Godwin only says that Hitler's mention was inevitable, given a long enough discussion.
If we're not going to talk about Hitler, and the standard reference of evil he represents, we're doomed to repeat Hitler.
These idiotic corruptions of Godwin's observations that long discussions eventually mention Hitler stand in the way of the Internet helping us enough progress to stop such evil from coming around again.
Java applets are not "dead and buried". Neither on the Web, nor on mobile phones (with the distinction increasingly meaningless), or on embedded devices, like DVD players and settop boxes (most of which have Java VMs in them, especially Blu-Ray players and other HD players for menus).
What is "dead and buried" is ActiveX, which is x86 code running in a browser's "sandbox". But even that is clearly no barrier to resurgence, as this story shows.
x86 is a lousy architecture for modern purposes. Its design was determined by optimizations for executing Pascal programs, which was the primary programming market for the IBM PC when it was originally designed. That was a long time ago, and only the huge legacy of existing apps (and their forward momentum maintained by huge backwards compatibility design and sacrifices) keeps x86 code popular. I'm all for a SW x86 emulator, especially for newer CPUs so they don't have to be shackled to design compromises just to run the legacy code, instead of doing it newer and better ways with a more modern instruction set. Just like I'm all for the game emulators that will play old Atari 2600 games on Core Duo PCs and ARM mobile phones. Let's just not enslave ourselves to 1980 design priorities optimizing for a really dead language for yet another decade of programming, now going on 30 years, which is 20 generations under Moore's Law.
That is totally cool. And exactly the main point of a "truly open Android" phone. The entire purpose of having a device is what it does, and for computers that's the apps.
Funny how that isn't the lede of the story. Thanks for cluing that together for us:).
I don't see an explanation there of whether the G1 network can be the 3G connection. Does the Android OS deliver the 3G as a regular network interface?
When you say "you can run ARM Debian without any porting work", do you mean that I can run non-GUI ARM Debian apps on the Android phone/OS right away? Binaries, or do I have to recompile source? And if I have to recompile, does gcc have an easy config for compiling on an x86 Debian (or Ubuntu) PC targeting the Android?
Do you know if there's any project out there right now that's working on running Debian apps (with some GUI, or with none) on a default Android that's also running Skia apps?
What's stopping an app written in, say, C++ available from, say, the Ubuntu APT repository from running directly against the Android kernel? Other than porting its GNOME (or other) GUI calls Android's GUI API. And how similar is that Android GUI API to any other existing one (GNOME, KDE, Java Swing, raw X11)?
One big difference between Iran and Kuwait is that although Iran warred with Iraq for control of the Basra area oilfields, Kuwait actually "sipped Iraq's milkshake" by drilling sideways across the Iraq border and actually sucked up Iraq's oil, which it sold to the US. Which was why Iraq invaded Kuwait. Though perhaps Iraq might not have invaded, if Bush's response to Saddam's warnings to Kuwait had not been "that's between Iraq and Kuwait", then reversed that policy when Iraq invaded.
This story, with only 29 responses as I type this one, is already tagged with "troll" and "flamebait". Because asking whether our military is winning or losing a war that could determine our survival as a free country, or whether it's even fighting one that is demonstrably costing a lot of money, isn't a legitimate question. No, it's just question designed to do nothing but start a flamewar.
Which is a cyberwar.
We therefore have our answer, basically: yes, we are in a cyberwar; no, we don't even really know how to fight one, or how to know that we are fighting one . I don't know if it's Chinese people tagging this story, but whoever it is, they're an enemy. Luckily, to defeat them we just have to think a little and talk amongst ourselves in public. Which is the charter of Slashdot. In this story's discussion we'll get to see whether we have a chance of winning.
This past Election Day, the people of Massachusetts just voted 2:1 to decriminalize possession of up to 1 ounce of marijuana (over 50 typical joints). If caught with that much pot, the "criminal" is issued a ticket, about equivalent to a ticket for an open container of beer, that can be mailed in with a $100 fine without even a court appearance.
