marker pen on my receipt would somehow prevent me from stuffing my backpack full of stolen goods. To clarify that bit: When on vacation my valuables stay with me at all times, that means a backpack full of electronics. Not one store has ever requested to see its contents.
Why did he choose to protest? If that answer still has not been made clear to you, just move right along to the nearest available police state. You will be most welcome in its law enforcement community.
There are ways to do this while keeping privacy in mind and largely intact.
To take where I live as an example. I can pick a manually operated lane and pay via coin toss or handing cash to a human being. These lanes do not record anything unless you try to blast through without paying.
I am not 100% positive such an anonymous alternative is required by law, but I'm fairly certain of it.
If opting for a transponder to avoid having to stop, there are strict limits as to how long identifiable information may be stored. The main concern is of course to register the amount of passes so your transponder is deducted properly. The specific booth or time is not required to fulfill that need. However, since you are entitled to complain, normally the specifics are stored for a short period of time for reference (you have full access to this information by contacting the company or logging into their site). You can opt out of that as well, but that obviously means you have less to point at if you do wish to complain.
Now, I do not live in the US. I trust the oversight system in place where I live to handle this properly. They not only have the power to shut down projects not respecting privacy, they can do the same to government surveillance experiments. And they have done so several times in recent history. I'd not put the same faith in the current US administration.
I remember an interview when one of them proclaiming he was virtually positive it would happen in his lifetime. Considering the odds we are talking about, I'd call that assuming a pretty high chance of success.
That we're doing it because it's the only thing we can think of is fine by me. I just don't see how anyone in their right mind can say something like what I just paraphrased.
I'm very much a layman. My knowledge is pretty much based on popular science type programs and documentaries. They seem to be very happy to mention how far our first TV signals would've reached by now, but never seem to mention they'd be drowned out before they get a chance to be detected. They also always mention the hydrogen band is very nice because of its relatively low amount of background noise.
If we're depending on a civilization actively beaconing a "we are here!" out into the great unknown, the odds aren't exactly improved compared to my original conclusion. I also think the time window would be about the same (read on).
I don't think the "wild advanced technologies" argument should be discounted. If we fast forward a thousand years and imagine we are all using [insert name of something like quantum entanglement communication] for just about everything. Will we be spending time and money on placing radio beacons to transmit into space? Will we be maintaining those for thousands of years, or will we by then consider it as unlikely to reach anyone worthwhile as smoke signals or signal mirrors? Yes, we'd remember radio.. But would we feel the same way about it as we do now?
I don't see much difference if we never invent anything to replace radio. There's no real budget for searching for extraterrestrial intelligence even today. Will there ever be the budget required to build transmitters of sufficient power to make it worth the effort? And maintaining those over the generations it would take to increase the odds of transmitting it at a time that happens to reach a civilization in its "radio age"? I don't think we would, nor "they".
My belief narrows it down to one of two. Either we'll be the ones discovered by someone far enough ahead of us to have nailed (speedy) interstellar travel and happens to stumble into our neighborhood and detect us (ignoring the chance they'd just move along). Sorry, the sci-fi gene in me refuses to accept that it can't be done. Or we'll pick up some emission from within the time window where a civilization found it worth the effort.
In case it got lost in my assume-fest. I feel the documentaries are way too certain we'll find anything by listening on the hydrogen band. I still think we've spent the equivalent of something like a millisecond listening for a signal that's unlikely to be there for more than a couple of milliseconds within a timespan of years. It doesn't hurt to try, but I'd give much better odds to inventing something better suited in the next hundred years than to discovering anything.
I'd be ecstatic to be proven wrong in my lifetime.
As far as structuring a piece of writing properly, yes you should be doing that if you want me to read it. I'd probably slog through a horribly structured text if it was written by a known genius, and I had interest in or need of the likely content.
For a forum post from an unknown however, it's a bit different. Why should I take the time to interpret something the poster didn't feel was worthwhile the time to phrase properly?
