No. I assure you it is YOU who are quite desperately wrong. Completely, on the wrong side of history and an offence under the eyes of all that is holy.
Communism really does seem to be an unworkable and inefficient system - it relies on an oversimplified 19th century view of economics (just like pure free-market corporate anarchists do as well). Nobody is even arguing in favour of that nonsense anymore, so just drop it.
Socialism is not wrong, it is profoundly right (and is not the same as communism, this is merely a lie the Powers That Be want you to believe), and will even try to save yours and your children's ignorant asses when the rich&powerful come to take away everything you have.
Homosexuality is only wrong if you are a True Believer in bronze age mythology, which (sad to say) many people still are.
I'm not talking about all the regular satellite communications. Are we intentionally broadcasting any messages for the universe at large?
Short answer is no - apart from at least one PR message sent out from Aricebo in the 70's IIRC.
And would regular satellite communications appear barycentric? It doesn't sound like it. So, if we're not broadcasting barycentric signals, why would we expect other lifeforms to broadcast them? Or are we braodcasting something barycentric?
The current SETI efforts assume that we will be receiving signals from a beacon aimed at least generally in our direction and which will be very high power. This is obviously a big assumption, but the problem is that we don't have the technology at the moment to detect "alien TV"-strength signals. Those signals would be utterly missed by the Aricebo effort, as they are too weak to resolve against the background noise. The Square Kilometer Array radio telescope might be able to pick up alien TV signals out to a dozen or so light years.
Pointdexter may be evil, but stupid he's not, nor are most of the people in the IAO (most likely). I can't help but think that they chose the logo at least in part out of sheer glee at the thought of how it was going to drive a certain portion of the conspiracy-minded public into spasms of paranoia.
Anyway, Heute die welt, morgens das sonnensystem is pretty much the for-real slogan of the Bushites, so we're off the edge of the paranoia event horizon in any case...
Just for reference, the Airport Improvement Fee is essentially a toll fee that goes towards the cost of the new terminal (just completed within the past couple of years).
Not that I expect them to remove the fee once the terminal is paid off - that's the real catch in these kinds of fees. The system gets used to the cash influx and comes to regard it as some kind of inherent right, rather than as a temporary measure (kind of like income tax was?).
I heard that. Creative Computing was the magazine that got me really excited about computers. The collection of stuff was always eclectic, humorous, informative, and driven by a passion to communicate the excitement of the new world that was opening up. Younger people should be rightly suspicious when old coots start prattling about how much better things were in the day, but I'm here to bear witness that every now and then things really were better, and Creative Computing was one of those things.
Sure, Maya and Softimage are/were standards for film production, but 3D Studio has been used in a number of major motion pictures as well. There's no denying that it has found more of a home in the games industry, but that's not for want of capability. Here is a list of application fot 3dsmax which includes cinematic works.
Of course if you're talking about it from a career perspective, then yeah, for sure, Maya would be the way to go for the film industry.
Perfect settings, thanks. Got over 133000 right away. My 6 year old daughter thinks this is the funniest thing she's seen in a while. Maybe I should be worried...
What, and admit that MBAs from an expensive school plus really really nice suits are not the same thing as business sense? Good grief, that would rattle the whole system to the core. I mean, if actual business success is what you're after there's probably a thousand 25 year oid MacDonald's managers out there who could run the company just as well as some Harvard MBA.
Business Administration is not, and never will be, an academic discipline.
Shiny eye candy, no doubt about it. However this begs the question - what about the those of us who prefer our desktop to be darker, moodier, and more subtle? While I acknowldedge that the new looks are bright and happy and very attractive, I find myself longing for something parallel but not quite so liable to burst forth into Pikachus and/or Hello Kitties at any moment.
Then again maybe there's just a theme somewhere that I should be downloading but am not. Anyone?
Hmmm... DVD quality at lower filesize than divx and all those codecs... this means that ALL those ripped movies are going to be worthless... people will have to re-encode it all AGAIN to H.264 and just chuck all those old "unwatchable" divx rips...
arrested for owning a gun, charged for saying something 'racist', and imprisoned for WRITING DOWN child porn
Oh my gosh - the Gun Nuts, the Klan, and Child Abusers aren't welcome in Canada? Terrible, who's next? Necrophiles? What about the poor, poor People Who Torture Animals?
Who would want to live in a country where you couldn't do things like that?
It seems to be getting worse, too. My Ph.D. not infrequently generates an attitude of "Oh, so you're not a real doctor, then?" I blame it all on medical TV dramas.
