Personally, I have hard time understanding why many people would not apparently accept a longer life than the current default. After all, one doesn't have to look back very far in time for the period, when just a few people even lived up to the age of 70 years and average life expectancy was around 30 years. Currently, most people in your average industrialized country can look forward to seeing that milestone and even still having a few good years left before the risk of needing nurses for everything becomes very probable.
While a significant portion of the increased average can be explained by the massive decrease in infant mortality, the improvements in medical care have also increased the length of healthy lifespan noticeably. In medieval times, I'd by now (I'm in my mid-thirties) probably be missing several of my teeth, have caught several more potent sicknesses, and in case of accidents, have higher probability of suffering the rest of my life from the effects of poorly mended injuries. I'd assume that given the option of probably having almost twice longer life with several decades of actually reasonably healthy additional time, quite a few medieval people would have gladly accepted the offer. So, as long as the additional time also increases the length of reasonably healthy life, why should I limit myself to the current figures?
(Regarding the idea of not really being able to figure out what to do with the additional time, that's completely weird concept to me. I've personally felt for a long time that there is far more to do than I seem to have time for. Perhaps I would change my mind after a few thousands of years, but almost certainly not with a few more decades.)
True, but if you're using prime lenses, are you really even going to think about using a digital camera?
It's a matter of individual preferences, but if I'd have to keep just one of my four lenses (two primes, two zooms) to use with my Canon 20D DSLR, I'd keep the 85mm f/1.2L. Sure, it has a quite slow focusing speed and I'll have to either zoom with my feet or change lenses to get the composition I want, but on the other side, the low-light performance is just insane and I generally like playing with narrow depth of field even when there is plenty of light.
On the other hand, somebody who shoots mostly landscapes in good light or keeps a tripod around would be far happier with a good wide-angle zoom.
No, I'm not joking. ZX BASIC was miles ahead of Commodore BASIC.
The CBM Basic v2.0 was indeed pretty bare-bones. On the other hand, non-trivial things tended to be too heavyweight to be done entirely on Basic anyway, so use of assembly was often the way to go. Personally, I chose the middle path and purchased Basic Lightning, which provided a hugely improved interprepter with fairly good graphics/sound performance as well.
I heard recently about some of the Samsung Yepp players supporting Ogg Vorbis as well. A quick search turned out at least a couple of models that list support for it:
Anyone remember the Amiga? It had a preemptive multitasking OS that lacked hardware memory protection because the hardware it was running on couldn't support it. And while the OS itself was very fast and efficient, the overall system was relatively crash-prone, because any memory-related programming error in any running application had a decent chance of taking down the system.
You probably know this, but for the benefit of random readers I'd like to mention some trivia: While there eventually was Amiga hardware that could have supported the memory protection (A3000, A4000 and actually pretty much any other models if fitted with a 3rd party expansion card, commonly known as turbo cards), the OS wasn't upgraded to make use of it accordingly because it would have broken compatibility with some existing features, including the message passing mechanism between processes, thus breaking a significant portion of existing applications badly.
Another major negative for GIMP is the utter lack of color management. Anyone who does "serious" image editing needs to be sure her colors are correct from the scanner/camera to her monitor and out of the printer. With GIMP - and Linux in general - this is currently impossible as it doesn't support ICC profiles
Actually, there seems to be some kind of support for color management and profiles in the Gimp 2.3 development series and thus also in the next stable Gimp series as well. The old 2.3.3 that I compiled almost one and half years ago had already a color management section in its Preferences menu, but I don't know myself what CM features will be there in GIMP 2.4.x series when it's released to the end-users; this has probably been covered in Gimp-developers list or something, but the sleep is calling too loudly for me to look for the information...
Regarding the appearance of CFLs, not all of them look as futuristic as your link. For example, the ones in our kitchen look just like the candle-shaped incandescent bulbs they replaced (well, the CFLs there have matted surface while the old bulbs were clean, but incandescent bulbs with matt finish are not that uncommon either). And while it's possible that I'm just not sophisticated enough to see the difference, I don't personally see other differences in the light they emit than an initially cooler color that warms up in a moment after they're turned on.
