I wasn't minimizing the problems, and by the way, you forgot arcing, which is what killed one of the tether experiments. My first reference also talks about the difficulties the tether caused to the shuttle navigation systems, by giving it a small continuous forward "thrust".
However, I would consider tethers to be a technology problem, and while there are difficulties, we've worked our way around far bigger ones. The real question is if tethers can grant sufficient benefits to be worth conquering the problems.
Building it and spinning it up are the easy parts.
Doing anything with it once you've spun it up is the hard part. At the very least, it's intuitively obvious that you want 2 tethers and 2 tethered objects, along with a hub that stays in fixed position, only rotating. Even with that, I'd be inclined to keep the hub fully stationary and have a rotating bearing at the end of a boom. With this "simple" setup you only have the problem of dynamics of mass in tethered objects - like people walking around, standing up, laying down, etc. Did I mention that the boom probably needs provisions to flex, because there's no way to react fast enough for the needed dynamic balance in a semi-rigid system. Even what I suggested ignores the dirty details - it's just one step more practical/complicated than simply spinning up 2 tethered objects.
How about the other type of tether - the long one. (gravity-gradient) There were supposed to be 3 shuttle experiments with tethers, and at last report I think they'd done the first and smallest, and had trouble with the second. (snarling/breakage?)
The actual shuttle experiments seem to be concerned with "dropping" a probe into the very upper atmosphere for measurments and observation. The third reference, non-shuttle deployed, seems to be materials/duration research.
None seem interested in generating effective gravity or skyhooks/pinwheels.
As long as you're going to demonize regulation, spread the joy around.
Demonize Corporate America, too. Why should anyone hire a US citizen with an advanced degree when you can hire a Chinese or Indian with an equivalent degree for a fraction of the price?
Never mind that you're GUTTING the US "value" in order to put more short-term profits in your pocket. Never mind that you're GUTTING the US economy to put more short-term profits in your pocket. (Who in the US do you think is going to buy your products, as workers in the US descend toward minimum wage? Oh yeah! Minimum wage! That piece of regulatory bullpuckey that should be abolished, to improve short-term profitability even further!))
As far as needless regulation, go take a breath of the fine Chinese air. Closer to home, go for a pleasant stroll on the Normandy Coast. Go sailing the the Pacific Gyre.
There used to be real Conservatives, but they're mostly gone today. Today's Conservatives are conserving their wealth and power. Stay on TOP at all costs, even if that turns it into a dungheap you're on top of.
I seriously doubt that the planet has an ideal temperature.
However OUR ideal temperature is "similar to what it's been for the past 100 years or so." The past 100 years or so of climate has been what's guided our use of land for habitation and food production. Change the temperature very much, and "very much" may well be fractions of a degree, we need to change our land use. There can be very serious political repercussions to "change our land use," when some country's quantity arable or inhabitable land drops.
We pollute because sometimes the costs of that pollution are not well understood, but the profits to be gained by polluting are.
> caused by humans
I'll repeat.
Doesn't matter.
Our society, habitation, and food production are tuned around the way the climate has been for the past 100 years or so. Change the climate, and you're going to throw sand into the works. Doesn't matter if it's natural or man-made, when inhabited lowlands flood and crops fail - it's disruption. Saying "Not my fault!" doesn't save a single life - it only extends your current business model.
The thing to keep in mind is that our society, notably including our areas of habitation and food production, are cast around the way the climate has been for the past hundred years or so.
Change the climate, and it's going to disrupt things. It doesn't matter whether the change is "natural" or human-caused, it's still going to disrupt things.
So the only question worth asking is, "How much is the climate changing, and what can we do about it?" It could be that the climate isn't changing at all, and we can just do nothing. I suspect that there's sufficient evidence that that's not the case. It could be that the changes are all naturally induced, and there is something we can do about it to mitigate the effects. In that case, we're really stupid to say, "Not my fault!" and do nothing, because whatever the cause, when low-lying areas get inundated and crop failures start, it doesn't matter whose fault it is, it's going to be a mess.
