I took a look at the paper in case I managed to understand something, and came across this:
Information Storage Capacity
If each extended kinase can either phosphorylate at the S-T site on a tubulin substrate, or not, the process effectively conveys one bit of information (e.g. no phosphorylation = 0, phosphorylation = 1). Each set of six extended kinases on either side of a CaMKII holoenzyme can thus act collectively as 6 bits of information. Ordered arrays of bits are termed âbytesâ(TM).
[...]
Logic Gates
Clusters of phosphorylated tubulin, and/or MAP attachment may serve as logic gates for propagating information. Figures 9 and 10 demonstrate two types of Boolean logic gates, an AND gate and an exclusive OR gate (XOR) in which MAPs convey inputs, with output along tubulin pathways. Figures 11 and 12 show AND and XOR gates in which MAPs convey output of inputs and processes in tubulins within the MT. The combination of XOR and AND logic gates forms a universal set for computation in which all other logic gates (NOT, OR etc.) can be conceived. Signals propagating through MT-MAP logic circuits may extend throughout cytoskeletal networks, regulating synaptic function, cognition and behavior.
Whoa. If that research is correct then that's really amazing.
This means the brain is using what we recognize as computational functions. That has profound implications. We ARE software.
Linux is stable, fast, secure, easy enough to use. It's a download away and you don't even need to waste a writable CD anymore. The price is right.
By 2003 This had Microsoft and Apple running scared. How can the big guys compete with something that's free and good? Over the last decade explosive growth of linux distros has seen Windows and Apple marginalised as the desktop OS of choice. In about 2005 it became common knowledge you'd buy a Windows desktop, paying microsoft tax and all, and after a few weeks you'd be shoving in a live CD and with about 6 clicks you have a whole new desktop, bringing across all your files and settings, right down to browser settings and automatically finding an appropriate OSS alternative application for what you had on your existing system. OEMs began installing distros on new desktops and from there linux proliferated in the desktop space to take over as #1 by 2008.
The sophisticated package management system in Linux evolved in to user-friendly App store system. This was highly attractive to developers and users alike and resulted in explosive growth in available software for the platform. This is why when Apple introduced their "App Store" in 2008 they were accused of copying Linux, which had this feature for some time although in a far more open format. iOS failed to attract developers from the much more entrenched Linux App system, and ultimately became a niche product.
So what was responsible for this growth? After all, any novice can shove one these things in to a computer and it's so self documenting they never need to consult a manual or even Google. People struggling with virus ridden crashing Windows machines would be handed a distro disk and have all their computing problems solved. It was the ultimate democratic computing revolution. The shear number of labour hours available to open source development meant proprietary OS vendors just could not compete pace of Linux development.
Despite huge pressure on lawmakers to restrict linux and a well funded smear campaigns to fight it, in 2011 a bankrupt Microsoft was forced to release Windows as open source software. Now a small community of nostalgic enthusiasts maintain the project.
Well at least that's what could have happened. I seriously used to believe this would happen. In about 2005 I started to realise it wouldn't. Why has desktop linux failed in this way?
I'm an OS agnostic, but with a soft spot for Linux it pains me to admit this: Because it sucks.
As I play around with my Android phone I realise the problem. Desktop linux has epic design problems, especially at higher levels. Despite the prowess of OSS at a line by line coding level, the further you get from the Kernel level the more things start to become an ungodly mess. Lately it seems out-of-touch UI designers are trying wreck things further.
Android's recipe got it right: Take the brilliant Linux Kernel and but a really good software stack on top of it and BOOM just like that you have a smartphone OS steamrolling over the competition.
OSS can win - look at Chrome and Firefox vs IE. And Android is Linux done right. But remember it IS Linux. So can Linux win if it just picks up it's act?
From teh abstract: "If these experiments nd evidence for hidden photons,
laser communications through matter are possible. We show that, using methods from free-space
optics, a channel capacity of more than 1 bit per second is possible in the near future, for distances
up to the Earth’s diameter"
The overload of sugar would do far more metabolic damage than any benefit realized from caffeine. Green Tea would be a better source of caffiene, and it comes along with many other beneficial compounds.