I'm personally pretty sick and tired of the use of megapixels as indicator for the quality of digital cameras and cameraphones. I pretty much bet that my older P&S digical camera (Canon Powershot G3) absolutely trounces any 4-megapixel camera phones in image quality, despite being released in 2002. It's even worse than the use of mega/gigahertzes and MIPSes for computer performance; the optics, size of individual photosites and other factors just have so much impact for image quality that it's downright silly to use a single figure to evaluate the image quality.
The above does not mean that I'd want phones with camera to disappear from the face of Earth; if the image quality is sufficient for somebodys needs, it's fine for me. I'd just like people to have some more informed bases for comparisons.
While I was using the A500, I mostly just played with it. However, with the later Amigas (which didn't have as much glamor as A1000/A500, due to the other machines starting to catch up, but they had *much* improved OS) I was enjoying the functionality provided by the OS quite a bit, or perhaps I had just starting to want more than gaming and nice demos. Datatypes, AREXX control ports provided by many applications for remote control and friends were truly nice things to have, as was the better-than-most multitasking. In many ways the OS continued to be a significant advantage longer than the custom chips.
For snoopdos-like functionality on Linux, strace is a quite similar nice application. Like snoopdos, it's pretty useful on debugging why application fails to start/does something insensible without using a real heavy-duty debugger. I'd assume that something similar would have been done for Windows.
The biggest hurdle that eventually led to downfall of Amiga was IMO the damn management that didn't quite appear to be able to make any decisions, or if they managed to decide something, it was apparently a result of consuming significant amounts of drugs (A600, the cheaper replacement for A500 that ended up being more expensive... A4000, a more limited machine than A3000+ that could probably have been out earlier as well... and so on).
The Amiga built-in graphics hardware (including the AGA machines) had fairly little support for 3D. While blitter did have support for filling areas and drawing lines, that was 2D operation. Thus, all fancy operations such as rotation, texture mapping, scaling and such had to be done by the CPU and blitter only did the final 2D drawing.
(Blitter was also actually slower doing those operations than the faster 68k CPUs, although it could be used in parallel with the main CPU.)
I think the price is more about the DO technology being new and not-so-proven. Some of the price difference can probably be explained by the significantly more sturdy build of the DO version and some other details such as non-rotating front element and faster autofocus performance, but not quite all.
I have had the DO version about year and half by now and like it personally, but the opinions about that lens seem to be fairly polarized. On the other hand, it _is_ significantly more compact that other Canon telezooms that have roughly the same focal length area covered and under good conditions, it provides good image quality. On the other hand, the lens has some sharpness issues when the focal length gets close to the 300mm end, it's more prone to flare or have contrast-eating haze when shooting into strong lights and a couple of other quirks such as the rare occasionally weird bokeh shapes. Personally, I can live with its quirks because I value the compactness highly and the contrast-eating haze / occasional lack of microcontrast are fixable in post-processing, but I can understand why quite a few people prefer the non-DO version for other reasons than the price.
I've occasionally been wondering if Canon will ever do more DO-based lenses than the two currently available; it might be that they haven't been a huge commercial success; either the price would have to come down, or the quirks of the DO should to be ironed out a bit more
I agree with you; it's perfectly possible to buy gadgets that do not break in a year or two, if you are somewhat careful while choosing your tools. My GSM phone (Siemens ME 45) is now over 4 years old and the only significant change is that the battery capacity has decreased to something like three days of usage with one full charge. My two digital cameras (Canon EOS 20D, Canon Powershot g3) have been working nicely (G3 about four years, 20D about two years).