By the say, the anti-climate-change crew is cherry-picking their data just as much as the climate-change crew. There are those who accuse the climage-change crew of being biased, because they want to publish and gain notariety. By that same token, the anti-climate-change crew is even more biased, because responding to climate change might force them to change their cushy business models - Heaven Forfend!
I forgot to mention, both systems are Gentoo, which is why I attached to the GGP.
The server is running hardened-sources-2.6.29-r?, and it has the vmmap_min_addr=0. I was asking if I can simply echo a nonzero value to band-aid around the vulnerability.
The client is running gentoo-sources-2.6.30-r3, and it does not have vmmap_min_addr. I know echoing a value into proc when there's no kernel support will do squat. I'm more wondering why it's missing, since the kernel is new enough. Is it only certain kernel options that make vmmap_min_addr exist?
> Why are we _supposed_ to care about other species?
Until you really KNOW what the requirements are to set up a robust free-running, resilient ecology, it's best to err on the side of caution. Yesterday's "swamp" that was merely undevelopable land is today's "wetland" that protects waterways from pollution, protects developed lands from flooding, etc. Yesterday's "trash bush" called the Pacific Yew is today's source of taxol for fighting cancer. Yesterday's moldy bread became penicillin, spawning the antibiotics industry.
I've argued "inherent value" before and been shouted down by Libertarians who assert that the only value to anything is the monetary value that the free market grants to it. I guess I won't argue "inherent value", only that every object may have a "currently unknown value" that we're not yet smart enough to understand, and that to simply waste it, or allow it to be wasted, because it's "currently known value" is close to zero, is shortsighted. We're learning more all the time.
Come to think of it, another example. When I was a kid, I seem to remember reading about all of the things we started finding in the fly ash (waste) of refining copper. Of course copper was what we were after, either for use on its own or for alloying with tin to make bronze. But in the ash we found silver, platinum, and even rarer stuff. Of course some of that rarer stuff in the fly ash was "worthless" until our technology had advanced to discover a need. For instance, some rare earths are "useless" until you start making vacuum tube cathodes that need a high electron emissivity, then they become incredibly valuable.
I guess it's another YMMV thing, because your experience sounds pretty bad. At the worst I've seen when I was involved, there was nothing that bad. We had prep and followup sessions, and we knew many/most of the couples were living together. Many of them didn't even bother to fake separate addresses. We also generally got decent amounts of positive feedback, though not unanimous. Many expressed surprise that they actually got something out of the sessions.
As for the worst, I guess it was "philosophical differences with the Church" over sex, and why we left as we were getting ready to take over leadership the next year. There was one presenting couple, talking on sexuality, emphasizing (rather angrily) that, "Just because you're married doesn't mean that you get to do whatever you want to in the bedroom!" At the followup session we expressed our reservations, that we felt that couple was over the top, and probably sending a message that would turn the engaged couples off. One of the older couples backed them up, saying, "Someone's got to tell them the way it is!" The group concensus backed that opinion, and we were gone. (Not that we're into really kinky stuff, we're just not into even the concept of bedroom police.)
Even with that, we still feel that there's value to the marriage prep program, especially considering how few other attempts are made to fill the need. Maybe someday when the team members turn over, we'll get back into it.
Find your local Catholic church. Ask the priest if you can enroll in one of their marriage preparation courses - there are usually 3 variations:
1: Engaged Encounter - A small group of engaged couples goes away for a relatively isolated weekend with several married couples and a priest. You go through a number of presentations by those running the program and exercises - as a couple - to help build communications and coping skills. My wife and I went to one of these a bit over 28 years ago.
2: Pre Cana - The same type of thing as the Engaged Encounter, but instead of the weekend, it's usually 2 to 4 sessions totaling 8-12 hours. It's for when you can't or won't dedicate an entire weekend to it. My wife and I have worked as one of the married couples on these, numerous times in the past. At the moment we're out of it because of disagreements with dogma.
3: Couple-to-couple - The same type of thing, but one engaged couple working with one married couple.