I always found it puzzling that the brightest minds seem to feel there's a fair percentage chance we'll find sign of extraterrestrial intelligence from radio waves. Granted, they're a lot more clever than me, so hopefully they have good reasons.
My view though...
Our civilization is in its technological infancy, and even we find radio rather slow and limiting. I can't imagine us leaving much of a radio footprint in another hundred years, especially not leaking it with omnidirectional broadcasting.
Imagining the same being the case of another civilization, we're trying to listen in on broadcasts from a time window of two hundred years or so, and we've been listening for a couple of decades. In a context where being off by a million years wouldn't be too bad, the odds strike me as fairly infinitesimal even if assuming thousands of civilizations located cosmically nearby.
Doesn't hurt to try, mind. It's not like we have a lot of other options open to us currently.
Smart choice. We bought Acers a few years back (laptops). Failure rate was over 50%. That's not an exaggaration. Literally over half of them had to go back, a large portion of those for new motherboards.
For some inexplicable reason I believe we stuck with them for 2-3 years before management finally saw the light (ie, the productivity cost of all the hardware failures) and switched us to another brand.
A few hundred employees and a few years of brand loyalty amounts to enough laptops to be statistically significant in my view.
As a complete opposite to you, I use virtually only my fingers and a little bit of wrist. My arm is rested on the desk. I feel that using my entire arm and parts of my upper body to slide a few grams of plastic around the table is overkill. But that's what most people around where I work do, their arms stretched out in front of them. The mice related physical issues here are normally neck/arm/shoulder related, not wrist. I can't help but feel there's a connection.
Perhaps you could quote the part of the article which defines that for me.
I'll do the honors.
World of Warcraft's Subscriber Definition World of Warcraft subscribers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or have an active prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the game and are within their free month of access. Internet Game Room players who have accessed the game over the last thirty days are also counted as subscribers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired prepaid cards. Subscribers in licensees' territories are defined along the same rules. Source: http://www.blizzard.com/press/070724.shtml
Apologies on behaf of the poster you replied to. He shouldn't expect anybody to actually click through to the Blizzard press release. This is Slashdot, after all.
Slashdot Mirror
I used the most recent drivers as of the day I tested. Doesn't mean they're any good, but they're the best available.
I'm desperately hoping the increased attention surrounding Linux, Ubuntu in particular is getting a lot of mainstream press lately, will lead to more native or Wine based support for games.
Vista has one great selling point as far as I'm concerned: DX10. It's inevitable that games will eventually require it, though so far it's not exactly a big deal.
So I notice Crysis has a "Very High" setting that's disabled for me in XP. Ok, I think, the first half or so of the game runs ok with High settings, so maybe it might just barely be playable on Very High. Just to be able to see what it looks like.
I boot into Vista and install the game there. Lo and behold, it runs at almost exactly half the FPS on High compared to in XP. Had to drop it to Medium to be even remotely playable. Needless to say, Very High is what I'd need to be to enjoy it with everything at max.
Is the culprit crap drivers for my hardware, general performance drain by Vista, or DRM using everything it can to make sure I'm actually allowed to use the computer today? I don't know, but I do know Vista has made me seriously try a Linux on a desktop for the first time (only used it for servers until now). If only more games supported it, or ran under Wine, I'd be happy as can be.
Many at my office has spent years working at our US offices. In brief, they did not come home with much of an appreciation of this particular part of the system there. At times people came in to work to find their keycard not working. That was the first sign of them possibly not having a job still.
After years there, it was still nothing short of bizarre. Compare that to back home where there's usually a card passed around for signing, along with an envelope for a buck or two for a goodbye gift, for a week or two before quitting time. And half an hour or so worth of cake eating and goodbyes for the department on quitting day.
As to your post, I don't get it. You state you'd take it as an employee. On the other hand you're saying the employer would rather be without qualified staff for the 2-3 months it takes to train the replacement? Granted, the law is in place largely to protect the employee, but it has a clear benefit for the employer as well. People can't just up and leave overnight leaving projects stranded.