If it hit the water, it may cause a tsunami wave. Depending on where that wave makes landfall, it could disrupt anywhere from dozens to millions of people.
But weren't the tsunami's (2004 and Japan's) caused when large (kilometers long) sections of the seabed were suddenly raised up, displacing the seawater? The displacement of a 140 m meteor doesn't seem like it would be as much.
Further reading:
The energy released on the Earth's surface only (ME, which is the seismic potential for damage) by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami was estimated at 1.1×1017 joules,[24] or 26 megatons of TNT. This energy is equivalent to over 1500 times that of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, but less than that of Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated. However, this is but a tiny fraction of the total work done MW (and thus energy) by this quake, 4.0×1022 joules (4.0×1029 ergs),[25] the vast majority underground.
While the wikipedia page doesn't say how much water was displaced, it does say this:
the earthquake had made a huge impact on the topography of the seabed. 1,500-metre-high (5,000 ft) thrust ridges created by previous geologic activity along the fault had collapsed, generating landslides several kilometers wide. One such landslide consisted of a single block of rock some 100 m high and 2 km long (300 ft by 1.25 mi). The momentum of the water displaced by tectonic uplift had also dragged massive slabs of rock, each weighing millions of tons, as far as 10 km (6 mi) across the seabed.
Yes but how much of that available energy at the surface went to create the Tsunami? Would need to know how efficient that process is. Then there's a huge list of factors compounding how destructive the tsunami is for a given amount of energy the seabed can impart to the mass of ocean above it. I wouldn't be surprised if a pretty devastating tsunami could be created with something like the energy of a small nuke. How much of the meteorite's energy is transferred in to a tsunami I couldn't guess at but I have a hunch it might be much more efficient. Especially if the meteorite that size hit above abyssal plain at 5000m depth of ocean - it would probably not punch through to the crust, imparting maximum energy in to the ocean and would produce a series of tsunami waves that would dwarf any undersea earthquake megaton-for-megaton. I think we'd prefer it hit in shallow water if it had to hit the ocean.
Ironically a significant damage causing meteorite impact in this day age would be good for mankind in terms of bringing about positive change. Once you put aside the threat to millions of lives.
It would see huge redirection of funds towards space programs again. When you understand that our technological civilization as it is now is largely a result of cold war spending on science and technology, you'll know we probably need a slap in the face from the universe to get back on track and get back in to space.
Oh and we'll be hit by the one we don't see coming. So a lot of people are going to be very angry that so little funding was directed to watching for such hazards.
...For the 192 KHz fans out there, there is direct and proven mathematical reasoning for why 44 KHz audio is plenty.
I'm not audio engineer but while I am aware of a lot of that proof and agree with what you say. However I've always doubted it as, it's can be defeated with a pen and paper.
Draw a graph of a nice waveform on a piece of paper, oscillating lets say various frequencies, X=Time and Y=amplitude. Then try recreating that analog curve with what looks like a chunky bar graph where Y is now a minimum resolution of the sample rate to be tested. At 44khz sample rate, something like 22khz can only be described by two bytes, one for the peak, one for the trough. You'd run in to trouble drawing a good accurate waveform with blockiness starting from 1/10 to 1/2 of the sample rate which is the frequency ceiling it can produce (22khz in this case). So you can prove this way there is sound detail lost to 44khz starting surprisingly far down the human hearing range, and towards the limit of hearing it's a really getting a bit shit.
But I'm damned if I can hear the difference though - digital to analog converters of decent quality, doing their jobs. For downloadable music 44khz is just fine, considering 99% of the equipment it'll get played on.
But repeat this experiment with 192khz, and suddenly 20khz - the upper limit of human hearing is now described with the accuracy used of about 4500khz
And that, I believe is the a reason 192khz was picked, no loss of nuance in sound and accurate frequency reproduction all the way through the range of human hearing. Not really necessary, but 24-bit however, is well worth it.
The slashdot article isn't even on the same planet as right and wrong.
