Yes, and the best existing lasers can, if you're lucky, make one of those pulses in a day. Not to mention that you couldn't get a symmetric compression with 5 targets. You gotta go with one, and it has to be precisely located. Moving target? I don't think so. The laser is huge, the size of a building, tens of thousands of tons. It would have to be built in space, with actuators to move each piece of laser substrate to within microns, which means precise temperature control over the whole structure. A single piece of dust will blow a crater the size of dime in one of the optics. A fingerprint would probably destroy the optic entirely. And it has to last for 450k years? I don't think so.
You're better off building the ship out of a huge block of ice or a large comet and using a simple uranium primed thorium or pure uranium fission reactor to generate steam for thrust and electricity. Much lower tolerances needed. Fewer moving parts. Lower mass of spares, etc.
Once they detect another civilization they move to wipe it out.
Why would they need us to send a transmission in order to detect us. We've been broadcasting our presence as the home of complex photosynthetic life for half a billion years. Planets like that are probably somewhat rare, and a species capable of interstellar travel would have no problems remotely monitoring them all for signs of a civilization. Our pollution has long since given us away as the home of a technological civilization.
The question would then be why would an alien civilization bother to wipe us out. Resources? Definitely not. Everything we have could be found closer to home. If there were a galactic resource depletion problem, we'd probably have seen signs of exo-engineering by now. But in that case the Earth might get taken apart so that an alien civilization can get at our valuable planetary core, but that won't be because were here. That will just be because we were the next system in line, and they probably won't even notice us.
Way back when, when the option was xfs or ext3, not getting forced fsck after a crash was a big plus for xfs. I don't think I've ever had xfs_repair do anything.
I have a NAS box with 4x750GB RAID5 formatted ext3. The processor and I/O is so slow that it has never finished an fsck even after I've waited for two weeks since it started. That was intolerable so I hacked into it and after building xfs.ko, found that support for linux xfs on big endian processors is non-existent. So what I do now is pull the drives, put them in an x86 linux system and do the fsck there if the thing crashes. Never buy a NAS box that uses ext3.
there is no chance a SETI telescope can receive earth-type signals
We're not looking for earth-type civilizations.
a next-to-zero chance an alien society will be spending time and energy beaming a signal directly at us.
A civilization in our galaxy a century or two more advanced than our own would know that this star has a planet with an oxygen nitrogen water vapor atmosphere, both oceans and solid surface and complex photosynthetic life. If you're going to be transmitting beacons, we'd be a very good target.
And while my terawatt hyperbole is just that, I'm sure it's not terribly far off.
What's six or seven orders of magnitude between friends. The Arecibo Planetary Radar transmitter (the brightest transmitter on the planet) is 425 kW. Yes, kW, and we could detect that across the galaxy because it has an effective isotropic radiated power (EIRP) of 10 TW. An SKA transmitter could do better on less power.
You'll never know if you don't look. And "a waste of everbody's time"? How is this wasting your time? Are you spending time on slashdot that you wouldn't otherwise be spending?
No. We're looking for deliberate transmissions, not leakage. Any planet even a couple decades beyond us in technology could know we're here and might be beaming a signal in our direction.
They will be looking primarily for deliberate transmissions. They look for continuous narrow-band signals, intermediate bandwidth pulses on millisecond timescales, broadband pulses on microsecond timescales, and soon (in beta) intermediate bandwidth signals consisting of a noise like signal followed milliseconds to seconds later by an overlapping identical signal.
Most leakage signals are too weak to be detected by the small telescopes we have like Greenbank and Arecibo, but the Arecibo planetary radar and some missile defense radars could be detected at interstellar distances.
I, of course, submitted a direct link to the Berkeley press release but apparently the Slashdot editors decided the one that was most wrong was the one to pick. First, SETI isn't a project, it's a field of study conducted by a lot of institutions. Nobody would talk about "the Physics Project started 2100 years ago by Pythagoras" when describing a particle accelerator.
This project in particular, is conducted by the Berkeley SETI group which is known for their SETI@home project, Astropulse search for radio pulses and their the SERENDIP project The exciting parts are 1) This targets earthlike planets. 2) It uses the Green Bank Telescope, which is the biggest steerable dish around and 3) they are recording time domain data at 3.2 Gbps (because the observations are short duration) rather than the 64 Mbps they get at Arecibo. That allows them to cover 800MHz of instantaneous bandwidth, rather than the 2.5MHz they get at Arecibo (albeit at much higher sensitivity)
I understand the desire to link this to the ATA shutdown, but that give the mistaken impression that this is a project of the SETI Institute. And they didn't even put a link to SETI@home (where the data will be processed) in the story.
