...which means we know that 15ish years prior to when we checked, there wasn't anybody over there transmitting artificial radio signals in our direction powerful enough to reach us.
That is certainly more than not knowing that. But what we probably ought to start off doing is just gathering as much information about those nearby systems as our current tech level and human ingenuity allows, instead of looking for one specific thing all over the universe (eg: SETI). We are at the point where we really don't even know what we don't know yet. But if we find something interesting, (which may or may not be life related), those are the systems we are capable of sending probes to. You're absolutely right that looking for interesting things hundreds of light years away isn't liable to be very productive until we have the capability of traveling there in a reasonable amount of time.
Spain didn't travel to the New World until after they'd found and colonized the Canaries. Portugal didn't sail straight to China on the first try. They explored the coast of Africa, and in the process worked out how the winds and currents in that area could help them go further faster. We definitely should be concentrating on things that are on the outer edge of what we know how to reach today.
But we don't know that. There are about 50 star systems within 15 light years of us. On the planetary level we have almost no idea what's in all of them.
It was never meant to be a descriptive mathematical formula, like Bernouli's Equation. Its just a way to break questions about the amount of life in the universe down into manageable chunks that can be reasoned about. Complaining that its not a real equation is like a software engineer going up to a network engineer and telling them a "protocol stack" is a joke because its not a real design pattern. Perhaps you are technically right, but seriously, find more productive things to attack.
“It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds.
That was a joke, the logic doesn't really work. For instance, there are an infinite number of integers, not every one of them is even, but there are still an infinite number of even integers. Not to mention that there are not in fact an "infinite" number of worlds. There may be a large number of them, but that number isn't inifinite.
Right. Ronald Reagan/George HW Bush got 63%, John McCain/Mitt Romney got 62%
No, McCain only got about 56% of the white male vote. So a 7 point swing up in that demographic in a single cycle is certainly feasible, since that's what happened last cycle. A similar swing up again would get them close to 70%.
So the real question here is will that upward trend continue, or is 62-ish% that party's white-male ceiling, and the McCain election was just an aberration? It isn't tough to find people out there arguing the former. Admittedly, the aberration theory seems to best satisfy Hanlon's Razor at the moment. But we only get datapoints for inter-cycle theories like this once every 4 years, so its tough to separate the evidence from the noise.
Yes, it is possible. I can remember when Ronald Regan first ran in 1976 and Saturday Night Live making jokes about how racist and ridiculously far right he was. (Left the hood up on his white robe. Har-har-har.) In 1980 Carter specifically helped Regan get the nomination because he felt Regan would be easier to beat in the general. Boy did that ever backfire.
*Anybody* can win if they can somehow get a major party nomination. There are only 2 choices at that point, at least 30% of the electorate will vote for one of them no matter what, so all you have to do is make other person unacceptable to more than half of the 40% of voters left in play. Sometimes they will even screw up and do that for you. Or something bad will happen, and voters will feel like the party in power needs to be punished (eg: Iran crisis, stagflation, financial meltdown, etc.) There's a lot of time in the next 6 moths for stuff to happen. A President Trump is quite possible at this point.
There are legitimate arguments in favor of the Superdelegates. They are mostly elected officials, who are the poor bastards who have to run with their names under whoever the idiot at the top of the ticket is. This means they are pretty much by design going to be more focused on the candidate who can win a general election in their district than a typical voter is. To vote otherwise would be to slit their own throats. This is also why its rare they go against the voters in their district, and when they do its usually in favor of a centrist not an extremist.
They are not unaccountable for this choice. As an elected official, if you hate the choice they made at the convention, its well within your power to vote to remove them from office the next time they are up for election (for the vast majority of them, that will be this November).
But really the only time one might expect them to swing an election one way or the other, would be if someone totally unacceptable to the rest of the country (eg: Trump) were to win the popular vote. In that case, you could argue they are a feature, not a bug. In fact, that's precisely why they are designed into the system. Combine them with proportional pledged delegate allocation that the Democrats use, and Trump likely could not have won the primary if it had be run under the Democrat's rules. Again, many would consider this a feature, and "fixing" it a really bad idea.
In this particular election, Hillary is likely to win a majority of the pledged delegates before the convention. FiveThirtyEight will even give you a predicted date somewhere on their website (which sadly they've rearranged since last night). So if they were to be any kind of issue whatsoever in this election, it would be to swing the election to Bernie. I don't see that happening. So really, they will end up being a total non-issue, just like in 2008 (after a similar amount of screaming).
I'm hoping this election cycle results in the GOP splitting in two. The racists, fascists, and religious fundamentalists can be loaded into one party while the sane Republicans who don't mind working WITH people on the opposite side of the aisle to get things done can be in a second party.