1. Browsers are more stable, secure and sandboxed than they were. You sacrifice all that but not upgrading and add some risk to your data security.
2. RAM is forever getting cheaper. Web browser memory usage is a non issue. If it is, you probably have a slot free for a sub $20 stick of memory
3. Web pages are forever becoming more complex. Memory consumption is not always the browsers fault and will invariably get worse over time.
4. Web browsing used to be quite taxing on a typical computer, moores laws seen to that.
5. What is this luddite doing with the rest of his ram that is so crucial? I surf Slashdot while I'm waiting for 1080p videos to render. It does make much difference.
I foresee I'll get modded down like the guy above me... but Vista SP1 isn't that bad. It's not much different than Win7, actually.
Well mod me down too because I spend a boat load of time with OSX and Linux and as much as I love each, I have to say Win7 is damn good.
W7's taskbar is the undefeated productivity king, I'm happy to settle it with fist fight with anyone who wants to disagree. Microsoft nailed integrated search in the OS, and popping of advanced searches from the start menu is pretty damn useful. The metro interface, love it or hate it, was far from a let down at it's release - If you've used it on a touch interface it was actually ahead of it's competitors at the time. It is at least highly innovative and a level up from the iPad's 2007 interface paradigm rut that Apple won't be able to get out of.
Actually.... Microsoft hasn't fucked anything up since Vista. Kinect, even, was actually more of a success than expected. Windows 8 doesn't seem to have any sign of problems.... erm... yet...
You can still use the normal desktop UI if you want, which I'm sure most desktop computer users will.
Except that the start menu is gone - Clicking 'start' returns you to the metro tiles - Sort of like clicking the button on an iPad. So if you consider the start menu to be part of the 'normal desktop UI' then no, you can't use the normal desktop.
But who uses the start menu anymore? Most users seldom use it, and power users will use the search function. You hit the windows key, you type a partial search string of what you are looking for, you hit enter. For instance type "fir" and hitting enter gets me firefox, you can also enter more complicated search strings including natural language stuff. It's the one killer thing I miss when I'm on any other GUI OSes is properly integrated search out of the box. It beggars belief how many knowledgeable IT guys don't know about it, I guess many thought Windows 7 was a patched up Vista and never bothered to learn about it. I thought so too until I had to work with it every day.
It's a touch ironic that as Windows has evolved, there has become less and less need to use the mouse. I almost feel sad for the mouse. The Metro interface is very much for touch, which I suspect very soon just about any laptop will have as standard, shortly thereafter most monitors will have it built in.
If you attach blood sucking leeches to each other till you join the first the last in a complete circle, you have a pretty good representation of the current global financial markets.
It's hard to see this search for the Higgs as anything other than a net economic loss. No work on exotic particles (that is, anything other than the proton, neutron, electron and photon that we've known for a century) has ever produced any useful technology...
People receiving pion radiation therapy would disagree, I think. How about muon imaging of geological and man-made structures? Neutrino imaging of the Earth? There you have three particles (or more depending on how you count the neutrinos) being used for practical purposes that you leave out.
One could have said the same thing about what Farrady found about electromagnetism, that the economic benefit wasn't much. The practical application of the higgs field we can only guess at now, but being able to dick about with the mass/inertia of matter for instance would have truly epic applications. This is about as insightful as saying in 1825 that electricity might be able to be used to make stuff move. Look how that technological revolution turned out.
It may not be very useful but it could equally well be the opposite. However from any particular point in history you can pretty much trace the current state of technological civilization back to some discovery at some point. I seem to notice a correlation between the effort in the discovery and how it transformed everything.
The higgs is a big deal for the future of mankind, if you don't immediately understand that it's kind of difficult to explain why.
You have a very long password you could not possibly remember of the top of your head. You wrote down on paper. You do not have the paper anymore. This at least makes it plausible that you have forgotten the password and removes the possibility you are lying. In practice this works well if the password was a passage for a book, a quote or a saying, or a shopping list, it could easily be overlooked by anyone rummaging through your bits of paper, not an obvious password. Even then only you would know what page and word and number of words to start from in a book for instance. You'd also pass a lie detector test if you had done this.