I wish I had mod points. But talking about how wonderful the administration was, 8 days after 9/11, isn't all that surprising. Everyone in the media was doing so at that time. After all, the success of that attack couldn't have been because of major screw-ups (or possible malfeasance) by the administration.
You know, if you voted for Obama in 2008 just to prove you're not racist, you have to vote for someone else in 2012 to prove you're not an IDIOT.
That depends upon whether the Republicans offer someone who would be better. If the choice is get fucked soft or get fucked hard with a broomstick, only an IDIOT chooses "get fucked hard with a broomstick." So far none of the Republican field are offering to fuck us with anything smaller than a chain saw.
John Edwards cheated on his dying wife (ten-upping Gingrich)
Gingrich cheated on his first wife while she was dying of cancer, told her he wanted a divorce when she was in a hospital bed recovering from surgery, and then left her for his second wife. It appears likely that Gingrich had already started sleeping with his third wife before he married his second wife, so it's unlikely the second wife developing a disease was the cause of the affair, but he eventually divorced his second wife and 10 days later, married the third, a congressional aide 23 years his junior. While this affair was going on, Gingrich tried to impeach Clinton for getting a blowjob from a consenting adult. It's likely he's already sleeping with his fourth and fifth wives.
Gingrich fulled illegal campaign donations through his non-profit, and after it appeared it would get him kicked out of the House he decided to quit. He still got fined $300,000 for this and for perjuring himself in front of the House Ethics Committee. He should have gotten prison time. Throughout the time these things were happening, Gingrich was trumpeting his superior ethics, his Baptist faith and his family values. His excuse for this behavior: he was working too hard for the American people, so it's our fault. “There’s no question at times in my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate.” These aren't things he did, but things that just happened in his life. Why should we hold him responsible for things that just happened? But now he's converted to Catholicism and has a new appreciation for why God should have a greater role in our government, so we apparently have no choice but to forget his past sins. Not bloody likely.
I think you're mistaking what is meant by rules, and maybe that's because of poor writing. Maybe a more descriptive way would be "but it at the disposal of anyone able to sway a significant number of the members and direct them towards a goal." (I'm not sure members is an appropriate word, though, because the number of participants is larger than the "membership.") How this is accomplished is by following unwritten rules of how members interact and rules that apply to any human behavior.
"And (outside of one special case), even if someone does decide to redistribute the program sometimes, the GPL doesn't say he has to distribute a copy to you in particular, or any other person in particular."
The important clause is "outside of one special case". That special case is distributing a binary without including source code. In other words, the "special case" is the dominant means of distributing programs in binary form. I don't think I have ever received a GPL licensed binary with the source included.
Beyond that you're just trying to make your points by pulling things out of context. The important document is the license, not a FAQ. The license is very clear when it say says what someone who wants to distribute a program must do. And if it's my GPL code, it's the license that I hold distributors to, not someone's mistaken interpretation of the FSF FAQ for the GPL.
On the off chance that this is HBO or Showtime thinking about spinning off a Science Fiction channel with classic movies, classic series and new series, then hell yes! Do it! If we're talking about making SyFy into a pay channel, then no, let it die.
I hate to tell you but premium channels care about ratings, too.
Not as much as the free channels do. Nobody cancels their Showtime subscription because Showtime made a TV series out of "This American Life". In the age of DVRs premium channels are mostly dead air. Check the Showtime and HBO schedules... They're 20 hours a day of movies you've already seen or never want to see. They no longer need to broadcast the new movies twice a day for a month. It's cheaper for them to broadcast it once a day and fill the dead space with "Porkys II", and even that's overkill. So the premiums have schedule space and the subscriber base to experiment. And they need to experiment because online movie rentals are going to kill their market if they don't have new and unique content.
But that doesn't work for SyFy. They'd need to have something on that would attract subscribers. And they've cancelled all of the shows that had enough of a rabid fan base that they would be willing to pay $10/month to get more episodes. You have to make that swap when you have those niche shows, not when you have wrestling and fake ghosts.
Oh also shoot in a old factory in Iowa instead of overpriced land of movies.
Up until the dollar dropped, Vancouver wasn't the "overpriced land of movies." Or did you think all those SG1 planets that look like the pacific northwest are located somewhere in southern california?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, and the best existing lasers can, if you're lucky, make one of those pulses in a day. Not to mention that you couldn't get a symmetric compression with 5 targets. You gotta go with one, and it has to be precisely located. Moving target? I don't think so. The laser is huge, the size of a building, tens of thousands of tons. It would have to be built in space, with actuators to move each piece of laser substrate to within microns, which means precise temperature control over the whole structure. A single piece of dust will blow a crater the size of dime in one of the optics. A fingerprint would probably destroy the optic entirely. And it has to last for 450k years? I don't think so.