Avoid items called "books". The amount of text will likely give you a massive coronary.
Goodness. It can't be more than a month or two ago I either read or heard (documentary/news) that the ozone layer was clearly in much better shape and giving the Montreal Protocol credit for it.
I guess this is a prime example of why I couldn't care less about the current environment/global warming hysteria. Hopefully they'll eventually calm down and start to make sense, as in talking as if they actually thought things through instead of the current knee jerk reactions. It's just political "look, we care!" posturing at the moment.
For example, the total car pool of the country I live in apparently contribute something like 0.000000012% of yearly man made CO2 emissions. Yet it's virtually the only thing politicians talk about. Way to shift focus away from there being a huge energy production boost to be gained from our hydropower plants by updating the turbines, thus reducing dependency on importing power produced by oh so environmentally friendly coal power plants.
Another example is an article that stated "we don't understand why the ice is melting as quickly as it is, it defies all our models", then later in the same article "there can be no doubt this is caused by mankind".
I think the truth is infinitely closer to "we don't have a clue but it sure gives us lots of column space" than anything else. Doesn't hurt to be conscious of our emissions and work to reduce them either way, but the way the politicians and media is handling this is hurting more than helping imo. I'm not the only one that stopped caring long ago.
Save your energy. It's like the cracker/hacker issue. Nobody seems to remember or care what the terms mean anymore.
I won't even point out the irony in that a Slashdot editor doesn't even know.
There are some pretty nifty keyboard phones available at the moment. The HTC S710 for example (Opera supposedly works on it). That's what I'm getting. iPhone is too much bling, too little... phone.
Oh yeah, and after getting burned by the 3G iPod battery, I'm not getting anything Apple again unless it comes with user replacable battery.
Actually I think such a device being mandatory would be illegal here under current laws. While driving after so much as thinking about alcohol is illegal, you can make a judgment call to ignore that law in an emergency. Let's use another analogy. Why have Police? Can't we trust the majority of people not to do things that are wrong? Let me complete that analogy for you. Why are people complaining about having to wait for the police to arrive and telling them it's ok to drive? Or not being able to drive at all because the police did not have time to come and enable their car for that evening?
Already made another post on this.
Steam is an online content delivery system. It does not prevent me from installing it or its games as many times as I like. At least that's how it was/I thought it was until Bioshock.
It does require I maintain backups in case they go out of business and I can no longer install from them. I'm fine with that.
The HL2 shitstorm was due to the launch day protection. The game shipped encrypted and you needed to download the decryption key to get it running.
I never said I was born with a "don't buy DRMed" principle. Nor did I take the time to nuance it. From what I can remember though, I did not buy HL2 before I learned of Steam's offline mode. Which wasn't exactly perfect back then, but that's more of a technical issue.
From my point of view, Steam is not a copy protection system. It's a content delivery system. It lets me install Steam and its games as many times as I like (until Bioshock came along) on as many computers as I like. The fact I have to keep my own backups in case Steam goes out of business is a choice I made when I went with an online option for buying games.
Also, some take a different route and don't protect their games at all. Paying for a protection scheme that does nothing is money out the window. Heck, even the record labels are (veeery slooowly) finally realizing DRM does not and will never work. Automobiles that made you fasten your seatbelt before they would start. Automobiles that make you pass a breathilizer test before you can start the car. An annoying car ding-dong sound until you stuff something into the seatbelt lock is analogous to a piece of software arbitrarily deciding you pirated it and choosing never to function again... how? Don't even go there trying to attack cars that attempt to determine if you are too drunk to drive. I don't need to. It's not relevant. There are numerous very heavy reasons to object though. What if you lost your serials to the Battlefield 1942 install discs? Again, relevance? Unless I'm mistaken, BF is an online game (and purely that). Bioshock is not.