> The RIAA completely misunderstood Napster. they saw money being lost not a chance at making more money. It took 6 years and one billion itunes downloads before they realized just how badly they fucked up.
The music companies were always screwed - it didn't matter what choices they made. Music revenues have done nothing but decline in the past 10 years. Saying that iTunes did it right is missing the fact that digital music sales have not compensated for the loss of physical sales. Mathematically speaking, for every $100 decline in physical music sales over the past ten years there has been an $18 increase in digital music sales. It's not a winning strategy. At best, it's making the best of a bad situation.
(Sorry, I get annoyed when people like to explain the music industry's decline as a result of "not moving to digital sales" when it seems like the real culprit was always what the music industry thought it was: a fast, global internet combined with piracy. The music industry was not wrong about Napster.)
That would be true. If it were true. I get annoyed with the assumption that the music, movie and even book publishing industry is in any form of terminal decline. These industries have seen substantial growth over the last decade and are as profitable as ever.
I'd consider the fourth option, that we've only had human history for 6,000 years, good records for less than probably 2,000, and that we're in the boondocks. If we had been visited, the chance is that there just isn't evidence of it, and that we'll either have to wait to be visited again, hope that other civilizations see our radio transmissions and see it as worthwhile to come here, or go out there on our own and see what's out there. The problem is that our technology is young, we are young, and there really isn't anything that interesting about us.
I'd consider a different option. If they can cross interstellar space, what need would they have of anything at the bottom of a gravity well? Would they even be terribly interested in is? For all we know we might not be terribly interesting - we think we're at an impressive peak of our civilization now, but we may have hundreds of years to go before we're worth talking to. Till then we're probably more scientifically useful to another civilization remaining undisturbed and un-contacted, especially as we'd be unprepared for it.
If they have that technological level then staying hidden from us - to study us without interfering - should be trivial. We're probably being watched.
Slashdot Mirror
I took a look at the paper in case I managed to understand something, and came across this:
Whoa. If that research is correct then that's really amazing.
This means the brain is using what we recognize as computational functions. That has profound implications. We ARE software.
Wait, so the human body does nightly backups? That is awesome.
So all these years of late nights and benders I've been corrupting my backups?
It's the Hobbit pub. It comes in half pints, you insensitive clod!
Is that an American hobbit or Everywhere-else-in-the-world hobbit? (An American Hobbit is only 0.42 pints).
There I fixed that for you. Wait... my bad... Liberia and Myanmar also don't use the metric system. :)
Linux is stable, fast, secure, easy enough to use. It's a download away and you don't even need to waste a writable CD anymore. The price is right.
By 2003 This had Microsoft and Apple running scared. How can the big guys compete with something that's free and good? Over the last decade explosive growth of linux distros has seen Windows and Apple marginalised as the desktop OS of choice. In about 2005 it became common knowledge you'd buy a Windows desktop, paying microsoft tax and all, and after a few weeks you'd be shoving in a live CD and with about 6 clicks you have a whole new desktop, bringing across all your files and settings, right down to browser settings and automatically finding an appropriate OSS alternative application for what you had on your existing system. OEMs began installing distros on new desktops and from there linux proliferated in the desktop space to take over as #1 by 2008.
The sophisticated package management system in Linux evolved in to user-friendly App store system. This was highly attractive to developers and users alike and resulted in explosive growth in available software for the platform. This is why when Apple introduced their "App Store" in 2008 they were accused of copying Linux, which had this feature for some time although in a far more open format. iOS failed to attract developers from the much more entrenched Linux App system, and ultimately became a niche product.
So what was responsible for this growth? After all, any novice can shove one these things in to a computer and it's so self documenting they never need to consult a manual or even Google. People struggling with virus ridden crashing Windows machines would be handed a distro disk and have all their computing problems solved. It was the ultimate democratic computing revolution. The shear number of labour hours available to open source development meant proprietary OS vendors just could not compete pace of Linux development.