You're better off building the ship out of a huge block of ice or a large comet and using a simple uranium primed thorium or pure uranium fission reactor to generate steam for thrust and electricity. Much lower tolerances needed. Fewer moving parts. Lower mass of spares, etc.
Or punditese for "Some people say"
Once they detect another civilization they move to wipe it out.
Why would they need us to send a transmission in order to detect us. We've been broadcasting our presence as the home of complex photosynthetic life for half a billion years. Planets like that are probably somewhat rare, and a species capable of interstellar travel would have no problems remotely monitoring them all for signs of a civilization. Our pollution has long since given us away as the home of a technological civilization.
The question would then be why would an alien civilization bother to wipe us out. Resources? Definitely not. Everything we have could be found closer to home. If there were a galactic resource depletion problem, we'd probably have seen signs of exo-engineering by now. But in that case the Earth might get taken apart so that an alien civilization can get at our valuable planetary core, but that won't be because were here. That will just be because we were the next system in line, and they probably won't even notice us.
Way back when, when the option was xfs or ext3, not getting forced fsck after a crash was a big plus for xfs. I don't think I've ever had xfs_repair do anything.
I have a NAS box with 4x750GB RAID5 formatted ext3. The processor and I/O is so slow that it has never finished an fsck even after I've waited for two weeks since it started. That was intolerable so I hacked into it and after building xfs.ko, found that support for linux xfs on big endian processors is non-existent. So what I do now is pull the drives, put them in an x86 linux system and do the fsck there if the thing crashes. Never buy a NAS box that uses ext3.
there is no chance a SETI telescope can receive earth-type signals
We're not looking for earth-type civilizations.
a next-to-zero chance an alien society will be spending time and energy beaming a signal directly at us.
A civilization in our galaxy a century or two more advanced than our own would know that this star has a planet with an oxygen nitrogen water vapor atmosphere, both oceans and solid surface and complex photosynthetic life. If you're going to be transmitting beacons, we'd be a very good target.
And while my terawatt hyperbole is just that, I'm sure it's not terribly far off.
What's six or seven orders of magnitude between friends. The Arecibo Planetary Radar transmitter (the brightest transmitter on the planet) is 425 kW. Yes, kW, and we could detect that across the galaxy because it has an effective isotropic radiated power (EIRP) of 10 TW. An SKA transmitter could do better on less power.
Besides, if it's beamed, it wouldn't need to be a terrawatt. If you didn't know that, your opinions on the subject are probably not worth considering.
You'll never know if you don't look. And "a waste of everbody's time"? How is this wasting your time? Are you spending time on slashdot that you wouldn't otherwise be spending?
No. We're looking for deliberate transmissions, not leakage. Any planet even a couple decades beyond us in technology could know we're here and might be beaming a signal in our direction.
Feed the starving millions in the world instead.
Are a gamer? To you go to see movies? Well stop wasting resources entertaining yourself and feed the starving millions instead.
Oops, that should be 6.2Gbps.
They will be looking primarily for deliberate transmissions. They look for continuous narrow-band signals, intermediate bandwidth pulses on millisecond timescales, broadband pulses on microsecond timescales, and soon (in beta) intermediate bandwidth signals consisting of a noise like signal followed milliseconds to seconds later by an overlapping identical signal.
Most leakage signals are too weak to be detected by the small telescopes we have like Greenbank and Arecibo, but the Arecibo planetary radar and some missile defense radars could be detected at interstellar distances.
I, of course, submitted a direct link to the Berkeley press release but apparently the Slashdot editors decided the one that was most wrong was the one to pick. First, SETI isn't a project, it's a field of study conducted by a lot of institutions. Nobody would talk about "the Physics Project started 2100 years ago by Pythagoras" when describing a particle accelerator.
This project in particular, is conducted by the Berkeley SETI group which is known for their SETI@home project, Astropulse search for radio pulses and their the SERENDIP project The exciting parts are 1) This targets earthlike planets. 2) It uses the Green Bank Telescope, which is the biggest steerable dish around and 3) they are recording time domain data at 3.2 Gbps (because the observations are short duration) rather than the 64 Mbps they get at Arecibo. That allows them to cover 800MHz of instantaneous bandwidth, rather than the 2.5MHz they get at Arecibo (albeit at much higher sensitivity)
I understand the desire to link this to the ATA shutdown, but that give the mistaken impression that this is a project of the SETI Institute. And they didn't even put a link to SETI@home (where the data will be processed) in the story.
I think we all knew this.
I wish I had mod points. But talking about how wonderful the administration was, 8 days after 9/11, isn't all that surprising. Everyone in the media was doing so at that time. After all, the success of that attack couldn't have been because of major screw-ups (or possible malfeasance) by the administration.
