I'm sorry, I think you're underestimating the survival problems imposed by such vast distances...
A gedanken experiment: Assuming you're right, and the distance isn't that much of a problem, *we* have launched spacecraft which have travelled to and landed on different (far closer) planet(oid)s, I have difficulty believing an alien civilisation that can navigate the truly immense gulf between planetary systems having any difficulty at all with a landing or navigation of a solar system (which is also pretty empty, btw)
You do get to make a billion or so observations of the destination as you're travelling towards it, after all. It's not going to be a complete unknown or anything...
Perhaps I am, but 31,000,000 miles doesn't seem that far away from an astronomical perspective - in fact it seems pretty darn close. A single light-year is about 5,878,625,373,183.61 miles (from Wiki), so 31M miles is roughly 1/190,000 of a light year.
The nearest star is ~4.2 light years away, so our potential alien visitor would have to travel a very long way towards us (and in that case why not come the last 0.0001% of the journey!) before this was a useful property.
Now I realise you can only take a video from as far away as your spacecraft really is, but I'd expect to see extrapolations to realistic distances before you start to claim things like "Making a video of Earth from so far away helps the search for other life-bearing planets in the Universe". - that's a bold claim, after all. I'm sure there's a standard line somewhere about extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence to back them up...
I dunno, perhaps I'm just a grumpy old physicist, but there's all sorts of effects that only come into play at astonomical-scale distances (and the relativistic-scale speeds that commonly occurs between bodies that far apart), I guess I'd like to have seen more data and less hand-waving.
The major tenet here is complete bollocks, of course. It's easy to distribute open-source apps for the iPhone.
Last night, I finally got my personal iphone development environment set up. I downloaded the 'accelerometer' example source (which graphs the accelerometer in real-time) - there's nothing special about this source code, I just wanted something a *little* more complex than 'hello world'. Any other source-code distribution would have illustrated my point just as well.
So, I went through the various certificate-signing things, and created development, distribution, and ad-hoc certificates. I compiled the code and dragged my ad-hoc certificate and the application onto itunes, then synced with my phone.
I now have some-random-program whose source-code I downloaded installed and running on my iphone. It needs the ad-hoc certificate at *compile-time*, which authorises my iPhone to be able to run the app, but if you're distributing open-source code, that's just fine and peachy - any recipient will want to compile it themselves anyway.
So, here's the choices if you want to code open-source stuff:
Generate an ad-hoc certificate for a set of phones (max 100) and deliver the certificate along with the phone. You can distribute binaries like this for an identified set of phones.
Distribute your source code. Developers can compile their own version of the app and install onto their own phone using their own ad-hoc certificates
Distribute the source-code on your website and the binary via the app-store (for free).
The *only* barrier to #2 is the cost of the developer program, ($99) which isn't much of a barrier...
Funny, I had almost that exact experience at the San Jose Apple store - the guy took it into the back to "check it", and came back to the desk.
Then he said, "yes, it's broken" (it couldn't play H.264 video properly, everything else worked) and gave me a new one there and then. That one's worked perfectly since:)
Hmm... Classic sign of a lost argument: resorting to insult instead of actually confronting the issue.
I quote: "California dood probably eats gobs of juice because his house is made of crap and has no insulation". Have you seen my house ? Do you have the title deeds and property upgrade permits/details on hand ? I'm sorry if you're accustomed to living in excrement, but personally I prefer a more robust structure.
I quote: "And he probably leaves the HVAC on 24/7, etc."... How do you even claim to know this ? What's the basis for your supposition ?
Was it in fact a completely uninformed comment, as I posited above ?
Thought so; and you didn't enjoy being called on it, did you ?
If you even did the basic mathematics you'd be able to work out that wasn't even *vaguely* possible - my costs for electricity were posted in the thread way before you replied, after all. Perhaps your reading comprehension is poor - in which case I suppose you at least have an excuse for your ignorance.
quote: "Do you need a pool? No.... {more crap deleted}". Way to switch the argument "dood". What that has to do with the quality of my house insulation or the time I use my AC for escapes me.