Actually it's pretty unlikely, I would guess. It depends strongly upon how the brain has been preserved - if it's in a strong formalin solution then the DNA is largely unrecoverable. There are methods for getting some DNA out of formalin-fixed tissue, but it wouldn't be an easy job.
I don't think the information would be a lot of use anyway until a LOT more is understood about brain development, and that's still assuming that whatever made Einstein's brain so brilliant was completely genetic in anyway. In utero environmental factors and probably lots of other factors we don't even know about yet might play a role. Make a complete DNA copy of Albert and you might just end up with an unusually bright kid, but not a world-class genius.
There are very specific reasons why this particular genome sequence, while it may not benefit you personally, may alter or save the lives of millions of people within the next ten years.
Relatively recently it was discovered that the malaria parasite contains a small, relict chloroplast. This is big news. The choloroplast (for those of you rusty on your biology, the green thingy that plants use to put sunlight to use in making ATP, essentially the energy-storage molecule for life) is degenerate and certainly doesn't do photosynthesis anymore. On the other hand it appears that many of the chloroplast genes have transferred themselves into the Plasmodium genome and become intergrally linked into the metabolism of the parasite.
Why is this a big deal? Because there are lots of chemicals around which kill plants by interfering with cholorplast metabolism, and which are simultaneously harmless to humans. This means a raft of new candidate cures for the disease.
Many are already undergoing development. The publication of the Plasmoium genome means that it will be a (moderately) easy task to tease out a complete list of all the chloroplast-related genes which are involved in the metabolism of the parasite, and to expand the list of potential treatments even more based upon this information.
Sheesh, people need to grab a bit of perspective here. They're talking about doing a bit of work to help out the needy in a poor country. From the response you'd think they were throwing Molotov Cocktails on the White House lawn.
People need to go have a walk and clear the dogma from their heads if they really think this is somehow an evil conspiracy.
I'm sure the fellow who played Arthur in the TV series is too old by now, which is a shame. The BBC TV series was pretty awful, with two shining exceptions. Arthur was, just to me, utterly perfect. He looked and spoke just about exactly the way Arthur did in my head.
The other Great Exception was Slartibartfast, not sure what the actor's name was, but he truly grokked the character.
A space of several inches, then what appears to be another door. I say door rather than wall, as the sides of the shaft are pretty obvious going in past the new door. Didn't look very much like the old door, however. The old door was white, and had two metallic attachments. The new "door" is grey, cracked, and has no attachments. Nothing much visible on the floor either. Just dust.
You and the original AC must have had the same teacher. It seems beyond belief that such an utterly aberrant and downright wrong spelling would be passed down through multiple teachers by accident. Much more likely that it came from the same source.
it would have been worth anybody's while, if all they wanted to do was fill a book with meaningless gibberish
Not too sure about this - he was scamming an Emperor after all. Doing a half-assed job could have landed him in prison or worse. I'm sure that a considerable effort was made by the scam artist in question to invent his own alphabet and then encode a number of random "mystical" tracts into it, fill the book up with "magical" images, and whatever other work was necessary to make it look "real" to the eye of a 15th century emperor.
Sheesh. By this logic reading a book is also a complete waste of time. I mean, you're just STARING at a PIECE OF PAPER covered with INK SPOTS talking about THINGS THAT NEVER HAPPENED! Don't even get me started on nonfiction - there's no such thing - every writer comes at book with a viewpoint decided beforehand. It is all a TISSUE OF LIES! Stop reading now!
Seriously though, there's a disturbing puritanism about the anti-TV people. Of course spending 4-8 hours a day staring at the tube is a waste of your life. Duh. That being said, I don't really feel guilty for sitting down to the odd documentary, or even something funny once in a while. In the end it's all about what you decide to watch, and about knowing when to turn it off.
Sure, you can come up with as many scenerios on why someone wouldn't do it as you want.
I think this is the part that I'm uncomfortable with - the argument seems to rest on the idea that if someone doesn't do it the way we think they should, then they probably don't exist. I accept provisionally that with a "reasonable degree of certainty" we see no evidence that they have ever been here, and thus must assume that either (a) they don't exist, as per the paradox, or (b) something is wrong with the model under which a paradox arises.
You can make up all kinds of conspiracy scenerios
I recognize that my argument treads dangerously close to loony ground. For the record let me state that I'm no UFO nut. All the same, the detritus of tinfoil hats and Von Daniken spoor all around us should not dissuade us from having a look around the territory. We cannot currently say anything conclusive about the frequency of extraterrestrial civilizations even nearby to our own solar system - we don't have the technology. The only thing we can eliminate with certainty is the presence of any nearby high-power directed beacons. Once we have the technology to detect earth-level RF from other solar systems, then we'll be able to say that we are not surrounded by civilizations. Until then, the Fermi Paradox must rest upon the absence of evidence for visitation within our own solar system.