Despite huge pressure on lawmakers to restrict linux and a well funded smear campaigns to fight it, in 2011 a bankrupt Microsoft was forced to release Windows as open source software. Now a small community of nostalgic enthusiasts maintain the project.
Well at least that's what could have happened. I seriously used to believe this would happen. In about 2005 I started to realise it wouldn't. Why has desktop linux failed in this way?
I'm an OS agnostic, but with a soft spot for Linux it pains me to admit this: Because it sucks.
As I play around with my Android phone I realise the problem. Desktop linux has epic design problems, especially at higher levels. Despite the prowess of OSS at a line by line coding level, the further you get from the Kernel level the more things start to become an ungodly mess. Lately it seems out-of-touch UI designers are trying wreck things further.
Android's recipe got it right: Take the brilliant Linux Kernel and but a really good software stack on top of it and BOOM just like that you have a smartphone OS steamrolling over the competition.
OSS can win - look at Chrome and Firefox vs IE. And Android is Linux done right. But remember it IS Linux. So can Linux win if it just picks up it's act?
The beam could be intercepted at any point, without it being interrupted. It would also have horrific energy consumption per bit transmitted.
For practical communication using lasers to do something similar is much closer: http://iopscience.iop.org/0295-5075/87/1/10010/pdf/0295-5075_87_1_10010.pdf
From teh abstract: "If these experiments nd evidence for hidden photons, laser communications through matter are possible. We show that, using methods from free-space optics, a channel capacity of more than 1 bit per second is possible in the near future, for distances up to the Earth’s diameter"
The overload of sugar would do far more metabolic damage than any benefit realized from caffeine. Green Tea would be a better source of caffiene, and it comes along with many other beneficial compounds.
"The livers of the rats on the high-fructose diet looked like the livers of alcoholics, plugged with fat and cirrhotic." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fructose#Liver_disease
If it hit the water, it may cause a tsunami wave. Depending on where that wave makes landfall, it could disrupt anywhere from dozens to millions of people.
But weren't the tsunami's (2004 and Japan's) caused when large (kilometers long) sections of the seabed were suddenly raised up, displacing the seawater? The displacement of a 140 m meteor doesn't seem like it would be as much.
Further reading:
The energy released on the Earth's surface only (ME, which is the seismic potential for damage) by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami was estimated at 1.1×1017 joules,[24] or 26 megatons of TNT. This energy is equivalent to over 1500 times that of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, but less than that of Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated. However, this is but a tiny fraction of the total work done MW (and thus energy) by this quake, 4.0×1022 joules (4.0×1029 ergs),[25] the vast majority underground.
While the wikipedia page doesn't say how much water was displaced, it does say this:
the earthquake had made a huge impact on the topography of the seabed. 1,500-metre-high (5,000 ft) thrust ridges created by previous geologic activity along the fault had collapsed, generating landslides several kilometers wide. One such landslide consisted of a single block of rock some 100 m high and 2 km long (300 ft by 1.25 mi). The momentum of the water displaced by tectonic uplift had also dragged massive slabs of rock, each weighing millions of tons, as far as 10 km (6 mi) across the seabed.
Yes but how much of that available energy at the surface went to create the Tsunami? Would need to know how efficient that process is. Then there's a huge list of factors compounding how destructive the tsunami is for a given amount of energy the seabed can impart to the mass of ocean above it. I wouldn't be surprised if a pretty devastating tsunami could be created with something like the energy of a small nuke. How much of the meteorite's energy is transferred in to a tsunami I couldn't guess at but I have a hunch it might be much more efficient. Especially if the meteorite that size hit above abyssal plain at 5000m depth of ocean - it would probably not punch through to the crust, imparting maximum energy in to the ocean and would produce a series of tsunami waves that would dwarf any undersea earthquake megaton-for-megaton. I think we'd prefer it hit in shallow water if it had to hit the ocean.
Just threaten to sue it out of existance.
No, fund a lobby group to push for law change. Newton's first law of motion is at fault here.
Ironically a significant damage causing meteorite impact in this day age would be good for mankind in terms of bringing about positive change. Once you put aside the threat to millions of lives.