You do come across as a very angry individual - I wonder why that is, "dood" ? The immediate suspect is (of course) inadequacy, perhaps because what whit of wit you possess appears to be... lacking. Perhaps I'd give your rant a little more respect if you could even spell correctly. Four letter words aren't really that hard, "dood". Of course, you'd have to actually address the question, as well...
The company doing it is Dollens Electric, you could ask for 'Steve' there, he's the main man for solar installations. They're using 200W panels in my case, if that helps, and each of these is ~$1k.
I was advocating a different form of power generation, one which used the same fundamental energy source, but didn't require the environmental impact. Nowhere did I suggest putting a steam turbine on the roof, or claim that the two solutions were the same...
I don't know where *you* got *your* numbers from, but I *wish* electricity was so unbelievably cheap as you say...My electricity is on a tiered rate:
Tier 1 (up to 12kWh) is $0.12/kWh
Tier 2 (101%-130% of baseline) is $0.13/kWh
Tier 3 (131%-200% of baseline) is $0.23/kWh
Tier 4 (201%-300% of baseline) is $0.31/kWh
Tier 5 (over 300% of baseline) is $0.36/kWh
Roughly half of my electricity is in tier #5 (44.5kWh/day last month). If anything, I'm lowballing the savings because of course it'll eat into tier-5 first (then tier-4,...)
As part of the proposal, the company referenced the appraisal journal (warning: PDF) which establishes that the resale value of a home powered by solar energy increases by $20 for every $1 in saved operating costs. In my case, that adds $168k to the value of my home (on day-1, it gradually tails off over time). This is actually more than I pay for it!
I think the argument goes that people can afford to spend more on the house because their energy bill will be lower every month - you're trading energy bill for mortgage payment... I'm not sure it makes sense to me, but the appraisers presumably read their own industry journal:)
Actually, it's the law (at least in CA). They have to agree to let you do it.
Consider a company that paid for solar panels to be installed on your roof, then charged you for the energy they produced. Any overage they could charge to the electricity supplier as it feeds back into the grid. You get a reduced rate for the electricity because you're leasing your roof to the company.
It's pretty easy - PG&E have a tiered cost-system, so it costs more as you use more. I've probably doubled my electricity use since it cost me $200/month, but the cost gets disproportionately higher.
I have a pool (which has a pump that soaks up 40A) and I have air-conditioning which can do the same. Add the washer/dryer, pond pumps (another 5A) and general load (server in the garage, lighting, etc..) and I'm using ~80kWH/day.
Hence the solar system:) Yes, this is CA, but no weed...
And yet, from the *same* article you linked to (yes, you actually have to *read* it all), his carbon-footprint per year is precisely zero. Can you say that ?
Personally I think it's probably better to distribute the power-generation facility onto the roofs of all the residents in these 'southwestern states'... Use the wasted space productively...
There's virtually no environmental impact, in fact you're helping the environment by reducing the load on the power stations
It actually reduces the need for air-conditioning - because a fair amount of the solar energy your roof would soak up is converted to electricity
The generation is local, so there's less loss as electricity is transported across the country
There are the mentioned rebates and tax credits to reduce the initial cost.
I'm in the process of installing an 11.9 kW system on the roof of my home in CA. It's costing about $80k (of which I expect to get $12-16k back in rebates) , and it'll take my electricity bill down from $800/month to ~$100/month. Saving ~$700/month makes payback in ~8 years, and the panels have a 25-year lifespan (at which point they're at ~80% efficiency of day-1).
I dunno about that. I was in Tokyo a year or two ago, and getting the commuter train was a bit weird - I'm 6'2", and I could see clear over a sea of heads down the platform at rush hour. There was the occasional head (like mine) that poked above the average, but the vast majority came up to no more than shoulder-height on me.
Being used to the 'tube' in London, I actually had to duck way down to get off the train, so I didn't bang my head on the top of the door-frame!
Perhaps this is one case where wiki is being "optimistic" about its facts ?