I accept the conclusions of the paradox, but only provisionally. We are still speculating in a sea of unknowns, and I'm uncomfortable with charting out a single string of minimal-assumption hypotheses and then taking the results with anything but a grain of salt.
FWIW, my own personal suspicion is that technological life is incredibly rare, but that simple, bacterial-level life might be common. This is just based upon the one piece of evidence we have - the history of life on Earth. It's only a single data point, but all the same it is an absolute and undeniable example of life evolving in a solar system. Over 4.5 billion years of Earth's history, nearly 3 billion of those were spent as a stable bacterial world. In all that time, only one successfull association of bacteria managed to develop the information capacity of eucaryotic life. That's really bad odds.
Fermi's paradox still seems to be built on lots of unstated assumptions. I accept the simple logic behind it: one intelligent species can fill up the galaxy on (reasonably) small time scales. What's unstated? That they would want to (ie, same expansion desires as our species - would it be the same for an oceanbound technological species?), that they would be sufficiently interested in our particular planet to colonize it, or at least spend a huge amount of effort to build an indestructible monument in the middle of the Silurian on the off chance that somebody might be around some day to check it out, and that there are no constraints to expansion of which we are currently unaware. I'm sure somebody else can come up with more.
It also assumes, of course, that they are not here. I don't want to open up THAT whole can of worms, but the reality is that all we can do at the moment is make the assumption that they aren't based upon the fact that we can't conclusively demonstrate that they are. All the same, the conclusion that Fermi's paradox says we are alone is predicated upon an assumption which cannot be proved true, to wit the proof of a negative, that they are not or have not been here.
I asked one of the SKA people about this very topic at a conference a couple of years ago. I'm not sure if anyone had actually done the math at that point, but they said an earthlike level of RF emission would be detectable at "a couple of dozen" light years. Beyond that it's back to looking for directed beacons again. All the same, it would be interesting to look to interstellar TV from a handfull of nearby solar systems.
Anyone have better information on the SKA's range for earthlike RF detection?
Slashdot Mirror
No. I assure you it is YOU who are quite desperately wrong. Completely, on the wrong side of history and an offence under the eyes of all that is holy.
Communism really does seem to be an unworkable and inefficient system - it relies on an oversimplified 19th century view of economics (just like pure free-market corporate anarchists do as well). Nobody is even arguing in favour of that nonsense anymore, so just drop it.
Socialism is not wrong, it is profoundly right (and is not the same as communism, this is merely a lie the Powers That Be want you to believe), and will even try to save yours and your children's ignorant asses when the rich&powerful come to take away everything you have.
Homosexuality is only wrong if you are a True Believer in bronze age mythology, which (sad to say) many people still are.
I'm not talking about all the regular satellite communications. Are we intentionally broadcasting any messages for the universe at large?
Short answer is no - apart from at least one PR message sent out from Aricebo in the 70's IIRC.
And would regular satellite communications appear barycentric? It doesn't sound like it. So, if we're not broadcasting barycentric signals, why would we expect other lifeforms to broadcast them? Or are we braodcasting something barycentric?
The current SETI efforts assume that we will be receiving signals from a beacon aimed at least generally in our direction and which will be very high power. This is obviously a big assumption, but the problem is that we don't have the technology at the moment to detect "alien TV"-strength signals. Those signals would be utterly missed by the Aricebo effort, as they are too weak to resolve against the background noise. The Square Kilometer Array radio telescope might be able to pick up alien TV signals out to a dozen or so light years.
Pointdexter may be evil, but stupid he's not, nor are most of the people in the IAO (most likely). I can't help but think that they chose the logo at least in part out of sheer glee at the thought of how it was going to drive a certain portion of the conspiracy-minded public into spasms of paranoia.
Anyway, Heute die welt, morgens das sonnensystem is pretty much the for-real slogan of the Bushites, so we're off the edge of the paranoia event horizon in any case...
Just for reference, the Airport Improvement Fee is essentially a toll fee that goes towards the cost of the new terminal (just completed within the past couple of years).
Not that I expect them to remove the fee once the terminal is paid off - that's the real catch in these kinds of fees. The system gets used to the cash influx and comes to regard it as some kind of inherent right, rather than as a temporary measure (kind of like income tax was?).
I heard that. Creative Computing was the magazine that got me really excited about computers. The collection of stuff was always eclectic, humorous, informative, and driven by a passion to communicate the excitement of the new world that was opening up. Younger people should be rightly suspicious when old coots start prattling about how much better things were in the day, but I'm here to bear witness that every now and then things really were better, and Creative Computing was one of those things.