Paleontology/Evolution (He's clearly not a creationist)
Wait until he gets asked in a debate. He'll become a creationist if he isn't one already. And at that point he'll claim he always was one.
You know, if you voted for Obama in 2008 just to prove you're not racist, you have to vote for someone else in 2012 to prove you're not an IDIOT.
That depends upon whether the Republicans offer someone who would be better. If the choice is get fucked soft or get fucked hard with a broomstick, only an IDIOT chooses "get fucked hard with a broomstick." So far none of the Republican field are offering to fuck us with anything smaller than a chain saw.
John Edwards cheated on his dying wife (ten-upping Gingrich)
Gingrich cheated on his first wife while she was dying of cancer, told her he wanted a divorce when she was in a hospital bed recovering from surgery, and then left her for his second wife. It appears likely that Gingrich had already started sleeping with his third wife before he married his second wife, so it's unlikely the second wife developing a disease was the cause of the affair, but he eventually divorced his second wife and 10 days later, married the third, a congressional aide 23 years his junior. While this affair was going on, Gingrich tried to impeach Clinton for getting a blowjob from a consenting adult. It's likely he's already sleeping with his fourth and fifth wives.
Gingrich fulled illegal campaign donations through his non-profit, and after it appeared it would get him kicked out of the House he decided to quit. He still got fined $300,000 for this and for perjuring himself in front of the House Ethics Committee. He should have gotten prison time. Throughout the time these things were happening, Gingrich was trumpeting his superior ethics, his Baptist faith and his family values. His excuse for this behavior: he was working too hard for the American people, so it's our fault. “There’s no question at times in my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate.” These aren't things he did, but things that just happened in his life. Why should we hold him responsible for things that just happened? But now he's converted to Catholicism and has a new appreciation for why God should have a greater role in our government, so we apparently have no choice but to forget his past sins. Not bloody likely.
I think you're mistaking what is meant by rules, and maybe that's because of poor writing. Maybe a more descriptive way would be "but it at the disposal of anyone able to sway a significant number of the members and direct them towards a goal." (I'm not sure members is an appropriate word, though, because the number of participants is larger than the "membership.") How this is accomplished is by following unwritten rules of how members interact and rules that apply to any human behavior.
"And (outside of one special case), even if someone does decide to redistribute the program sometimes, the GPL doesn't say he has to distribute a copy to you in particular, or any other person in particular."
The important clause is "outside of one special case". That special case is distributing a binary without including source code. In other words, the "special case" is the dominant means of distributing programs in binary form. I don't think I have ever received a GPL licensed binary with the source included.
Beyond that you're just trying to make your points by pulling things out of context. The important document is the license, not a FAQ. The license is very clear when it say says what someone who wants to distribute a program must do. And if it's my GPL code, it's the license that I hold distributors to, not someone's mistaken interpretation of the FSF FAQ for the GPL.
Fuck off, Troll Boy. Nobody here takes you seriously no matter how many accounts you make. Now go home to mommy for some of that good loving.
On the off chance that this is HBO or Showtime thinking about spinning off a Science Fiction channel with classic movies, classic series and new series, then hell yes! Do it! If we're talking about making SyFy into a pay channel, then no, let it die.
I hate to tell you but premium channels care about ratings, too.
Not as much as the free channels do. Nobody cancels their Showtime subscription because Showtime made a TV series out of "This American Life". In the age of DVRs premium channels are mostly dead air. Check the Showtime and HBO schedules... They're 20 hours a day of movies you've already seen or never want to see. They no longer need to broadcast the new movies twice a day for a month. It's cheaper for them to broadcast it once a day and fill the dead space with "Porkys II", and even that's overkill. So the premiums have schedule space and the subscriber base to experiment. And they need to experiment because online movie rentals are going to kill their market if they don't have new and unique content.
But that doesn't work for SyFy. They'd need to have something on that would attract subscribers. And they've cancelled all of the shows that had enough of a rabid fan base that they would be willing to pay $10/month to get more episodes. You have to make that swap when you have those niche shows, not when you have wrestling and fake ghosts.
Cable, due to the number of channels, has the possibility of providing much more targeted programming.
Every channel will eventually decide that bigger audience means more money, and then you get "Punkin Chunkin II: Revenge of the Punkin"
Next time your favorite show ends, count the names. Check out Star Trek Phase II for doing it on the cheap. Two episodes a year if you're lucky.
Oh also shoot in a old factory in Iowa instead of overpriced land of movies.
Up until the dollar dropped, Vancouver wasn't the "overpriced land of movies." Or did you think all those SG1 planets that look like the pacific northwest are located somewhere in southern california?