Looks like things such as Apple TV are set for a boost then. Sure, you have the same DRM, but at least "it just works". No need to reboot devices to re-establish authentication... Customers like hassle-free, especially in the living-room. Cable/Satellite companies ought to be careful, or Apple (or someone else who does it better) will be eating their lunch.
... because it's not as though Webkit provides rich multimedia at all, and I guess Sprout could never provide any of those "struts" to build any applications at all...
For what it's worth, I retract the "Nothing like Gitmo was ever set up" comment... As pointed out by numerous posters [grin], this is simply not the case, and internment did take place.
Having read more of the background, though, I still think the British government were more restrained than the US one however, or at least better at preventing anything being leaked to the media. I would have thought that stories about habitual use of torture would have escaped by now if it was indeed the case by the UK, though.
Still, internment is a pure and unadulteratedly evil policy, and there is no defence for its imposition.
I guess my point in all this was people like to point at Gitmo and so forth and be like "OMG US IS TEH SUXXOR" but the fact remainds if their government was confronted with a similar situation it's highly likely they would ot he same. Or worse. Then your point was poorly made. Very poorly made.
The UK suffered at the hands of terrorists (these terrorists mainly funded by US organisations like Noraid, actually) for several decades. Nothing like Gitmo was ever set up - people committing acts of terrorism were in fact denied the status of terrorists and charged as common murderers, then locked up in civilian jails if found guilty under the normal due process of law.
Now the UK was hardly blameless in the actions that started the terrorism, but it tried to maintain a diplomatic solution (even engaging with the political wing of the terrorist organisations) that eventually more or less worked. Throughout "the troubles" in Northern Ireland, even though the military were called in to keep order, all suspected terrorists were processed through a civilian court.
There is no possible defence of the existence of Guantanamo Bay. None. Yet it remains the policy of the US government. The contrast between the UK and the US approach to terrorism is actually quite startling.
Well, no, obviously it is *not* the policy of the UK that they can be held for 42 days. It's passed one house, barely. The house entrusted with the duty of rejecting popular but bad laws has yet to rule on it. It's *entirely* within the remit of the house of Lords to reject this out of hand, and it's one of the checks-and-balances that the second house is there to provide...
Abu Ghraib may have been an isolated "incident" (though an awful lot of people would have needed to conveniently ignore what happened there...), but Guantanamo Bay is precisely current US policy.
Given the amount of illegal wiretapping, the removal of habeus corpus for non-citizens, the policy of torturing suspected terrorists coupled with the ability of the president to arbitrarily designate someone a terrorist, (I could go on and on...), I find the implications disturbing in the extreme.
I don't agree with the 42 days thing, but I think the glass-houses line really does apply here...
Did you see me say it was ok ? No ? Then don't put words into my mouth.
The summary is ridiculously biased, or shows a shocking level of ignorance. When the summary is so poorly written, it's not unreasonable to rebalance it a little.
I'm not a religious man by any means, but I think there's a parable about removing the plank-of-wood from your own eye before trying to take the splinter out of your brothers. Seems remarkably fitting, here...
The US certainly has no moral high ground. They rape, torture, and sexually humiliate *suspected* terrorists, in a foreign land, out of sight of the people because they're so ashamed of what they do in the people's name.
If (I'm not, but *if*) I was a suspected terrorist, I'd take 42 days maximum in a standard UK jail, held under standard UK law by standard UK law-enforcement over indefinite detainment in a foreign military prison, with no legal status, and denied the right of habeus corpus. I'd prefer to be jailed in the UK rather than tortured and sexually abused by the US military.
Just saying. I continue to hope that the American people abhor and remove this stain on their countries honour, but it seems to be getting worse, not better.
As mentioned above, the bill has to make it through the house of lords yet, and since the Lords are usually the "conscience" of the legal process in the UK (weird, but true), it's highly unlikely to make it.