Sure, Maya and Softimage are/were standards for film production, but 3D Studio has been used in a number of major motion pictures as well. There's no denying that it has found more of a home in the games industry, but that's not for want of capability. Here is a list of application fot 3dsmax which includes cinematic works.
Of course if you're talking about it from a career perspective, then yeah, for sure, Maya would be the way to go for the film industry.
Perfect settings, thanks. Got over 133000 right away. My 6 year old daughter thinks this is the funniest thing she's seen in a while. Maybe I should be worried...
What, and admit that MBAs from an expensive school plus really really nice suits are not the same thing as business sense? Good grief, that would rattle the whole system to the core. I mean, if actual business success is what you're after there's probably a thousand 25 year oid MacDonald's managers out there who could run the company just as well as some Harvard MBA.
Business Administration is not, and never will be, an academic discipline.
Shiny eye candy, no doubt about it. However this begs the question - what about the those of us who prefer our desktop to be darker, moodier, and more subtle? While I acknowldedge that the new looks are bright and happy and very attractive, I find myself longing for something parallel but not quite so liable to burst forth into Pikachus and/or Hello Kitties at any moment.
Then again maybe there's just a theme somewhere that I should be downloading but am not. Anyone?
Hmmm... DVD quality at lower filesize than divx and all those codecs... this means that ALL those ripped movies are going to be worthless... people will have to re-encode it all AGAIN to H.264 and just chuck all those old "unwatchable" divx rips...
arrested for owning a gun, charged for saying something 'racist', and imprisoned for WRITING DOWN child porn
Oh my gosh - the Gun Nuts, the Klan, and Child Abusers aren't welcome in Canada? Terrible, who's next? Necrophiles? What about the poor, poor People Who Torture Animals?
Who would want to live in a country where you couldn't do things like that?
It seems to be getting worse, too. My Ph.D. not infrequently generates an attitude of "Oh, so you're not a real doctor, then?" I blame it all on medical TV dramas.
Actually it's pretty unlikely, I would guess. It depends strongly upon how the brain has been preserved - if it's in a strong formalin solution then the DNA is largely unrecoverable. There are methods for getting some DNA out of formalin-fixed tissue, but it wouldn't be an easy job.
I don't think the information would be a lot of use anyway until a LOT more is understood about brain development, and that's still assuming that whatever made Einstein's brain so brilliant was completely genetic in anyway. In utero environmental factors and probably lots of other factors we don't even know about yet might play a role. Make a complete DNA copy of Albert and you might just end up with an unusually bright kid, but not a world-class genius.
There are very specific reasons why this particular genome sequence, while it may not benefit you personally, may alter or save the lives of millions of people within the next ten years.
Relatively recently it was discovered that the malaria parasite contains a small, relict chloroplast. This is big news. The choloroplast (for those of you rusty on your biology, the green thingy that plants use to put sunlight to use in making ATP, essentially the energy-storage molecule for life) is degenerate and certainly doesn't do photosynthesis anymore. On the other hand it appears that many of the chloroplast genes have transferred themselves into the Plasmodium genome and become intergrally linked into the metabolism of the parasite.
Why is this a big deal? Because there are lots of chemicals around which kill plants by interfering with cholorplast metabolism, and which are simultaneously harmless to humans. This means a raft of new candidate cures for the disease.
Many are already undergoing development. The publication of the Plasmoium genome means that it will be a (moderately) easy task to tease out a complete list of all the chloroplast-related genes which are involved in the metabolism of the parasite, and to expand the list of potential treatments even more based upon this information.
Sheesh, people need to grab a bit of perspective here. They're talking about doing a bit of work to help out the needy in a poor country. From the response you'd think they were throwing Molotov Cocktails on the White House lawn.
People need to go have a walk and clear the dogma from their heads if they really think this is somehow an evil conspiracy.
I'm sure the fellow who played Arthur in the TV series is too old by now, which is a shame. The BBC TV series was pretty awful, with two shining exceptions. Arthur was, just to me, utterly perfect. He looked and spoke just about exactly the way Arthur did in my head.
The other Great Exception was Slartibartfast, not sure what the actor's name was, but he truly grokked the character.
A space of several inches, then what appears to be another door. I say door rather than wall, as the sides of the shaft are pretty obvious going in past the new door. Didn't look very much like the old door, however. The old door was white, and had two metallic attachments. The new "door" is grey, cracked, and has no attachments. Nothing much visible on the floor either. Just dust.