It would see huge redirection of funds towards space programs again. When you understand that our technological civilization as it is now is largely a result of cold war spending on science and technology, you'll know we probably need a slap in the face from the universe to get back on track and get back in to space.
Oh and we'll be hit by the one we don't see coming. So a lot of people are going to be very angry that so little funding was directed to watching for such hazards.
I'm not audio engineer but while I am aware of a lot of that proof and agree with what you say. However I've always doubted it as, it's can be defeated with a pen and paper.
Draw a graph of a nice waveform on a piece of paper, oscillating lets say various frequencies, X=Time and Y=amplitude. Then try recreating that analog curve with what looks like a chunky bar graph where Y is now a minimum resolution of the sample rate to be tested. At 44khz sample rate, something like 22khz can only be described by two bytes, one for the peak, one for the trough. You'd run in to trouble drawing a good accurate waveform with blockiness starting from 1/10 to 1/2 of the sample rate which is the frequency ceiling it can produce (22khz in this case). So you can prove this way there is sound detail lost to 44khz starting surprisingly far down the human hearing range, and towards the limit of hearing it's a really getting a bit shit.
But I'm damned if I can hear the difference though - digital to analog converters of decent quality, doing their jobs. For downloadable music 44khz is just fine, considering 99% of the equipment it'll get played on.
But repeat this experiment with 192khz, and suddenly 20khz - the upper limit of human hearing is now described with the accuracy used of about 4500khz
And that, I believe is the a reason 192khz was picked, no loss of nuance in sound and accurate frequency reproduction all the way through the range of human hearing. Not really necessary, but 24-bit however, is well worth it.
The slashdot article isn't even on the same planet as right and wrong.
1. Browsers are more stable, secure and sandboxed than they were. You sacrifice all that but not upgrading and add some risk to your data security.
2. RAM is forever getting cheaper. Web browser memory usage is a non issue. If it is, you probably have a slot free for a sub $20 stick of memory
3. Web pages are forever becoming more complex. Memory consumption is not always the browsers fault and will invariably get worse over time.
4. Web browsing used to be quite taxing on a typical computer, moores laws seen to that.
5. What is this luddite doing with the rest of his ram that is so crucial? I surf Slashdot while I'm waiting for 1080p videos to render. It does make much difference.
Yes exactly right. Most of us techies a fuck about web browser ram usage since 2005.
I foresee I'll get modded down like the guy above me... but Vista SP1 isn't that bad. It's not much different than Win7, actually.
Well mod me down too because I spend a boat load of time with OSX and Linux and as much as I love each, I have to say Win7 is damn good. W7's taskbar is the undefeated productivity king, I'm happy to settle it with fist fight with anyone who wants to disagree. Microsoft nailed integrated search in the OS, and popping of advanced searches from the start menu is pretty damn useful. The metro interface, love it or hate it, was far from a let down at it's release - If you've used it on a touch interface it was actually ahead of it's competitors at the time. It is at least highly innovative and a level up from the iPad's 2007 interface paradigm rut that Apple won't be able to get out of.
Actually.... Microsoft hasn't fucked anything up since Vista. Kinect, even, was actually more of a success than expected. Windows 8 doesn't seem to have any sign of problems.... erm... yet...
You can still use the normal desktop UI if you want, which I'm sure most desktop computer users will.
Except that the start menu is gone - Clicking 'start' returns you to the metro tiles - Sort of like clicking the button on an iPad. So if you consider the start menu to be part of the 'normal desktop UI' then no, you can't use the normal desktop.
But who uses the start menu anymore? Most users seldom use it, and power users will use the search function. You hit the windows key, you type a partial search string of what you are looking for, you hit enter. For instance type "fir" and hitting enter gets me firefox, you can also enter more complicated search strings including natural language stuff. It's the one killer thing I miss when I'm on any other GUI OSes is properly integrated search out of the box. It beggars belief how many knowledgeable IT guys don't know about it, I guess many thought Windows 7 was a patched up Vista and never bothered to learn about it. I thought so too until I had to work with it every day.