And, of course, 42 days in police custody, still with all human-rights privileges and in a standard jail subject to standard civilian law is a significantly better deal than several years in a foreign military jail, with questionable legal status, and subject to military law and "process". I very very much doubt these suspects, held for 42 days maximum, will be tortured and humiliated, either.
In other words, glass-house-dwellers, throw no stones...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, I think you're underestimating the survival problems imposed by such vast distances...
A gedanken experiment: Assuming you're right, and the distance isn't that much of a problem, *we* have launched spacecraft which have travelled to and landed on different (far closer) planet(oid)s, I have difficulty believing an alien civilisation that can navigate the truly immense gulf between planetary systems having any difficulty at all with a landing or navigation of a solar system (which is also pretty empty, btw)
You do get to make a billion or so observations of the destination as you're travelling towards it, after all. It's not going to be a complete unknown or anything...
Simon
Perhaps I am, but 31,000,000 miles doesn't seem that far away from an astronomical perspective - in fact it seems pretty darn close. A single light-year is about 5,878,625,373,183.61 miles (from Wiki), so 31M miles is roughly 1/190,000 of a light year.
The nearest star is ~4.2 light years away, so our potential alien visitor would have to travel a very long way towards us (and in that case why not come the last 0.0001% of the journey!) before this was a useful property.
Now I realise you can only take a video from as far away as your spacecraft really is, but I'd expect to see extrapolations to realistic distances before you start to claim things like "Making a video of Earth from so far away helps the search for other life-bearing planets in the Universe". - that's a bold claim, after all. I'm sure there's a standard line somewhere about extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence to back them up...
I dunno, perhaps I'm just a grumpy old physicist, but there's all sorts of effects that only come into play at astonomical-scale distances (and the relativistic-scale speeds that commonly occurs between bodies that far apart), I guess I'd like to have seen more data and less hand-waving.
Simon.
The major tenet here is complete bollocks, of course. It's easy to distribute open-source apps for the iPhone.
Last night, I finally got my personal iphone development environment set up. I downloaded the 'accelerometer' example source (which graphs the accelerometer in real-time) - there's nothing special about this source code, I just wanted something a *little* more complex than 'hello world'. Any other source-code distribution would have illustrated my point just as well.
So, I went through the various certificate-signing things, and created development, distribution, and ad-hoc certificates. I compiled the code and dragged my ad-hoc certificate and the application onto itunes, then synced with my phone.
I now have some-random-program whose source-code I downloaded installed and running on my iphone. It needs the ad-hoc certificate at *compile-time*, which authorises my iPhone to be able to run the app, but if you're distributing open-source code, that's just fine and peachy - any recipient will want to compile it themselves anyway.
So, here's the choices if you want to code open-source stuff:
The *only* barrier to #2 is the cost of the developer program, ($99) which isn't much of a barrier...
Simon.
I did this as well - an (old) picture of the dish is here - that was back when I lived in London - who needs a back yard, anyway ? :-)
Simon.
Funny, I had almost that exact experience at the San Jose Apple store - the guy took it into the back to "check it", and came back to the desk.
Then he said, "yes, it's broken" (it couldn't play H.264 video properly, everything else worked) and gave me a new one there and then. That one's worked perfectly since :)
Perhaps yours have had liquid damage ?
Simon
Not that I'm a pilot or anything, but on the 260hp engine gives 197mph at 75% cruise for gross weight, which is ~171 knots...
Simon
Hmm... Classic sign of a lost argument: resorting to insult instead of actually confronting the issue.
I quote: "California dood probably eats gobs of juice because his house is made of crap and has no insulation". Have you seen my house ? Do you have the title deeds and property upgrade permits/details on hand ? I'm sorry if you're accustomed to living in excrement, but personally I prefer a more robust structure.
I quote: "And he probably leaves the HVAC on 24/7, etc." ... How do you even claim to know this ? What's the basis for your supposition ?
Was it in fact a completely uninformed comment, as I posited above ?
Thought so; and you didn't enjoy being called on it, did you ?