I also recently bought a secondhand lens for the 20D (85mm f/1.2L); the lens was manufactured in 1990. It has no scratches, dents or any visible sights of damage; likewise, image quality looks good too. In the 20D (and most other (D)SLR cameras the shutter is the first part to fail; it's expected to survive something between 50000 and 100000 cycles. So far, I've taken about 16000 photos, so it should be good for something like 5-10 years from now on, unless I really have bad luck. (Yes, I know, at the price of the 20D I could have had a couple of even more durable non-digital SLR bodies...)
I've also had 2 hard drive failures in the about 16 years of using machines with them; one of them was caused by me dropping a keyboard on a running drive by accident, so that hardly counts as a normal case. Likewise, just one motherboard has died on me, and I'm not one of those persons who completely upgrade their machines every year or two.
On the other hand, sinking to the gravel happens mostly due to gravity, which is fairly low (~1/36 of Earth gravity) even at Ceres, which contains a significant part of the whole asteroid belt mass. So I think the risk of that happening is fairly minor if the landing is performed at small velocity.
Hmm, is there any truly comphehensive guide about the capabilities of the sound chip (Pokey) online? I got sufficiently curious to do a bit of googling about it, but didn't really find any really comphehensive feature / register descriptions or such. I did find comments about some interesting tricks, such as possibility of combining channels to produce more than 8 bits of resolution, though. (Filtering capabilities seem to have been restricted to high-pass filtering though, whereas SID filtering provided low/band/high-pass filtering options, or combinations of them.)
The pre-ST Atari machines were fairly rare around where I live, so I didn't ever really see or hear them in action. Perhaps I should give the SAP player a try and check out some Atari tunes; if somebody has cared enough to build an archive of them, they can't be truly bad:)
I'll sure be happy when/if OWL eventually materializes (currently it's still more a concept than 'real'), as it would undeniably be a revolutionary telescope.
However, I don't really see Hubble service mission and OWL as direct competitors:
- OWL is at least a decade away in the future even without any delays, whereas Hubble service mission (if it happens) is about a more immediate problem that needs to be addressed in a couple of years, unless 'we' accept a gap of several years in existence of large space-based telescopes.
- Space-based and ground-based telescopes are still different beasts; it's not possible to currently haul truly gigantic telescopes to space, but space does provide its own benefits, such as no unwanted loss of many bands of electromagnetic spectrum; any ground-based telescope will have a hard time matching the infrared and UV observation performance of space-based telescopes, even if the difference in aperture is huge. Space-based telescopes also do not have to struggle with being blinded roughly half of the time due to daylight, which somewhat lessens the impact of smaller diameter.
- I'd assume that they're not completing directly for the same money, as OWL is an European project.
I have a recollection of adaptive optics also having issues with correcting large fields of view; if that's true, earth-based telescopes would excel mostly on small targets. However, this bit might be worth taking with a grain of doubt, as I might have just misunderstood something myself.
So, my opinion is that having both kind of telescopes would be nice; huge earth-bound telescopes for visible light/high resolving power and smaller space telescopes for peeking into other wavelengths. I'd really like to see something like Darwin or TPF as well, though...
Re:Who would have thought that
on
The Hubble Lives On
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Regarding the replacement (well, close enough, even though the JWST is more focused on infrared observations); yes, it's hopefully going to be launched to the space around 2013 or so. However, Hubble won't last that long and it would be quite inconvenient to have a gap of several years between them without any comparable IR/visible light telescopes in space.
Regarding the ground-based telescopes, while adaptive optics and other fancy things allow them to outperform Hubble in some ways such as resolving power, there are still things they can't do. The ground-based telescopes are unable to observe anything for a significant part of the time because sun is happily shining on the sky and reflecting off the atmosphere. Likewise, no matter where you place the telescope under the atmosphere, weather will occasionally be an issue and atmosphere also tends to absorb some of the wavelenghts, although that's not a big issue on visible light. Additionally, atmospheric glow, no matter whether it's from reflected light pollution or natural, makes observations of very dim targets more difficult on the ground.
Being an hopeless astronomy freak, I couldn't help noticing that the article doesn't quite appear to know where they're actually sending the broadcast. On the beginning on the article they're talking about sending the broadcast to a star in Big Dipper. Later, the name of the star turns out to be Errai. All is fine and dandy, except that the Errai resides in Cepheus.