Every day that goes by without Massachusetts falling into chaos or bedlam will prove how stupid pot prohibition is. Something like 50% of America's over 1 million imprisoned criminals committed nonviolent drug crimes, and about 850,000 people are arrested for pot every year. Instead of spending an average of $30,000 per year per prisoner, we could be collecting income and sales taxes from the people growing, distributing and consuming it. Probably could be a top agriculture export for this country. And with an entire state running OK mostly post-prohibition, the counterexample in favor of sanity should be undeniable.
If you want a 4G network, there is no competition. That is a monopoly. It's like if the only broadband were AT&T, but somehow 56Kbps dialup meant AT&T's broadband weren't a monopoly. If some other competitor rolled out a 4G network, that might represent a different kind of monopoly, a duopoly. And if those two 4G competitors locked out the other network from their subscribed equipment, that would be a lockin monopoly just as the current Sprint/Verizon/T-Mobile/etc each are.
To see the difference, look at the Internet connections available in a "telecom hotel", where many interoperable networks actually do terminate for customers to choose from, that are all in the same class of service. A customer can connect to one of them, or multiple, depending on the differences between them. That kind of free choice is completely different from a customer for this first 4G network. And the different 3G or 2G mobile networks are themselves a lot closer to the monopoly than to the free choice.
This new network will be a monopoly, even more than the current mobile telco monopolies (lockin). At least on the current mobile networks you can roam on a different network, even though each network can use its monopoly of access to it to set prices and policies arbitrarily expensive and restrictive. For comparison, see the Internet backbones, which are comparatively cheap and open (even though the telcos/cablecos are increasingly coordinated in a cartel, abusing openness and fixing prices).
Of course the first of anything gets to be a monopoly, especially when there's no "photo finish" race among competitors to be first. And the early adopters will pay whatever cost is required. That monopoly might even be necessary and acceptable for a while. But the incumbent mobile telcos have shown that the monopoly lasts forever, even if there are competing corporations (each with their own monopoly).
These networks are all courtesy of the public, especially the mobile ones that lease the public airwaves. Those leases should include a public/private benefit formula that accounts for investment and risk by the spectrum developer, allowing monopoly control long enough to protect profit enough that investors are encouraged to go for the gold. But once some range of motivating profit is achieved, equal access and price anti-gouging rules should protect the public from the monopoly, protect the market from the monopoly crushing any competition entering. Perhaps the lease price should include a refundable deposit that reverts to the spectrum developer once competition is achieved, and is used to fund competitive entrants (under equal access and price protections) if the way the developer runs it doesn't allow competition soon enough.
Make the incentives and protections for competition match the environment, and the market will run properly. Otherwise, we're just going to pay retail for a fourth generation of the telco monopoly that interferes with all our other development, exploiting public property for a very narrow private gain.
So since we've got some tiny islands that N Korea could barely reach if it got really lucky, that N Korea could benefit from attacking only by escalating a shooting war with the US, we should... polish the trigger and load the gun?
If N Korea could hit something that actually damaged US ability to counterattack militarily, economically, or - last resort, like always - diplomatically (like cut off their trade with all their neighbors), then we might want to consider an antimissile defense. But the Aleutians are a buffer against such an attack. If they hit them, we'd suffer minimal loss, and N Korea would finally find itself facing the most global opposition possible. It would be a boon to the US, just as Georgia's attacking Russia finally gave Russia the chance to slap down its Georgia nuisance.
Because the US, unlike N Korea, has plenty of reach anywhere in N Korea, once the nice guy gloves are off. And N Korea, unlike the Aleutians, is full of targets useful for destroying its regime.
In case you missed it, I'll make it plain: an antimissile defense of the Aleutians from N Korea is precisely the worst distraction from the proper, conventional response. Even plainer: exactly like invading Iraq when a couple dozen mostly Saudis attacked us from an HQ in Afghanistan protected by the secret police in Pakistan, antimissile defense of the Aleutians from N Korea is a bait & switch that would just squander everything, including unprecedented world alliance, to make everything worse, with no way out.
There are probably plenty of distant objects with little to no intervening matter. And then there's probably distant objects that have intervening matter that collimates light, either optically or gravitationally.