Usually the scheduled sessions happen in the spring, ahead of Summer Wedding Season. One reason to go with Option 3 would be for it's flexiblity of scheduling. Otherwise I highly recommend Option 1.
Obviously many bash the church, especially the Catholic Church, but in this one area I have to hand them some credit. They are making a very real effort to improve marriages. Think of all of the other things in life that you have to attend classes before you're allowed to participate, like drivers' ed, for instance. Yet for what should be a lifetime commitment which marriage is supposed to be, there is very little available. Well, at least the Catholic Church is trying, and having participated in the efforts, I'll say that it's not just a celibate priest telling engaged couples how to be married. Most of the content comes from married couples. For that matter, there are childbirth classes, but nothing on parenting.
I remember once reading that we are rather "early" in the potential for life in the Universe. Since we're all made of dead star-stuff, it takes a certain amount of time for enough generations of stars to be born, die, and scatter their ashes to give rise to hard rocky planets. Moreover, you need enough supernovae to get anything above iron on the periodic table. Given the processes necessary to create someplace like the Earth, this source asserted that though it was possible to be earlier than us, we were pretty darned early, in the grand scheme of things.
Another article suggested that galaxies might have "life zones", just like we speak of the solar system having one. But in galactic terms, the life zone is more in terms of enough stellar activity to produce the "ash" that is us, yet not so much activity as to have too much radiation and orbital perturbations. Seems to me that with time - stellar time, even longer than geological time, this life zone would move inward toward the center of a galaxy, and the outer reaches may never have had enough activity for rocky planets.
The latter argument seems well aligned with yours, and not inconsistent with the first point I made. Combine the 2 arguments, and it says that maybe life won't happen much further out than us, because if we're really "early", so some extent we define the start of the galactic life zone. (Obviously denser parts of the arm would extend any life zone outward.)
Maybe rather than looking for the mythical "Progenitors" or "Ancient Ones", we should focus on getting wise, getting smart, growing up and becoming the Progenitors or Ancient Ones.
All humor aside, there is a very real problem here, common to both "publishing" industries you mention. It's one that has been poorly (far worse by music) handled by both industries in the old mode, and still isn't properly/pervasively handled in any new mode, and that's payment for content creators. (musicians and journalists) In both cases the public grew to think that the value was in the products that they held in their hands instead of the work done to create the content. In both cases, the industries did little do dispell that impression, because so little of the money went to the content creators, and so much into running the industry, itself.
Where they differ is that the public has a decent understanding of the value of paying musicians, as well as a tolerance of the idea of Rock Stars making big bucks. The same does not appear to be true of journalism, where one has to remember that Anderson Cooper (to pick one at random) is really more of a Rock Star than a journalist. The country will suffer far more from a lack of paid journalism than from a lack of Rock Stars, or even paid musicians.
Gee, you're suggesting that unions may actually perform some good. Seems like for a long time unions have been the whipping boy around here, serving only to suck money out the system and hold back Progress (TM). (I know that's group-think... seems to me that some unions have lost track of their true purpose and given the institution a bad name, but the function is needed, now as much as ever.)
I would argue that for the most part, the production chain is responsible for the "Rise of the Consumer", using "Consumer" as the derogatory you imply. "They" don't want discerning "customers," they want gullible "consumers" who will buy whatever is being sold. In this case, you're getting squeezed out of the middle, because "customers" are the lifeblood of local retailers.
On other consideration... the Earth is way the heck out in the sticks.
There have been recent maps of the Milky Way suggesting that it's more of a barred spiral galaxy that a simple spiral. I came across a "map" that I use for one of my random desktops.
The 2 major arms are the Perseus Arm and the Scutum-Centaurus Arm. There appear to be 2 minor arms near the bar, the Near and Far 3kpc Arms. There appear to be 2 minor arms spreading outward, Sagittarius Arm and the Norma Arm. There's another smaller minor arm, the Outer Arm.
Then there's this little clump hanging out in the middle of nowhere called the Orion Spur.
That's where we live - in the sticks.