I was taught the version "i before e except after c, unless it sounds like 'a' as in neighbour and weigh", although that doesn't explain "height".
You and the original AC must have had the same teacher. It seems beyond belief that such an utterly aberrant and downright wrong spelling would be passed down through multiple teachers by accident. Much more likely that it came from the same source.
it would have been worth anybody's while, if all they wanted to do was fill a book with meaningless gibberish
Not too sure about this - he was scamming an Emperor after all. Doing a half-assed job could have landed him in prison or worse. I'm sure that a considerable effort was made by the scam artist in question to invent his own alphabet and then encode a number of random "mystical" tracts into it, fill the book up with "magical" images, and whatever other work was necessary to make it look "real" to the eye of a 15th century emperor.
And considerably more boring. I made it through F.P. by sheer bloodymindedness. The Name of the Rose it ain't.
Sheesh. By this logic reading a book is also a complete waste of time. I mean, you're just STARING at a PIECE OF PAPER covered with INK SPOTS talking about THINGS THAT NEVER HAPPENED! Don't even get me started on nonfiction - there's no such thing - every writer comes at book with a viewpoint decided beforehand. It is all a TISSUE OF LIES! Stop reading now!
Seriously though, there's a disturbing puritanism about the anti-TV people. Of course spending 4-8 hours a day staring at the tube is a waste of your life. Duh. That being said, I don't really feel guilty for sitting down to the odd documentary, or even something funny once in a while. In the end it's all about what you decide to watch, and about knowing when to turn it off.
Sure, you can come up with as many scenerios on why someone wouldn't do it as you want.
I think this is the part that I'm uncomfortable with - the argument seems to rest on the idea that if someone doesn't do it the way we think they should, then they probably don't exist. I accept provisionally that with a "reasonable degree of certainty" we see no evidence that they have ever been here, and thus must assume that either (a) they don't exist, as per the paradox, or (b) something is wrong with the model under which a paradox arises.
You can make up all kinds of conspiracy scenerios
I recognize that my argument treads dangerously close to loony ground. For the record let me state that I'm no UFO nut. All the same, the detritus of tinfoil hats and Von Daniken spoor all around us should not dissuade us from having a look around the territory. We cannot currently say anything conclusive about the frequency of extraterrestrial civilizations even nearby to our own solar system - we don't have the technology. The only thing we can eliminate with certainty is the presence of any nearby high-power directed beacons. Once we have the technology to detect earth-level RF from other solar systems, then we'll be able to say that we are not surrounded by civilizations. Until then, the Fermi Paradox must rest upon the absence of evidence for visitation within our own solar system.
I accept the conclusions of the paradox, but only provisionally. We are still speculating in a sea of unknowns, and I'm uncomfortable with charting out a single string of minimal-assumption hypotheses and then taking the results with anything but a grain of salt.
FWIW, my own personal suspicion is that technological life is incredibly rare, but that simple, bacterial-level life might be common. This is just based upon the one piece of evidence we have - the history of life on Earth. It's only a single data point, but all the same it is an absolute and undeniable example of life evolving in a solar system. Over 4.5 billion years of Earth's history, nearly 3 billion of those were spent as a stable bacterial world. In all that time, only one successfull association of bacteria managed to develop the information capacity of eucaryotic life. That's really bad odds.
Fermi's paradox still seems to be built on lots of unstated assumptions. I accept the simple logic behind it: one intelligent species can fill up the galaxy on (reasonably) small time scales. What's unstated? That they would want to (ie, same expansion desires as our species - would it be the same for an oceanbound technological species?), that they would be sufficiently interested in our particular planet to colonize it, or at least spend a huge amount of effort to build an indestructible monument in the middle of the Silurian on the off chance that somebody might be around some day to check it out, and that there are no constraints to expansion of which we are currently unaware. I'm sure somebody else can come up with more.
It also assumes, of course, that they are not here. I don't want to open up THAT whole can of worms, but the reality is that all we can do at the moment is make the assumption that they aren't based upon the fact that we can't conclusively demonstrate that they are. All the same, the conclusion that Fermi's paradox says we are alone is predicated upon an assumption which cannot be proved true, to wit the proof of a negative, that they are not or have not been here.
I asked one of the SKA people about this very topic at a conference a couple of years ago. I'm not sure if anyone had actually done the math at that point, but they said an earthlike level of RF emission would be detectable at "a couple of dozen" light years. Beyond that it's back to looking for directed beacons again. All the same, it would be interesting to look to interstellar TV from a handfull of nearby solar systems.
Anyone have better information on the SKA's range for earthlike RF detection?