For most of human history, all browsers were in prerelease. Until 1995, only a few weren't in prerelease, like www and w3.
In fact, almost all browsers are still in prerelease. As they always are, except momentarily when they are released.
And this isn't just pedantry. All these browsers have the low quality that prerelease versions of software used to have before browsers were released, in the mid 1990s. They've lowered the quality of released software of all types down to what rarely would have been released.
The flatness of the surface isn't really a problem, because the photons that arrived a little later (by speed of light, the distance of the "roughness") are going to be extremely similar to the ones that arrived at the time of the first photons reaching the closer parts of the roughness. In fact what helps us is our tolerance of a somewhat soft focus. Since our resolution is 10cm, which light travels in 3.33564095E-10 seconds, our probably much longer exposure (to collect photons) means our focus is not going to be precise anyway.
The main problem, bigger than reconstructing the image that didn't pass through a collimating (projecting) lens (though the atmosphere's curvature might give us something to work with, however fuzzy at the "boundary" with vacuum), is indeed all the other light on the reflecting object. We could probably filter that by spectrographic filters, though we'd be guessing at the precise spectrum of the ancient light of the Sun.
This whole thing would be quite a feat, at every step. But it does seem to be within physical limits. So given enough time to work on it, "we" might eventually pull it off.
It will have been fun in the future to watch us type these responses back here (and now). Just sit closer to the window, and you'll be famous for it someday!
You're getting double the information by using two telescopes. Most of the info is redundant. But there is phase info, available to the "phased array", in what you're getting. The interferometry is the method of extracting the phase info. The phase info isn't redundant between the two telescopes. So that extra info is an increase over the single telescope's. The extra info is the increased resolution.
I didn't know about McDevitt's version of this idea. I thought of it when thinking through "faster than light travel" applications, when I realized that reflected light "bends space" back to the source, which is effectively time travel. I was helping build a digital camera out of a lot of cutting edge DSP for noise reduction and feature enhancement, including some efforts at reversing the effects of air turbulence confusing light paths to the sensor. It occurred to me that similar processing, but more advanced, could "clean up" the reflections of Earth from distant objects. Pluto is frozen and kind of "shiny", and by extension so are other distant objects. The computation might be far too vast for our current computing methods, even if all of our computers were dedicated to it. But quantum computing methods, especially in later generations (harnessing all the subatomic particles, not just the "big" ones and their simplest quantum states), could deliver the power.
It's certainly worth thinking about. Because if it worked, the value would be unprecedented. Age old questions, some religious (various miracles), some political (conduct of ancient original conflicts), some scientific (video of ancient ecologies), and others of wide impact, could be settled with visual evidence understandable to anyone (if sufficiently reconstructed). And if we're ever going to do it, we're going to have to think about it a lot before we get there.
If only we could reverse the technique, and peer at very close objects to see the future, we might learn quicker how to look at the past:).
A telescope array acting as an interferometer doesn't need to be a single large sensor like that. We can orbit the array with separations of 1E13, just beyond Neptune. That would give us resolution of something like 5.8E-20 arcseconds. The radius of that regular polygon with 10cm sides is about 7E21m, or about 740,000 light years. Which would show light that left Earth about 1.48 million years ago. Orbital arrays much closer to Earth are sufficient for looking for apples only 175ly away.
The signal to noise is of course extremely high ("astronomical"). That's why I mentioned the combined computing power of all the world's computers. We're gonna need a bigger boat, but that's a good sea to sail her on, to catch this shark:).
When can we point our telescopes at an object hundreds or thousands of lightyears distant, and pick up the light reflected back at us that previously traveled from Earth to that object, then reassemble it into images? Images of the Earth's past, twice as old as the lightyear distance of the object?
We could look at an object 1000 lightyears distant for reflections of Jesus being crucified. Search among objects 250-600 lightyears distant for reflections of people arriving in the "Americas" on ships before Columbus. 176ly distant objects could show us images of Newton getting hit by a falling apple.
Finally a use for the combined computing power of all Earth's computers.