It's probably too hard to bother getting to the Orion Spur until you've been everywhere else, unless you already live there. The Orion Spur is also small enough that "overwhelming odds" of life are a little less overwhelming. We may well be all alone, out here in the sticks.
If you have the resources to wage interplanetary war, you've got so much energy at your immediate disposal, that if you're even slightly disposed to wipe yourselves out, you'll have done so.
If we can truly get to the interplanetary (common interplanetary travel) stage, chances are we'll be past war.
History may suggest otherwise, but it's only been in the last century that we've had enough power at our disposal to seriously consider wiping ourselves out. Sometimes boundary conditions change. Our access to power is a significant boundary change. Now either we change... or we're history.
As a sub-part of this, as others have mentioned, more advanced communication looks more like noise. A friend (radar designer for a defense contractor) hung a spectrum analyzer on an HDTV signal. It was a "white blob" 6 MHz wide - at that level there was no recognizable detail, it looked like noise. Granted a 6MHz wide blob of noise would look intelligent, simply because of the sharp rolloffs in the skirts.
But tweak that by using spread-spectrum - and then shove it through fibre.
For that matter, we maybe be nearing the end of "broadcast" completely. We're shoving more an more over IP these days. Think for a moment if the major ISPs and router manufacturers had embraced multicast - any migration from broadcast to IP would have proceeded much faster.
Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a thriving community out in the Kuiper belt, watching us. Not that long ago they were in the asteroid belt, and they probably still have sensors and relay stations hidden there, but most of the activity has had to move as we've gotten more capable. There are gobs of stars, and gobs of planets. I have no idea how rare life is, or how much rarer intelligent life is. But I'm going to make the guess that intelligent life is rare enough to be interesting, and to attract an audience. Which augments the "Prime Directive" idea, that they're deliberately hiding from us, because once we know that someone is out there, our behavior and civilization will change. It's also entirely likely that we're not the first primitive civilization they've studied, so there would be hindsight at play in studying us.
Oh, and they likely didn't get here at Warp Factor 9 for via the Kessell Run, either. Even if we have some primitive theories of Warp Drive, they still require harnessing utterly massive amounts of energy - perhaps as much energy as getting there the slow way. So if "they" are out there in the Kuiper Belt, I expect them to be either A.I.s or former biologicals that have uploaded.
They are probably also taking side-bets on whether or not we'll exterminate ourselves, and if so, how.
The military has all sorts of EMP-hardened stuff, and has had it deployed since Cold War days. Sure the transmission lines complicate things, but in that respect, and with proper hardening, a smart grid need be no more vulnerable than the current dumb grid. Harder, in fact, because the current dumb grid had no hardening in mind whatsoever. We don't need a smart grid to be dropped dead by EMP, our current grid will fill the bill just fine, thank you.
We just need to set the right standards.
As for hacking, that presumes that power companies are dumb enough to put this stuff live on the internet. I worked for a day once with a power guy - he knew his stuff, and knew how to keep things isolated that should be kept isolated. I'm not worried about infrastructure he manages. On the other hand, he told of auditing another place, and one recommendation was that they pass their networking through a firewall. Later, he was given the opportunity to inspect the "problem resolutions." He saw an ethernet cable going in a hole in a machine marked "firewall" and out the other side. No connectors, just the cable looping through the box.
For all the "waiting to compile" jokes, Gentoo is a highly servicable distribution.
Really, Gentoo has also been called a meta-distribution, because of its customization capabilities. In that light, it can be highly appropriate for a "controlled shop", where more-or-less locked-down systems are centrally administered.
If you're running a "real shop", in other words many boxes that you want to keep in sync, dedicate one or a few as "binhost servers". Compile there, and the rest of the machines just fetch binaries.
Only problem is that it defuses the usual "waiting to compile" Gentoo jokes.
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I wasn't minimizing the problems, and by the way, you forgot arcing, which is what killed one of the tether experiments. My first reference also talks about the difficulties the tether caused to the shuttle navigation systems, by giving it a small continuous forward "thrust".
However, I would consider tethers to be a technology problem, and while there are difficulties, we've worked our way around far bigger ones. The real question is if tethers can grant sufficient benefits to be worth conquering the problems.