Let's take Half-Life as an example instead, since I actually have that. Now, losing the product itself is not what we're talking about, so I'll discard the "would you whine if you lost your serial" argument. Half-Life requires a serial to install. Which is pointless in itself, but the real purpose of it is/was to prevent pirates from using official servers if you went online. I would have preferred the serial to only be required if you choose to go online with the game, but since it in no way hinders me from installing the game 40 years from now (assuming I can find an OS that'll run it), and it's only done once on install, I don't mind much.
I think it also has a cd-in-drive requirement, of which my view goes without saying.
So, to repeat my point with regards to cracks. Pirates get the better product. I must rely on a crack to secure myself access to the product I bought. That just should not ever be an issue.
Accepting this type of digital restrictions on anything is a bad idea.
In Bioshock's case I unfortunately did not learn of it until unlock day. It just didn't occur to me that a Steam title would have anything like that. Had I picked up on it earlier I would've voted with my cash and canceled my preorder. I don't buy protected titles as a rule. And vice versa, I buy some unprotected titles just to show support.
Thankfully, there's always a crack. But I'm really fed up with the pirates consistently getting the better product than the legit customers.
Considering most things of decent value in such stores are either locked in the store area, or in the cage at the register, I fail to see how that scenario would be feasible. Not to mention I've yet to have anybody try to search my backpack when leaving such a store. It would hold a whole lot of hard drives.
Heck, I've been to stores where $20 items were locked items that a clerk had to come along and unlock, and then escort me to the register and watch me pay for.
Good thing labor is cheap in the US or it would be impossible to buy anything at all.
I see you failed to read the article.
Circuit City did not have a legal right to check the contents of his bag or the receipt. It's voluntary. The police officer did not have a legal right to demand a drivers license (he was not operating a vehicle). The officer did have a legal right to demand he identify himself by name, which he did.
I'm not a US citizen, but I have traveled there a fair bit. I always wondered how the stores expected checking my bag and jotting a marker pen on my receipt would somehow prevent me from stuffing my backpack full of stolen goods. To clarify that bit: When on vacation my valuables stay with me at all times, that means a backpack full of electronics. Not one store has ever requested to see its contents.
Why did he choose to protest? If that answer still has not been made clear to you, just move right along to the nearest available police state. You will be most welcome in its law enforcement community.
There are ways to do this while keeping privacy in mind and largely intact.
To take where I live as an example. I can pick a manually operated lane and pay via coin toss or handing cash to a human being. These lanes do not record anything unless you try to blast through without paying.
I am not 100% positive such an anonymous alternative is required by law, but I'm fairly certain of it.
If opting for a transponder to avoid having to stop, there are strict limits as to how long identifiable information may be stored. The main concern is of course to register the amount of passes so your transponder is deducted properly. The specific booth or time is not required to fulfill that need. However, since you are entitled to complain, normally the specifics are stored for a short period of time for reference (you have full access to this information by contacting the company or logging into their site). You can opt out of that as well, but that obviously means you have less to point at if you do wish to complain.
Now, I do not live in the US. I trust the oversight system in place where I live to handle this properly. They not only have the power to shut down projects not respecting privacy, they can do the same to government surveillance experiments. And they have done so several times in recent history. I'd not put the same faith in the current US administration.
I remember an interview when one of them proclaiming he was virtually positive it would happen in his lifetime. Considering the odds we are talking about, I'd call that assuming a pretty high chance of success.
That we're doing it because it's the only thing we can think of is fine by me. I just don't see how anyone in their right mind can say something like what I just paraphrased.
I'm very much a layman. My knowledge is pretty much based on popular science type programs and documentaries. They seem to be very happy to mention how far our first TV signals would've reached by now, but never seem to mention they'd be drowned out before they get a chance to be detected. They also always mention the hydrogen band is very nice because of its relatively low amount of background noise.
If we're depending on a civilization actively beaconing a "we are here!" out into the great unknown, the odds aren't exactly improved compared to my original conclusion. I also think the time window would be about the same (read on).