You are a complete fucking idiot. The Democrats didn't have any power from 2001-2006, so they weren't even in a position to do what THE CHAIRMAN OF THE FCC IS DOING. Policy announcements by the controlling official are not the same as campaign promises. But after 8-14 years of the Republican Era, culminating in the Bush "Permanent Republican Majority", I suppose you've forgotten what actual government policy and rulemaking looks like, as distinct from a campaign promise. But forgetting that is for complete fucking idiots.
I don't even see Obama "changing his mind on stuff that helped get him elected". Unless you can show me where Obama promised FREE NATIONWIDE WIRELESS INTERNET, or something actually comparable to it, which he's now changing, you're just a complete fucking idiot.
I had said nothing about the Democrats, because this story is about the Republican FCC chief doing something that has no facts about Democrats attached to it. But since you brought it up, I'll cut you down. Nor did I say that Obama is "son of god", though you seem more obsessed with him being the first Black president in a way that is totally irrelevant, and therefore racist. Congratulations: you're a complete fucking idiot racist. Even if that's just a bonus, a more precise idiocy than the actual point of this story - but you brought it up.
What you need to do now is start whining "But Clinton...", which is the standard formula for you "they're all the same" idiots. Especially since a Clinton is now about to be Secretary of State. See how easy life can be for a complete fucking idiot?
Re:It is censorship, Brave New World style
on
Censorship By Glut
·
· Score: 1
Yes, that is censorship using "drown it out" techniques. But that is not the same as when the noise isn't coming from a group designing and executing the noise, which is selecting the message drowned out. That's why I made those points in my post. Just because a message isn't getting through isn't necessarily censorship, when the noise is just people's bad communication, not some people's exceptionally good suppression of it.
And that is why we don't live the way Jefferson ran his plantation, but rather more like the way he ran his philosophy.
It's not like Jefferson was magic or something. He was just a brilliant person in a time of fundamental crisis, who came up with a lot of ways out of that crisis. A fundamental crisis that awaits whenever we ignore or abuse his contributions. One of which contributions was that ideas and laws, not the people who make them, are the standards according to which we should live our lives.
Slashdot Mirror
Godwin only says that Hitler's mention was inevitable, given a long enough discussion.
If we're not going to talk about Hitler, and the standard reference of evil he represents, we're doomed to repeat Hitler.
These idiotic corruptions of Godwin's observations that long discussions eventually mention Hitler stand in the way of the Internet helping us enough progress to stop such evil from coming around again.
Java applets are not "dead and buried". Neither on the Web, nor on mobile phones (with the distinction increasingly meaningless), or on embedded devices, like DVD players and settop boxes (most of which have Java VMs in them, especially Blu-Ray players and other HD players for menus).
What is "dead and buried" is ActiveX, which is x86 code running in a browser's "sandbox". But even that is clearly no barrier to resurgence, as this story shows.
x86 is a lousy architecture for modern purposes. Its design was determined by optimizations for executing Pascal programs, which was the primary programming market for the IBM PC when it was originally designed. That was a long time ago, and only the huge legacy of existing apps (and their forward momentum maintained by huge backwards compatibility design and sacrifices) keeps x86 code popular. I'm all for a SW x86 emulator, especially for newer CPUs so they don't have to be shackled to design compromises just to run the legacy code, instead of doing it newer and better ways with a more modern instruction set. Just like I'm all for the game emulators that will play old Atari 2600 games on Core Duo PCs and ARM mobile phones. Let's just not enslave ourselves to 1980 design priorities optimizing for a really dead language for yet another decade of programming, now going on 30 years, which is 20 generations under Moore's Law.
That is totally cool. And exactly the main point of a "truly open Android" phone. The entire purpose of having a device is what it does, and for computers that's the apps.
Funny how that isn't the lede of the story. Thanks for cluing that together for us :).
I don't see an explanation there of whether the G1 network can be the 3G connection. Does the Android OS deliver the 3G as a regular network interface?
When you say "you can run ARM Debian without any porting work", do you mean that I can run non-GUI ARM Debian apps on the Android phone/OS right away? Binaries, or do I have to recompile source? And if I have to recompile, does gcc have an easy config for compiling on an x86 Debian (or Ubuntu) PC targeting the Android?