It's a touch ironic that as Windows has evolved, there has become less and less need to use the mouse. I almost feel sad for the mouse. The Metro interface is very much for touch, which I suspect very soon just about any laptop will have as standard, shortly thereafter most monitors will have it built in.
I just want a levitating house! Anyone for house air hockey?
If you attach blood sucking leeches to each other till you join the first the last in a complete circle, you have a pretty good representation of the current global financial markets.
It's hard to see this search for the Higgs as anything other than a net economic loss. No work on exotic particles (that is, anything other than the proton, neutron, electron and photon that we've known for a century) has ever produced any useful technology...
People receiving pion radiation therapy would disagree, I think. How about muon imaging of geological and man-made structures? Neutrino imaging of the Earth? There you have three particles (or more depending on how you count the neutrinos) being used for practical purposes that you leave out.
One could have said the same thing about what Farrady found about electromagnetism, that the economic benefit wasn't much. The practical application of the higgs field we can only guess at now, but being able to dick about with the mass/inertia of matter for instance would have truly epic applications. This is about as insightful as saying in 1825 that electricity might be able to be used to make stuff move. Look how that technological revolution turned out.
It may not be very useful but it could equally well be the opposite. However from any particular point in history you can pretty much trace the current state of technological civilization back to some discovery at some point. I seem to notice a correlation between the effort in the discovery and how it transformed everything.
The higgs is a big deal for the future of mankind, if you don't immediately understand that it's kind of difficult to explain why.
You have a very long password you could not possibly remember of the top of your head. You wrote down on paper. You do not have the paper anymore. This at least makes it plausible that you have forgotten the password and removes the possibility you are lying. In practice this works well if the password was a passage for a book, a quote or a saying, or a shopping list, it could easily be overlooked by anyone rummaging through your bits of paper, not an obvious password. Even then only you would know what page and word and number of words to start from in a book for instance. You'd also pass a lie detector test if you had done this.
If I get caught, I'll tell them to decrypt it with rot13!
> The RIAA completely misunderstood Napster. they saw money being lost not a chance at making more money. It took 6 years and one billion itunes downloads before they realized just how badly they fucked up. The music companies were always screwed - it didn't matter what choices they made. Music revenues have done nothing but decline in the past 10 years. Saying that iTunes did it right is missing the fact that digital music sales have not compensated for the loss of physical sales. Mathematically speaking, for every $100 decline in physical music sales over the past ten years there has been an $18 increase in digital music sales. It's not a winning strategy. At best, it's making the best of a bad situation. (Sorry, I get annoyed when people like to explain the music industry's decline as a result of "not moving to digital sales" when it seems like the real culprit was always what the music industry thought it was: a fast, global internet combined with piracy. The music industry was not wrong about Napster.)
That would be true. If it were true. I get annoyed with the assumption that the music, movie and even book publishing industry is in any form of terminal decline. These industries have seen substantial growth over the last decade and are as profitable as ever.
Income and paperwork.
But it's still probably helpful.
Better a false positive than a false negative.
I'd consider the fourth option, that we've only had human history for 6,000 years, good records for less than probably 2,000, and that we're in the boondocks. If we had been visited, the chance is that there just isn't evidence of it, and that we'll either have to wait to be visited again, hope that other civilizations see our radio transmissions and see it as worthwhile to come here, or go out there on our own and see what's out there. The problem is that our technology is young, we are young, and there really isn't anything that interesting about us.
I'd consider a different option. If they can cross interstellar space, what need would they have of anything at the bottom of a gravity well? Would they even be terribly interested in is? For all we know we might not be terribly interesting - we think we're at an impressive peak of our civilization now, but we may have hundreds of years to go before we're worth talking to. Till then we're probably more scientifically useful to another civilization remaining undisturbed and un-contacted, especially as we'd be unprepared for it.
If they have that technological level then staying hidden from us - to study us without interfering - should be trivial. We're probably being watched.
America's top few billionaires could fund the whole thing out of their own pockets.
goddamnit if you started facing it you'd just turn around twice and walk into it.
Maybe he meant 720 radians, not degrees? You'd get so dizzy you'd fall down in a heap.