Article does not mention why that particular star was selected, however, it appears to host a known exoplanet, which is quite probably the reason here. Errai also happens to be somewhat more massive than our sun, which means that it progresses through its 'life' faster than the Sol. Any possible life out there has less time to evolve before the star kicks the bucket. It's also a double star, which may make the orbits of the planet(s) in the system somewhat more chaotic.
Personally, I would think it as an equally low thing to do if it would be done by my "own" country. Why would that attitude need some oppression against some other nation as a reason? (The quotes, because I'm not really that much a nationalist, even though I'm grateful for fairly peaceful and safe environment to grow / work in and all that.)
Or he/she could ask for an independent specialist, such as a (preferably young) doctor to certify that a) the noise is there and b) it's seriously annoying for all people who can hear that frequency range. If no peaceful resolution can be reached, then suing the old man for causing public discomfort with the specialist as a witness should do the trick with less risk of interesting tightening circles of revenge, unlike the various straight-from-the-caves - brute force solutions.
Additionally, at least the eyesight of cats is actually able to resolve less detail than a human with a normal vision. They would not be that impressive predators without the mentioned significantly better ability to detect motion and their about six times more light-sensitive vision, especially when it's twilight or dark. I've fairly often noticed that I can spot a stationary hare when the cats miss it, until we get closer or it moves. No doubt this is partly because I view the world from a higher point, but I'd say that my more acute vision regarding details plays a part as well.
(Of course, their sense of smell and especially hearing is far superior and helps as well as the motion sensitivity in many cases)
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I have hard time understanding why many people would not apparently accept a longer life than the current default. After all, one doesn't have to look back very far in time for the period, when just a few people even lived up to the age of 70 years and average life expectancy was around 30 years. Currently, most people in your average industrialized country can look forward to seeing that milestone and even still having a few good years left before the risk of needing nurses for everything becomes very probable.
While a significant portion of the increased average can be explained by the massive decrease in infant mortality, the improvements in medical care have also increased the length of healthy lifespan noticeably. In medieval times, I'd by now (I'm in my mid-thirties) probably be missing several of my teeth, have caught several more potent sicknesses, and in case of accidents, have higher probability of suffering the rest of my life from the effects of poorly mended injuries. I'd assume that given the option of probably having almost twice longer life with several decades of actually reasonably healthy additional time, quite a few medieval people would have gladly accepted the offer. So, as long as the additional time also increases the length of reasonably healthy life, why should I limit myself to the current figures?
(Regarding the idea of not really being able to figure out what to do with the additional time, that's completely weird concept to me. I've personally felt for a long time that there is far more to do than I seem to have time for. Perhaps I would change my mind after a few thousands of years, but almost certainly not with a few more decades.)
True, but if you're using prime lenses, are you really even going to think about using a digital camera?
It's a matter of individual preferences, but if I'd have to keep just one of my four lenses (two primes, two zooms) to use with my Canon 20D DSLR, I'd keep the 85mm f/1.2L. Sure, it has a quite slow focusing speed and I'll have to either zoom with my feet or change lenses to get the composition I want, but on the other side, the low-light performance is just insane and I generally like playing with narrow depth of field even when there is plenty of light.
On the other hand, somebody who shoots mostly landscapes in good light or keeps a tripod around would be far happier with a good wide-angle zoom.
No, I'm not joking. ZX BASIC was miles ahead of Commodore BASIC.
The CBM Basic v2.0 was indeed pretty bare-bones. On the other hand, non-trivial things tended to be too heavyweight to be done entirely on Basic anyway, so use of assembly was often the way to go. Personally, I chose the middle path and purchased Basic Lightning, which provided a hugely improved interprepter with fairly good graphics/sound performance as well.