I don't think the "wild advanced technologies" argument should be discounted. If we fast forward a thousand years and imagine we are all using [insert name of something like quantum entanglement communication] for just about everything. Will we be spending time and money on placing radio beacons to transmit into space? Will we be maintaining those for thousands of years, or will we by then consider it as unlikely to reach anyone worthwhile as smoke signals or signal mirrors? Yes, we'd remember radio.. But would we feel the same way about it as we do now?
I don't see much difference if we never invent anything to replace radio. There's no real budget for searching for extraterrestrial intelligence even today. Will there ever be the budget required to build transmitters of sufficient power to make it worth the effort? And maintaining those over the generations it would take to increase the odds of transmitting it at a time that happens to reach a civilization in its "radio age"? I don't think we would, nor "they".
My belief narrows it down to one of two. Either we'll be the ones discovered by someone far enough ahead of us to have nailed (speedy) interstellar travel and happens to stumble into our neighborhood and detect us (ignoring the chance they'd just move along). Sorry, the sci-fi gene in me refuses to accept that it can't be done. Or we'll pick up some emission from within the time window where a civilization found it worth the effort.
In case it got lost in my assume-fest. I feel the documentaries are way too certain we'll find anything by listening on the hydrogen band. I still think we've spent the equivalent of something like a millisecond listening for a signal that's unlikely to be there for more than a couple of milliseconds within a timespan of years. It doesn't hurt to try, but I'd give much better odds to inventing something better suited in the next hundred years than to discovering anything.
I'd be ecstatic to be proven wrong in my lifetime.
The post you replied to didn't ask a question.
As far as structuring a piece of writing properly, yes you should be doing that if you want me to read it. I'd probably slog through a horribly structured text if it was written by a known genius, and I had interest in or need of the likely content.
For a forum post from an unknown however, it's a bit different. Why should I take the time to interpret something the poster didn't feel was worthwhile the time to phrase properly?
Consider fixing your shift and enter keys while I ponder whether to read that.
I'm not sure what you're replying to. It doesn't seem to be my post.
Nothing I wrote said anything about an intended transmission from an ETI to us.
I always found it puzzling that the brightest minds seem to feel there's a fair percentage chance we'll find sign of extraterrestrial intelligence from radio waves. Granted, they're a lot more clever than me, so hopefully they have good reasons.
My view though...
Our civilization is in its technological infancy, and even we find radio rather slow and limiting. I can't imagine us leaving much of a radio footprint in another hundred years, especially not leaking it with omnidirectional broadcasting.
Imagining the same being the case of another civilization, we're trying to listen in on broadcasts from a time window of two hundred years or so, and we've been listening for a couple of decades. In a context where being off by a million years wouldn't be too bad, the odds strike me as fairly infinitesimal even if assuming thousands of civilizations located cosmically nearby.
Doesn't hurt to try, mind. It's not like we have a lot of other options open to us currently.
Smart choice. We bought Acers a few years back (laptops). Failure rate was over 50%. That's not an exaggaration. Literally over half of them had to go back, a large portion of those for new motherboards.
For some inexplicable reason I believe we stuck with them for 2-3 years before management finally saw the light (ie, the productivity cost of all the hardware failures) and switched us to another brand.
A few hundred employees and a few years of brand loyalty amounts to enough laptops to be statistically significant in my view.
As a complete opposite to you, I use virtually only my fingers and a little bit of wrist. My arm is rested on the desk. I feel that using my entire arm and parts of my upper body to slide a few grams of plastic around the table is overkill. But that's what most people around where I work do, their arms stretched out in front of them. The mice related physical issues here are normally neck/arm/shoulder related, not wrist. I can't help but feel there's a connection.
Most of those with pain opt for a vertical type mouse over a trackball.
World of Warcraft subscribers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or have an active prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the game and are within their free month of access. Internet Game Room players who have accessed the game over the last thirty days are also counted as subscribers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired prepaid cards. Subscribers in licensees' territories are defined along the same rules. Source: http://www.blizzard.com/press/070724.shtml
Apologies on behaf of the poster you replied to. He shouldn't expect anybody to actually click through to the Blizzard press release. This is Slashdot, after all.