Do you know if there's any project out there right now that's working on running Debian apps (with some GUI, or with none) on a default Android that's also running Skia apps?
What's stopping an app written in, say, C++ available from, say, the Ubuntu APT repository from running directly against the Android kernel? Other than porting its GNOME (or other) GUI calls Android's GUI API. And how similar is that Android GUI API to any other existing one (GNOME, KDE, Java Swing, raw X11)?
One big difference between Iran and Kuwait is that although Iran warred with Iraq for control of the Basra area oilfields, Kuwait actually "sipped Iraq's milkshake" by drilling sideways across the Iraq border and actually sucked up Iraq's oil, which it sold to the US. Which was why Iraq invaded Kuwait. Though perhaps Iraq might not have invaded, if Bush's response to Saddam's warnings to Kuwait had not been "that's between Iraq and Kuwait", then reversed that policy when Iraq invaded.
What does it take to make Linux source code apps compile and run on an Android phone?
This story, with only 29 responses as I type this one, is already tagged with "troll" and "flamebait". Because asking whether our military is winning or losing a war that could determine our survival as a free country, or whether it's even fighting one that is demonstrably costing a lot of money, isn't a legitimate question. No, it's just question designed to do nothing but start a flamewar.
Which is a cyberwar.
We therefore have our answer, basically: yes, we are in a cyberwar; no, we don't even really know how to fight one, or how to know that we are fighting one . I don't know if it's Chinese people tagging this story, but whoever it is, they're an enemy. Luckily, to defeat them we just have to think a little and talk amongst ourselves in public. Which is the charter of Slashdot. In this story's discussion we'll get to see whether we have a chance of winning.
This past Election Day, the people of Massachusetts just voted 2:1 to decriminalize possession of up to 1 ounce of marijuana (over 50 typical joints). If caught with that much pot, the "criminal" is issued a ticket, about equivalent to a ticket for an open container of beer, that can be mailed in with a $100 fine without even a court appearance.
Every day that goes by without Massachusetts falling into chaos or bedlam will prove how stupid pot prohibition is. Something like 50% of America's over 1 million imprisoned criminals committed nonviolent drug crimes, and about 850,000 people are arrested for pot every year. Instead of spending an average of $30,000 per year per prisoner, we could be collecting income and sales taxes from the people growing, distributing and consuming it. Probably could be a top agriculture export for this country. And with an entire state running OK mostly post-prohibition, the counterexample in favor of sanity should be undeniable.
If you want a 4G network, there is no competition. That is a monopoly. It's like if the only broadband were AT&T, but somehow 56Kbps dialup meant AT&T's broadband weren't a monopoly. If some other competitor rolled out a 4G network, that might represent a different kind of monopoly, a duopoly. And if those two 4G competitors locked out the other network from their subscribed equipment, that would be a lockin monopoly just as the current Sprint/Verizon/T-Mobile/etc each are.
To see the difference, look at the Internet connections available in a "telecom hotel", where many interoperable networks actually do terminate for customers to choose from, that are all in the same class of service. A customer can connect to one of them, or multiple, depending on the differences between them. That kind of free choice is completely different from a customer for this first 4G network. And the different 3G or 2G mobile networks are themselves a lot closer to the monopoly than to the free choice.
This new network will be a monopoly, even more than the current mobile telco monopolies (lockin). At least on the current mobile networks you can roam on a different network, even though each network can use its monopoly of access to it to set prices and policies arbitrarily expensive and restrictive. For comparison, see the Internet backbones, which are comparatively cheap and open (even though the telcos/cablecos are increasingly coordinated in a cartel, abusing openness and fixing prices).
Of course the first of anything gets to be a monopoly, especially when there's no "photo finish" race among competitors to be first. And the early adopters will pay whatever cost is required. That monopoly might even be necessary and acceptable for a while. But the incumbent mobile telcos have shown that the monopoly lasts forever, even if there are competing corporations (each with their own monopoly).