Building it and spinning it up are the easy parts.
Doing anything with it once you've spun it up is the hard part. At the very least, it's intuitively obvious that you want 2 tethers and 2 tethered objects, along with a hub that stays in fixed position, only rotating. Even with that, I'd be inclined to keep the hub fully stationary and have a rotating bearing at the end of a boom. With this "simple" setup you only have the problem of dynamics of mass in tethered objects - like people walking around, standing up, laying down, etc. Did I mention that the boom probably needs provisions to flex, because there's no way to react fast enough for the needed dynamic balance in a semi-rigid system. Even what I suggested ignores the dirty details - it's just one step more practical/complicated than simply spinning up 2 tethered objects.
How about the other type of tether - the long one. (gravity-gradient) There were supposed to be 3 shuttle experiments with tethers, and at last report I think they'd done the first and smallest, and had trouble with the second. (snarling/breakage?)
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1989fmet.symp..149L
http://www.satobs.org/tss.html
http://code8100.nrl.navy.mil/programs/tips.htm
The actual shuttle experiments seem to be concerned with "dropping" a probe into the very upper atmosphere for measurments and observation. The third reference, non-shuttle deployed, seems to be materials/duration research.
None seem interested in generating effective gravity or skyhooks/pinwheels.
As long as you're going to demonize regulation, spread the joy around.
Demonize Corporate America, too. Why should anyone hire a US citizen with an advanced degree when you can hire a Chinese or Indian with an equivalent degree for a fraction of the price?
Never mind that you're GUTTING the US "value" in order to put more short-term profits in your pocket. Never mind that you're GUTTING the US economy to put more short-term profits in your pocket. (Who in the US do you think is going to buy your products, as workers in the US descend toward minimum wage? Oh yeah! Minimum wage! That piece of regulatory bullpuckey that should be abolished, to improve short-term profitability even further!))
As far as needless regulation, go take a breath of the fine Chinese air. Closer to home, go for a pleasant stroll on the Normandy Coast. Go sailing the the Pacific Gyre.
There used to be real Conservatives, but they're mostly gone today. Today's Conservatives are conserving their wealth and power. Stay on TOP at all costs, even if that turns it into a dungheap you're on top of.
I seriously doubt that the planet has an ideal temperature.
However OUR ideal temperature is "similar to what it's been for the past 100 years or so." The past 100 years or so of climate has been what's guided our use of land for habitation and food production. Change the temperature very much, and "very much" may well be fractions of a degree, we need to change our land use. There can be very serious political repercussions to "change our land use," when some country's quantity arable or inhabitable land drops.
We pollute because sometimes the costs of that pollution are not well understood, but the profits to be gained by polluting are.
> caused by humans
I'll repeat.
Doesn't matter.
Our society, habitation, and food production are tuned around the way the climate has been for the past 100 years or so. Change the climate, and you're going to throw sand into the works. Doesn't matter if it's natural or man-made, when inhabited lowlands flood and crops fail - it's disruption. Saying "Not my fault!" doesn't save a single life - it only extends your current business model.
> whether it is human-caused
Doesn't matter.
Doesn't matter a single bit.
The thing to keep in mind is that our society, notably including our areas of habitation and food production, are cast around the way the climate has been for the past hundred years or so.
Change the climate, and it's going to disrupt things. It doesn't matter whether the change is "natural" or human-caused, it's still going to disrupt things.
So the only question worth asking is, "How much is the climate changing, and what can we do about it?" It could be that the climate isn't changing at all, and we can just do nothing. I suspect that there's sufficient evidence that that's not the case. It could be that the changes are all naturally induced, and there is something we can do about it to mitigate the effects. In that case, we're really stupid to say, "Not my fault!" and do nothing, because whatever the cause, when low-lying areas get inundated and crop failures start, it doesn't matter whose fault it is, it's going to be a mess.
By the say, the anti-climate-change crew is cherry-picking their data just as much as the climate-change crew.