I heard recently about some of the Samsung Yepp players supporting Ogg Vorbis as well. A quick search turned out at least a couple of models that list support for it:
l ayer/yp_t9bab.asp?page=Specificationsl ayer/yp_u1vels.asp?page=Specifications
http://www.samsung.com/uk/products/mp3player/mp3p
http://www.samsung.com/uk/products/mp3player/mp3p
(slightly confusingly, not all Samsung websites do mention Ogg support for these same models)
Anyone remember the Amiga? It had a preemptive multitasking OS that lacked hardware memory protection because the hardware it was running on couldn't support it. And while the OS itself was very fast and efficient, the overall system was relatively crash-prone, because any memory-related programming error in any running application had a decent chance of taking down the system.
:)
You probably know this, but for the benefit of random readers I'd like to mention some trivia: While there eventually was Amiga hardware that could have supported the memory protection (A3000, A4000 and actually pretty much any other models if fitted with a 3rd party expansion card, commonly known as turbo cards), the OS wasn't upgraded to make use of it accordingly because it would have broken compatibility with some existing features, including the message passing mechanism between processes, thus breaking a significant portion of existing applications badly.
(Yes, I realize that this is a bit off-topic
Another major negative for GIMP is the utter lack of color management. Anyone who does "serious" image editing needs to be sure her colors are correct from the scanner/camera to her monitor and out of the printer. With GIMP - and Linux in general - this is currently impossible as it doesn't support ICC profiles
Actually, there seems to be some kind of support for color management and profiles in the Gimp 2.3 development series and thus also in the next stable Gimp series as well. The old 2.3.3 that I compiled almost one and half years ago had already a color management section in its Preferences menu, but I don't know myself what CM features will be there in GIMP 2.4.x series when it's released to the end-users; this has probably been covered in Gimp-developers list or something, but the sleep is calling too loudly for me to look for the information...
Regarding the appearance of CFLs, not all of them look as futuristic as your link. For example, the ones in our kitchen look just like the candle-shaped incandescent bulbs they replaced (well, the CFLs there have matted surface while the old bulbs were clean, but incandescent bulbs with matt finish are not that uncommon either). And while it's possible that I'm just not sophisticated enough to see the difference, I don't personally see other differences in the light they emit than an initially cooler color that warms up in a moment after they're turned on.
I'm personally pretty sick and tired of the use of megapixels as indicator for the quality of digital cameras and cameraphones. I pretty much bet that my older P&S digical camera (Canon Powershot G3) absolutely trounces any 4-megapixel camera phones in image quality, despite being released in 2002. It's even worse than the use of mega/gigahertzes and MIPSes for computer performance; the optics, size of individual photosites and other factors just have so much impact for image quality that it's downright silly to use a single figure to evaluate the image quality.
The above does not mean that I'd want phones with camera to disappear from the face of Earth; if the image quality is sufficient for somebodys needs, it's fine for me. I'd just like people to have some more informed bases for comparisons.
Actually, the hypernova is an already established term :)
While I was using the A500, I mostly just played with it. However, with the later Amigas (which didn't have as much glamor as A1000/A500, due to the other machines starting to catch up, but they had *much* improved OS) I was enjoying the functionality provided by the OS quite a bit, or perhaps I had just starting to want more than gaming and nice demos. Datatypes, AREXX control ports provided by many applications for remote control and friends were truly nice things to have, as was the better-than-most multitasking. In many ways the OS continued to be a significant advantage longer than the custom chips.
For snoopdos-like functionality on Linux, strace is a quite similar nice application. Like snoopdos, it's pretty useful on debugging why application fails to start/does something insensible without using a real heavy-duty debugger. I'd assume that something similar would have been done for Windows.
The biggest hurdle that eventually led to downfall of Amiga was IMO the damn management that didn't quite appear to be able to make any decisions, or if they managed to decide something, it was apparently a result of consuming significant amounts of drugs (A600, the cheaper replacement for A500 that ended up being more expensive... A4000, a more limited machine than A3000+ that could probably have been out earlier as well... and so on).