These networks are all courtesy of the public, especially the mobile ones that lease the public airwaves. Those leases should include a public/private benefit formula that accounts for investment and risk by the spectrum developer, allowing monopoly control long enough to protect profit enough that investors are encouraged to go for the gold. But once some range of motivating profit is achieved, equal access and price anti-gouging rules should protect the public from the monopoly, protect the market from the monopoly crushing any competition entering. Perhaps the lease price should include a refundable deposit that reverts to the spectrum developer once competition is achieved, and is used to fund competitive entrants (under equal access and price protections) if the way the developer runs it doesn't allow competition soon enough.
Make the incentives and protections for competition match the environment, and the market will run properly. Otherwise, we're just going to pay retail for a fourth generation of the telco monopoly that interferes with all our other development, exploiting public property for a very narrow private gain.
So since we've got some tiny islands that N Korea could barely reach if it got really lucky, that N Korea could benefit from attacking only by escalating a shooting war with the US, we should... polish the trigger and load the gun?
If N Korea could hit something that actually damaged US ability to counterattack militarily, economically, or - last resort, like always - diplomatically (like cut off their trade with all their neighbors), then we might want to consider an antimissile defense. But the Aleutians are a buffer against such an attack. If they hit them, we'd suffer minimal loss, and N Korea would finally find itself facing the most global opposition possible. It would be a boon to the US, just as Georgia's attacking Russia finally gave Russia the chance to slap down its Georgia nuisance.
Because the US, unlike N Korea, has plenty of reach anywhere in N Korea, once the nice guy gloves are off. And N Korea, unlike the Aleutians, is full of targets useful for destroying its regime.
In case you missed it, I'll make it plain: an antimissile defense of the Aleutians from N Korea is precisely the worst distraction from the proper, conventional response. Even plainer: exactly like invading Iraq when a couple dozen mostly Saudis attacked us from an HQ in Afghanistan protected by the secret police in Pakistan, antimissile defense of the Aleutians from N Korea is a bait & switch that would just squander everything, including unprecedented world alliance, to make everything worse, with no way out.
That's where the reverse ray tracing comes in :).
There are probably plenty of distant objects with little to no intervening matter. And then there's probably distant objects that have intervening matter that collimates light, either optically or gravitationally.
Inverting the ratio by calling it "high" has a way of doing that :). Nice catch.
For most of human history, all browsers were in prerelease. Until 1995, only a few weren't in prerelease, like www and w3.
In fact, almost all browsers are still in prerelease. As they always are, except momentarily when they are released.
And this isn't just pedantry. All these browsers have the low quality that prerelease versions of software used to have before browsers were released, in the mid 1990s. They've lowered the quality of released software of all types down to what rarely would have been released.
The flatness of the surface isn't really a problem, because the photons that arrived a little later (by speed of light, the distance of the "roughness") are going to be extremely similar to the ones that arrived at the time of the first photons reaching the closer parts of the roughness. In fact what helps us is our tolerance of a somewhat soft focus. Since our resolution is 10cm, which light travels in 3.33564095E-10 seconds, our probably much longer exposure (to collect photons) means our focus is not going to be precise anyway.
The main problem, bigger than reconstructing the image that didn't pass through a collimating (projecting) lens (though the atmosphere's curvature might give us something to work with, however fuzzy at the "boundary" with vacuum), is indeed all the other light on the reflecting object. We could probably filter that by spectrographic filters, though we'd be guessing at the precise spectrum of the ancient light of the Sun.
This whole thing would be quite a feat, at every step. But it does seem to be within physical limits. So given enough time to work on it, "we" might eventually pull it off.
It will have been fun in the future to watch us type these responses back here (and now). Just sit closer to the window, and you'll be famous for it someday!
You're getting double the information by using two telescopes. Most of the info is redundant. But there is phase info, available to the "phased array", in what you're getting. The interferometry is the method of extracting the phase info. The phase info isn't redundant between the two telescopes. So that extra info is an increase over the single telescope's. The extra info is the increased resolution.
You can look into aperature synthesis, which is the technique at work.