There are those who accuse the climage-change crew of being biased, because they want to publish and gain notariety. By that same token, the anti-climate-change crew is even more biased, because responding to climate change might force them to change their cushy business models - Heaven Forfend!
I forgot to mention, both systems are Gentoo, which is why I attached to the GGP.
The server is running hardened-sources-2.6.29-r?, and it has the vmmap_min_addr=0. I was asking if I can simply echo a nonzero value to band-aid around the vulnerability.
The client is running gentoo-sources-2.6.30-r3, and it does not have vmmap_min_addr. I know echoing a value into proc when there's no kernel support will do squat. I'm more wondering why it's missing, since the kernel is new enough. Is it only certain kernel options that make vmmap_min_addr exist?
On my hardened (non-SELinux) server, mmap_min=0. On my desktop, there is no mmap_min.
Can I "fix" this by just writing something non-zero to that file in /proc?
What does it mean that my desktop has no mmap_min?
> Why are we _supposed_ to care about other species?
Until you really KNOW what the requirements are to set up a robust free-running, resilient ecology, it's best to err on the side of caution. Yesterday's "swamp" that was merely undevelopable land is today's "wetland" that protects waterways from pollution, protects developed lands from flooding, etc. Yesterday's "trash bush" called the Pacific Yew is today's source of taxol for fighting cancer. Yesterday's moldy bread became penicillin, spawning the antibiotics industry.
I've argued "inherent value" before and been shouted down by Libertarians who assert that the only value to anything is the monetary value that the free market grants to it. I guess I won't argue "inherent value", only that every object may have a "currently unknown value" that we're not yet smart enough to understand, and that to simply waste it, or allow it to be wasted, because it's "currently known value" is close to zero, is shortsighted. We're learning more all the time.
Come to think of it, another example. When I was a kid, I seem to remember reading about all of the things we started finding in the fly ash (waste) of refining copper. Of course copper was what we were after, either for use on its own or for alloying with tin to make bronze. But in the ash we found silver, platinum, and even rarer stuff. Of course some of that rarer stuff in the fly ash was "worthless" until our technology had advanced to discover a need. For instance, some rare earths are "useless" until you start making vacuum tube cathodes that need a high electron emissivity, then they become incredibly valuable.
I guess it's another YMMV thing, because your experience sounds pretty bad. At the worst I've seen when I was involved, there was nothing that bad. We had prep and followup sessions, and we knew many/most of the couples were living together. Many of them didn't even bother to fake separate addresses. We also generally got decent amounts of positive feedback, though not unanimous. Many expressed surprise that they actually got something out of the sessions.
As for the worst, I guess it was "philosophical differences with the Church" over sex, and why we left as we were getting ready to take over leadership the next year. There was one presenting couple, talking on sexuality, emphasizing (rather angrily) that, "Just because you're married doesn't mean that you get to do whatever you want to in the bedroom!" At the followup session we expressed our reservations, that we felt that couple was over the top, and probably sending a message that would turn the engaged couples off. One of the older couples backed them up, saying, "Someone's got to tell them the way it is!" The group concensus backed that opinion, and we were gone. (Not that we're into really kinky stuff, we're just not into even the concept of bedroom police.)
Even with that, we still feel that there's value to the marriage prep program, especially considering how few other attempts are made to fill the need. Maybe someday when the team members turn over, we'll get back into it.
Find your local Catholic church. Ask the priest if you can enroll in one of their marriage preparation courses - there are usually 3 variations:
1: Engaged Encounter - A small group of engaged couples goes away for a relatively isolated weekend with several married couples and a priest. You go through a number of presentations by those running the program and exercises - as a couple - to help build communications and coping skills. My wife and I went to one of these a bit over 28 years ago.
2: Pre Cana - The same type of thing as the Engaged Encounter, but instead of the weekend, it's usually 2 to 4 sessions totaling 8-12 hours. It's for when you can't or won't dedicate an entire weekend to it. My wife and I have worked as one of the married couples on these, numerous times in the past. At the moment we're out of it because of disagreements with dogma.
3: Couple-to-couple - The same type of thing, but one engaged couple working with one married couple.