The Amiga built-in graphics hardware (including the AGA machines) had fairly little support for 3D. While blitter did have support for filling areas and drawing lines, that was 2D operation. Thus, all fancy operations such as rotation, texture mapping, scaling and such had to be done by the CPU and blitter only did the final 2D drawing.
(Blitter was also actually slower doing those operations than the faster 68k CPUs, although it could be used in parallel with the main CPU.)
I think the price is more about the DO technology being new and not-so-proven. Some of the price difference can probably be explained by the significantly more sturdy build of the DO version and some other details such as non-rotating front element and faster autofocus performance, but not quite all.
I have had the DO version about year and half by now and like it personally, but the opinions about that lens seem to be fairly polarized. On the other hand, it _is_ significantly more compact that other Canon telezooms that have roughly the same focal length area covered and under good conditions, it provides good image quality. On the other hand, the lens has some sharpness issues when the focal length gets close to the 300mm end, it's more prone to flare or have contrast-eating haze when shooting into strong lights and a couple of other quirks such as the rare occasionally weird bokeh shapes. Personally, I can live with its quirks because I value the compactness highly and the contrast-eating haze / occasional lack of microcontrast are fixable in post-processing, but I can understand why quite a few people prefer the non-DO version for other reasons than the price.
I've occasionally been wondering if Canon will ever do more DO-based lenses than the two currently available; it might be that they haven't been a huge commercial success; either the price would have to come down, or the quirks of the DO should to be ironed out a bit more
I agree with you; it's perfectly possible to buy gadgets that do not break in a year or two, if you are somewhat careful while choosing your tools. My GSM phone (Siemens ME 45) is now over 4 years old and the only significant change is that the battery capacity has decreased to something like three days of usage with one full charge. My two digital cameras (Canon EOS 20D, Canon Powershot g3) have been working nicely (G3 about four years, 20D about two years).
I also recently bought a secondhand lens for the 20D (85mm f/1.2L); the lens was manufactured in 1990. It has no scratches, dents or any visible sights of damage; likewise, image quality looks good too. In the 20D (and most other (D)SLR cameras the shutter is the first part to fail; it's expected to survive something between 50000 and 100000 cycles. So far, I've taken about 16000 photos, so it should be good for something like 5-10 years from now on, unless I really have bad luck. (Yes, I know, at the price of the 20D I could have had a couple of even more durable non-digital SLR bodies...)
I've also had 2 hard drive failures in the about 16 years of using machines with them; one of them was caused by me dropping a keyboard on a running drive by accident, so that hardly counts as a normal case. Likewise, just one motherboard has died on me, and I'm not one of those persons who completely upgrade their machines every year or two.
On the other hand, sinking to the gravel happens mostly due to gravity, which is fairly low (~1/36 of Earth gravity) even at Ceres, which contains a significant part of the whole asteroid belt mass. So I think the risk of that happening is fairly minor if the landing is performed at small velocity.
Hmm, is there any truly comphehensive guide about the capabilities of the sound chip (Pokey) online? I got sufficiently curious to do a bit of googling about it, but didn't really find any really comphehensive feature / register descriptions or such. I did find comments about some interesting tricks, such as possibility of combining channels to produce more than 8 bits of resolution, though. (Filtering capabilities seem to have been restricted to high-pass filtering though, whereas SID filtering provided low/band/high-pass filtering options, or combinations of them.)
:)
The pre-ST Atari machines were fairly rare around where I live, so I didn't ever really see or hear them in action. Perhaps I should give the SAP player a try and check out some Atari tunes; if somebody has cared enough to build an archive of them, they can't be truly bad
I'll sure be happy when/if OWL eventually materializes (currently it's still more a concept than 'real'), as it would undeniably be a revolutionary telescope.
However, I don't really see Hubble service mission and OWL as direct competitors:
- OWL is at least a decade away in the future even without any delays, whereas Hubble service mission (if it happens) is about a more immediate problem that needs to be addressed in a couple of years, unless 'we' accept a gap of several years in existence of large space-based telescopes.