I didn't know about McDevitt's version of this idea. I thought of it when thinking through "faster than light travel" applications, when I realized that reflected light "bends space" back to the source, which is effectively time travel. I was helping build a digital camera out of a lot of cutting edge DSP for noise reduction and feature enhancement, including some efforts at reversing the effects of air turbulence confusing light paths to the sensor. It occurred to me that similar processing, but more advanced, could "clean up" the reflections of Earth from distant objects. Pluto is frozen and kind of "shiny", and by extension so are other distant objects. The computation might be far too vast for our current computing methods, even if all of our computers were dedicated to it. But quantum computing methods, especially in later generations (harnessing all the subatomic particles, not just the "big" ones and their simplest quantum states), could deliver the power.
It's certainly worth thinking about. Because if it worked, the value would be unprecedented. Age old questions, some religious (various miracles), some political (conduct of ancient original conflicts), some scientific (video of ancient ecologies), and others of wide impact, could be settled with visual evidence understandable to anyone (if sufficiently reconstructed). And if we're ever going to do it, we're going to have to think about it a lot before we get there.
If only we could reverse the technique, and peer at very close objects to see the future, we might learn quicker how to look at the past :).
A telescope array acting as an interferometer doesn't need to be a single large sensor like that. We can orbit the array with separations of 1E13, just beyond Neptune. That would give us resolution of something like 5.8E-20 arcseconds. The radius of that regular polygon with 10cm sides is about 7E21m, or about 740,000 light years. Which would show light that left Earth about 1.48 million years ago. Orbital arrays much closer to Earth are sufficient for looking for apples only 175ly away.
The signal to noise is of course extremely high ("astronomical"). That's why I mentioned the combined computing power of all the world's computers. We're gonna need a bigger boat, but that's a good sea to sail her on, to catch this shark :).
When can we point our telescopes at an object hundreds or thousands of lightyears distant, and pick up the light reflected back at us that previously traveled from Earth to that object, then reassemble it into images? Images of the Earth's past, twice as old as the lightyear distance of the object?
We could look at an object 1000 lightyears distant for reflections of Jesus being crucified. Search among objects 250-600 lightyears distant for reflections of people arriving in the "Americas" on ships before Columbus. 176ly distant objects could show us images of Newton getting hit by a falling apple.
Finally a use for the combined computing power of all Earth's computers.
Or, they're ghosts.
You are a complete fucking idiot. The Democrats didn't have any power from 2001-2006, so they weren't even in a position to do what THE CHAIRMAN OF THE FCC IS DOING. Policy announcements by the controlling official are not the same as campaign promises. But after 8-14 years of the Republican Era, culminating in the Bush "Permanent Republican Majority", I suppose you've forgotten what actual government policy and rulemaking looks like, as distinct from a campaign promise. But forgetting that is for complete fucking idiots.
I don't even see Obama "changing his mind on stuff that helped get him elected". Unless you can show me where Obama promised FREE NATIONWIDE WIRELESS INTERNET, or something actually comparable to it, which he's now changing, you're just a complete fucking idiot.
I had said nothing about the Democrats, because this story is about the Republican FCC chief doing something that has no facts about Democrats attached to it. But since you brought it up, I'll cut you down. Nor did I say that Obama is "son of god", though you seem more obsessed with him being the first Black president in a way that is totally irrelevant, and therefore racist. Congratulations: you're a complete fucking idiot racist. Even if that's just a bonus, a more precise idiocy than the actual point of this story - but you brought it up.
What you need to do now is start whining "But Clinton...", which is the standard formula for you "they're all the same" idiots. Especially since a Clinton is now about to be Secretary of State. See how easy life can be for a complete fucking idiot?
Yes, that is censorship using "drown it out" techniques. But that is not the same as when the noise isn't coming from a group designing and executing the noise, which is selecting the message drowned out. That's why I made those points in my post. Just because a message isn't getting through isn't necessarily censorship, when the noise is just people's bad communication, not some people's exceptionally good suppression of it.
And that is why we don't live the way Jefferson ran his plantation, but rather more like the way he ran his philosophy.
It's not like Jefferson was magic or something. He was just a brilliant person in a time of fundamental crisis, who came up with a lot of ways out of that crisis. A fundamental crisis that awaits whenever we ignore or abuse his contributions. One of which contributions was that ideas and laws, not the people who make them, are the standards according to which we should live our lives.