Usually the scheduled sessions happen in the spring, ahead of Summer Wedding Season. One reason to go with Option 3 would be for it's flexiblity of scheduling. Otherwise I highly recommend Option 1.
Obviously many bash the church, especially the Catholic Church, but in this one area I have to hand them some credit. They are making a very real effort to improve marriages. Think of all of the other things in life that you have to attend classes before you're allowed to participate, like drivers' ed, for instance. Yet for what should be a lifetime commitment which marriage is supposed to be, there is very little available. Well, at least the Catholic Church is trying, and having participated in the efforts, I'll say that it's not just a celibate priest telling engaged couples how to be married. Most of the content comes from married couples. For that matter, there are childbirth classes, but nothing on parenting.
I remember once reading that we are rather "early" in the potential for life in the Universe. Since we're all made of dead star-stuff, it takes a certain amount of time for enough generations of stars to be born, die, and scatter their ashes to give rise to hard rocky planets. Moreover, you need enough supernovae to get anything above iron on the periodic table. Given the processes necessary to create someplace like the Earth, this source asserted that though it was possible to be earlier than us, we were pretty darned early, in the grand scheme of things.
Another article suggested that galaxies might have "life zones", just like we speak of the solar system having one. But in galactic terms, the life zone is more in terms of enough stellar activity to produce the "ash" that is us, yet not so much activity as to have too much radiation and orbital perturbations. Seems to me that with time - stellar time, even longer than geological time, this life zone would move inward toward the center of a galaxy, and the outer reaches may never have had enough activity for rocky planets.
The latter argument seems well aligned with yours, and not inconsistent with the first point I made. Combine the 2 arguments, and it says that maybe life won't happen much further out than us, because if we're really "early", so some extent we define the start of the galactic life zone. (Obviously denser parts of the arm would extend any life zone outward.)
Maybe rather than looking for the mythical "Progenitors" or "Ancient Ones", we should focus on getting wise, getting smart, growing up and becoming the Progenitors or Ancient Ones.
All humor aside, there is a very real problem here, common to both "publishing" industries you mention. It's one that has been poorly (far worse by music) handled by both industries in the old mode, and still isn't properly/pervasively handled in any new mode, and that's payment for content creators. (musicians and journalists) In both cases the public grew to think that the value was in the products that they held in their hands instead of the work done to create the content. In both cases, the industries did little do dispell that impression, because so little of the money went to the content creators, and so much into running the industry, itself.
Where they differ is that the public has a decent understanding of the value of paying musicians, as well as a tolerance of the idea of Rock Stars making big bucks. The same does not appear to be true of journalism, where one has to remember that Anderson Cooper (to pick one at random) is really more of a Rock Star than a journalist. The country will suffer far more from a lack of paid journalism than from a lack of Rock Stars, or even paid musicians.
Gee, you're suggesting that unions may actually perform some good. Seems like for a long time unions have been the whipping boy around here, serving only to suck money out the system and hold back Progress (TM). (I know that's group-think... seems to me that some unions have lost track of their true purpose and given the institution a bad name, but the function is needed, now as much as ever.)
I would argue that for the most part, the production chain is responsible for the "Rise of the Consumer", using "Consumer" as the derogatory you imply. "They" don't want discerning "customers," they want gullible "consumers" who will buy whatever is being sold. In this case, you're getting squeezed out of the middle, because "customers" are the lifeblood of local retailers.
On other consideration... the Earth is way the heck out in the sticks.
There have been recent maps of the Milky Way suggesting that it's more of a barred spiral galaxy that a simple spiral. I came across a "map" that I use for one of my random desktops.
The 2 major arms are the Perseus Arm and the Scutum-Centaurus Arm.
There appear to be 2 minor arms near the bar, the Near and Far 3kpc Arms.
There appear to be 2 minor arms spreading outward, Sagittarius Arm and the Norma Arm.
There's another smaller minor arm, the Outer Arm.
Then there's this little clump hanging out in the middle of nowhere called the Orion Spur.
That's where we live - in the sticks.