- Space-based and ground-based telescopes are still different beasts; it's not possible to currently haul truly gigantic telescopes to space, but space does provide its own benefits, such as no unwanted loss of many bands of electromagnetic spectrum; any ground-based telescope will have a hard time matching the infrared and UV observation performance of space-based telescopes, even if the difference in aperture is huge. Space-based telescopes also do not have to struggle with being blinded roughly half of the time due to daylight, which somewhat lessens the impact of smaller diameter.
- I'd assume that they're not completing directly for the same money, as OWL is an European project.
I have a recollection of adaptive optics also having issues with correcting large fields of view; if that's true, earth-based telescopes would excel mostly on small targets. However, this bit might be worth taking with a grain of doubt, as I might have just misunderstood something myself.
So, my opinion is that having both kind of telescopes would be nice; huge earth-bound telescopes for visible light/high resolving power and smaller space telescopes for peeking into other wavelengths. I'd really like to see something like Darwin or TPF as well, though...
Regarding the replacement (well, close enough, even though the JWST is more focused on infrared observations); yes, it's hopefully going to be launched to the space around 2013 or so. However, Hubble won't last that long and it would be quite inconvenient to have a gap of several years between them without any comparable IR/visible light telescopes in space.
Regarding the ground-based telescopes, while adaptive optics and other fancy things allow them to outperform Hubble in some ways such as resolving power, there are still things they can't do. The ground-based telescopes are unable to observe anything for a significant part of the time because sun is happily shining on the sky and reflecting off the atmosphere. Likewise, no matter where you place the telescope under the atmosphere, weather will occasionally be an issue and atmosphere also tends to absorb some of the wavelenghts, although that's not a big issue on visible light. Additionally, atmospheric glow, no matter whether it's from reflected light pollution or natural, makes observations of very dim targets more difficult on the ground.
The Finns were highly tactically superior, but lost quite a bit of their land (roughly between a third and a fourth).
Not quite that much; the real number is about one tenth.
Being an hopeless astronomy freak, I couldn't help noticing that the article doesn't quite appear to know where they're actually sending the broadcast. On the beginning on the article they're talking about sending the broadcast to a star in Big Dipper. Later, the name of the star turns out to be Errai. All is fine and dandy, except that the Errai resides in Cepheus.
Article does not mention why that particular star was selected, however, it appears to host a known exoplanet, which is quite probably the reason here. Errai also happens to be somewhat more massive than our sun, which means that it progresses through its 'life' faster than the Sol. Any possible life out there has less time to evolve before the star kicks the bucket. It's also a double star, which may make the orbits of the planet(s) in the system somewhat more chaotic.
Personally, I would think it as an equally low thing to do if it would be done by my "own" country. Why would that attitude need some oppression against some other nation as a reason? (The quotes, because I'm not really that much a nationalist, even though I'm grateful for fairly peaceful and safe environment to grow / work in and all that.)
I could hear the sound quite easily with my headphones and I'm turning 34 next week.
Or he/she could ask for an independent specialist, such as a (preferably young) doctor to certify that a) the noise is there and b) it's seriously annoying for all people who can hear that frequency range. If no peaceful resolution can be reached, then suing the old man for causing public discomfort with the specialist as a witness should do the trick with less risk of interesting tightening circles of revenge, unlike the various straight-from-the-caves - brute force solutions.
Additionally, at least the eyesight of cats is actually able to resolve less detail than a human with a normal vision. They would not be that impressive predators without the mentioned significantly better ability to detect motion and their about six times more light-sensitive vision, especially when it's twilight or dark. I've fairly often noticed that I can spot a stationary hare when the cats miss it, until we get closer or it moves. No doubt this is partly because I view the world from a higher point, but I'd say that my more acute vision regarding details plays a part as well.
(Of course, their sense of smell and especially hearing is far superior and helps as well as the motion sensitivity in many cases)
Dunno about US, but none of the places I've been working in Finland have warned about romances in any way.