If you even did the basic mathematics you'd be able to work out that wasn't even *vaguely* possible - my costs for electricity were posted in the thread way before you replied, after all. Perhaps your reading comprehension is poor - in which case I suppose you at least have an excuse for your ignorance.
quote: "Do you need a pool? No.You do come across as a very angry individual - I wonder why that is, "dood" ? The immediate suspect is (of course) inadequacy, perhaps because what whit of wit you possess appears to be ... lacking. Perhaps I'd give your rant a little more respect if you could even spell correctly. Four letter words aren't really that hard, "dood". Of course, you'd have to actually address the question, as well...
Simon.
The company doing it is Dollens Electric, you could ask for 'Steve' there, he's the main man for solar installations. They're using 200W panels in my case, if that helps, and each of these is ~$1k.
Simon
I was advocating a different form of power generation, one which used the same fundamental energy source, but didn't require the environmental impact. Nowhere did I suggest putting a steam turbine on the roof, or claim that the two solutions were the same...
Simon.
I don't know where *you* got *your* numbers from, but I *wish* electricity was so unbelievably cheap as you say...My electricity is on a tiered rate:
Roughly half of my electricity is in tier #5 (44.5kWh/day last month). If anything, I'm lowballing the savings because of course it'll eat into tier-5 first (then tier-4, ...)
Simon.
Thanks for the completely uninformed comment, there "dood".
Simon.
As part of the proposal, the company referenced the appraisal journal (warning: PDF) which establishes that the resale value of a home powered by solar energy increases by $20 for every $1 in saved operating costs. In my case, that adds $168k to the value of my home (on day-1, it gradually tails off over time). This is actually more than I pay for it!
I think the argument goes that people can afford to spend more on the house because their energy bill will be lower every month - you're trading energy bill for mortgage payment... I'm not sure it makes sense to me, but the appraisers presumably read their own industry journal :)
Simon
Actually, it's the law (at least in CA). They have to agree to let you do it.
Consider a company that paid for solar panels to be installed on your roof, then charged you for the energy they produced. Any overage they could charge to the electricity supplier as it feeds back into the grid. You get a reduced rate for the electricity because you're leasing your roof to the company.
Seems like it could work...
Simon
It's pretty easy - PG&E have a tiered cost-system, so it costs more as you use more. I've probably doubled my electricity use since it cost me $200/month, but the cost gets disproportionately higher.
I have a pool (which has a pump that soaks up 40A) and I have air-conditioning which can do the same. Add the washer/dryer, pond pumps (another 5A) and general load (server in the garage, lighting, etc..) and I'm using ~80kWH/day.
Hence the solar system :) Yes, this is CA, but no weed...
Simon.
And yet, from the *same* article you linked to (yes, you actually have to *read* it all), his carbon-footprint per year is precisely zero. Can you say that ?
Simon
Personally I think it's probably better to distribute the power-generation facility onto the roofs of all the residents in these 'southwestern states'... Use the wasted space productively...
I'm in the process of installing an 11.9 kW system on the roof of my home in CA. It's costing about $80k (of which I expect to get $12-16k back in rebates) , and it'll take my electricity bill down from $800/month to ~$100/month. Saving ~$700/month makes payback in ~8 years, and the panels have a 25-year lifespan (at which point they're at ~80% efficiency of day-1).
Why cover the land ? Cover the roofs instead!
Simon
I dunno about that. I was in Tokyo a year or two ago, and getting the commuter train was a bit weird - I'm 6'2", and I could see clear over a sea of heads down the platform at rush hour. There was the occasional head (like mine) that poked above the average, but the vast majority came up to no more than shoulder-height on me.
Being used to the 'tube' in London, I actually had to duck way down to get off the train, so I didn't bang my head on the top of the door-frame!
Perhaps this is one case where wiki is being "optimistic" about its facts ?
Simon.
Looks like things such as Apple TV are set for a boost then. Sure, you have the same DRM, but at least "it just works". No need to reboot devices to re-establish authentication... Customers like hassle-free, especially in the living-room. Cable/Satellite companies ought to be careful, or Apple (or someone else who does it better) will be eating their lunch.