It's probably too hard to bother getting to the Orion Spur until you've been everywhere else, unless you already live there. The Orion Spur is also small enough that "overwhelming odds" of life are a little less overwhelming. We may well be all alone, out here in the sticks.
If you have the resources to wage interplanetary war, you've got so much energy at your immediate disposal, that if you're even slightly disposed to wipe yourselves out, you'll have done so.
If we can truly get to the interplanetary (common interplanetary travel) stage, chances are we'll be past war.
History may suggest otherwise, but it's only been in the last century that we've had enough power at our disposal to seriously consider wiping ourselves out. Sometimes boundary conditions change. Our access to power is a significant boundary change. Now either we change... or we're history.
As a sub-part of this, as others have mentioned, more advanced communication looks more like noise. A friend (radar designer for a defense contractor) hung a spectrum analyzer on an HDTV signal. It was a "white blob" 6 MHz wide - at that level there was no recognizable detail, it looked like noise. Granted a 6MHz wide blob of noise would look intelligent, simply because of the sharp rolloffs in the skirts.
But tweak that by using spread-spectrum - and then shove it through fibre.
For that matter, we maybe be nearing the end of "broadcast" completely. We're shoving more an more over IP these days. Think for a moment if the major ISPs and router manufacturers had embraced multicast - any migration from broadcast to IP would have proceeded much faster.
Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a thriving community out in the Kuiper belt, watching us. Not that long ago they were in the asteroid belt, and they probably still have sensors and relay stations hidden there, but most of the activity has had to move as we've gotten more capable. There are gobs of stars, and gobs of planets. I have no idea how rare life is, or how much rarer intelligent life is. But I'm going to make the guess that intelligent life is rare enough to be interesting, and to attract an audience. Which augments the "Prime Directive" idea, that they're deliberately hiding from us, because once we know that someone is out there, our behavior and civilization will change. It's also entirely likely that we're not the first primitive civilization they've studied, so there would be hindsight at play in studying us.
Oh, and they likely didn't get here at Warp Factor 9 for via the Kessell Run, either. Even if we have some primitive theories of Warp Drive, they still require harnessing utterly massive amounts of energy - perhaps as much energy as getting there the slow way. So if "they" are out there in the Kuiper Belt, I expect them to be either A.I.s or former biologicals that have uploaded.
They are probably also taking side-bets on whether or not we'll exterminate ourselves, and if so, how.
The military has all sorts of EMP-hardened stuff, and has had it deployed since Cold War days. Sure the transmission lines complicate things, but in that respect, and with proper hardening, a smart grid need be no more vulnerable than the current dumb grid. Harder, in fact, because the current dumb grid had no hardening in mind whatsoever. We don't need a smart grid to be dropped dead by EMP, our current grid will fill the bill just fine, thank you.
We just need to set the right standards.
As for hacking, that presumes that power companies are dumb enough to put this stuff live on the internet. I worked for a day once with a power guy - he knew his stuff, and knew how to keep things isolated that should be kept isolated. I'm not worried about infrastructure he manages. On the other hand, he told of auditing another place, and one recommendation was that they pass their networking through a firewall. Later, he was given the opportunity to inspect the "problem resolutions." He saw an ethernet cable going in a hole in a machine marked "firewall" and out the other side. No connectors, just the cable looping through the box.
We just need to set the right standards.
Oh, so you watched "Big Bang Theory" the other night, too. I don't generally, but happened to catch a few moments.
For all the "waiting to compile" jokes, Gentoo is a highly servicable distribution.
Really, Gentoo has also been called a meta-distribution, because of its customization capabilities. In that light, it can be highly appropriate for a "controlled shop", where more-or-less locked-down systems are centrally administered.
One addendum to the Gentoo thing...
If you're running a "real shop", in other words many boxes that you want to keep in sync, dedicate one or a few as "binhost servers". Compile there, and the rest of the machines just fetch binaries.
Only problem is that it defuses the usual "waiting to compile" Gentoo jokes.
Since I was tying down the boat anyway, I just ran to the nearby Faraday cage - I got in the car.