Simon
... because it's not as though Webkit provides rich multimedia at all, and I guess Sprout could never provide any of those "struts" to build any applications at all...
Yep, that's right, delusional...
Simon.
For what it's worth, I retract the "Nothing like Gitmo was ever set up" comment... As pointed out by numerous posters [grin], this is simply not the case, and internment did take place.
Having read more of the background, though, I still think the British government were more restrained than the US one however, or at least better at preventing anything being leaked to the media. I would have thought that stories about habitual use of torture would have escaped by now if it was indeed the case by the UK, though.
Still, internment is a pure and unadulteratedly evil policy, and there is no defence for its imposition.
Simon.
The UK suffered at the hands of terrorists (these terrorists mainly funded by US organisations like Noraid, actually) for several decades. Nothing like Gitmo was ever set up - people committing acts of terrorism were in fact denied the status of terrorists and charged as common murderers, then locked up in civilian jails if found guilty under the normal due process of law.
Now the UK was hardly blameless in the actions that started the terrorism, but it tried to maintain a diplomatic solution (even engaging with the political wing of the terrorist organisations) that eventually more or less worked. Throughout "the troubles" in Northern Ireland, even though the military were called in to keep order, all suspected terrorists were processed through a civilian court.
There is no possible defence of the existence of Guantanamo Bay. None. Yet it remains the policy of the US government. The contrast between the UK and the US approach to terrorism is actually quite startling.
Simon.
Well, no, obviously it is *not* the policy of the UK that they can be held for 42 days. It's passed one house, barely. The house entrusted with the duty of rejecting popular but bad laws has yet to rule on it. It's *entirely* within the remit of the house of Lords to reject this out of hand, and it's one of the checks-and-balances that the second house is there to provide...
Abu Ghraib may have been an isolated "incident" (though an awful lot of people would have needed to conveniently ignore what happened there...), but Guantanamo Bay is precisely current US policy.
If you are a citizen in the US, they'll simply fabricate evidence and send you to be tortured in one of the less squeamish regimes that the US has links with (eg: Syria)...
Given the amount of illegal wiretapping, the removal of habeus corpus for non-citizens, the policy of torturing suspected terrorists coupled with the ability of the president to arbitrarily designate someone a terrorist, (I could go on and on...), I find the implications disturbing in the extreme.
I don't agree with the 42 days thing, but I think the glass-houses line really does apply here...
Simon.
Did you see me say it was ok ? No ? Then don't put words into my mouth.
The summary is ridiculously biased, or shows a shocking level of ignorance. When the summary is so poorly written, it's not unreasonable to rebalance it a little.
I'm not a religious man by any means, but I think there's a parable about removing the plank-of-wood from your own eye before trying to take the splinter out of your brothers. Seems remarkably fitting, here...
Simon
"Guantanamo bay"
or how about: "Abu Ghraib"
The US certainly has no moral high ground. They rape, torture, and sexually humiliate *suspected* terrorists, in a foreign land, out of sight of the people because they're so ashamed of what they do in the people's name.
If (I'm not, but *if*) I was a suspected terrorist, I'd take 42 days maximum in a standard UK jail, held under standard UK law by standard UK law-enforcement over indefinite detainment in a foreign military prison, with no legal status, and denied the right of habeus corpus. I'd prefer to be jailed in the UK rather than tortured and sexually abused by the US military.
Just saying. I continue to hope that the American people abhor and remove this stain on their countries honour, but it seems to be getting worse, not better.
Simon.
As mentioned above, the bill has to make it through the house of lords yet, and since the Lords are usually the "conscience" of the legal process in the UK (weird, but true), it's highly unlikely to make it.
And, of course, 42 days in police custody, still with all human-rights privileges and in a standard jail subject to standard civilian law is a significantly better deal than several years in a foreign military jail, with questionable legal status, and subject to military law and "process". I very very much doubt these suspects, held for 42 days maximum, will be tortured and humiliated, either.
In other words, glass-house-dwellers, throw no stones...
Simon.