That's effectively already happened. This is why Congress hasn't been able to do anything for 6 years. It contains three parties, none of which can muster the majority required to pass legislation.
The problem is our system naturally has a 2-party system as its stable state. So if you want a new party, the only realistic way to do it is take over one of the existing two. That's what the "Tea Party" has been doing for the last 8 years, and with their guy at the top of the ticket they've pretty much completed the process.
Trump is literally going to plaster the walls with Hillary
He'll certainly try. Bullying is pretty much his A, B, and C game. However, the one time he's tried that on a female opponent so far, it didn't seem to work as well as usual. And in general, bullying someone using an attribute shared by 51% of the electorate doesn't seem likely to be a winning strategy.
But the normal "rules" don't seem to apply to Trump. I could honestly see thing go very badly for someone, but I'm not sure yet which one of the two it will be. Either way its going to be fascinating to watch.
Actually I follow a lot of tweeps from the Arab world. As far as they are concerned Libya has gone far far better than Syria has under her replacement's watch. A lot of Syria's neighbors and the countries in Europe being flooded with their refugees would probably agree.
Turns out that intervening to stop a genocide may not make the land fart rainbows and unicorns afterwards, but it can prevent the genocide.
No....I'm not really a fan of Trump, but he pretty much seems to be an open book.
If so, then he's one of those fake Amazon books where the first few pages are prose written to look lucid enough to get past spam filters, followed by 3,000 pages of randomly generated text, designed specifically to scam money off of Amazon's $-per-page author pool.
Trump will need 70% of the white male vote to win the election without votes from every other voting bloc that he so far had managed to alienate. Not happening.
I wouldn't be so sure. Romney got 62% of the white male vote last time round. That isn't 70%, but its in hailing distance.
I believe that's referring to USA imports, not "imports" from other USA states. However, I suppose if you want to interpret it that way, for the purposes of this situation the effect would be the same.
What's the reasoning that inter-state sales should not be taxed? I really don't get that logic.
Essentially, that's how they divied up powers when the constitution was written. Individual states were responsible for activities that affected only themselves, and the Federal Government was responsible for regulating activities that involve multiple states and/or foreign governments. You can make arguments for this pro and con, but that's the historic reason for it.
If Congress really wanted to "fix" this within the Constitution, all they'd have to do is pass a law imposing a Federal sales tax on such transactions, at the rate specified by the states involved. Of course this would require our current congress actually passing a meaningful law, and one that goes against the Republican no-tax blood pledge to boot. So we are talking science fiction at this point.
That tripped me up too. He was talking about using solar to replace the entire UK yearly energy production (which is about 35GW), not just that one plant.
The thing is, if we are using that rhetorical device, to be fair we should try it with Hinkly Point C's too. That would require about 11 of them, for a total cost of nearly $4 Trillion. I don't know how the NIMBYs are in the UK, but I can't imagine someone pulling off the construction of 11 nuke plants in a similarly-sized area of the US (eg: the state of Oregon).
I'd say the F-35 pretty much qualifies for being 'on earth'. Most of the time anyway.
It has cost $1.5 trillion. But that's for 171 of them. For each individual plane, that's "only" about $9 billion each. But that's amortizing the R&D costs (which I think it would be stretching things to call a "building". Per unit to build at this point, they are about $1 billion each. But either way, much cheaper.
It was actually kind of nice for the UK to build something that makes an F-35 look like a good use of money in comparison.
You could probably easily get that coverage by using rooftops. But then the UK isn't exactly known for its sunny days.
However, there are parts that certainly are known for wind. Utility-grade wind turbines can produce a bit over 2 MW. No doubt 1,600 of those would take up a lot of space (but generally in really remote windy places). Supposedly those turbines cost about $2 million per MW, which would mean you could get your 35GW for about $70 Billion. This new plant, for about half that amount, is only producing 3.2GW (less than 1/10th the power). You need more than 10 of these $35 billion nuke plants (for a grand total of $382 Billion) to produce all that electricity.
So comparatively, wind seems like a pretty dang good deal. Plus, when a wind turbine breaks down for some reason, you are only down 2MW until it gets fixed, rather than 1/11th of your entire country's output.
This will greatly help out the show Coma-Doof Warrior (the Mad Max guitar guy) puts on there. He already had trucks and flamethrowers. All he was missing was lasers.
under the 5th amendment he can't be compelled to "utter" the passphrase, but he can be compelled to provide the unencrypted contents in most jurisdictions.
So he could get himself out of prison tomorrow by getting another inmate to cut off his hands. Then he couldn't type it, and would have to "utter" the passphrase, which they can't force him to do.
ever believed Cruz's "H1-B visa stance". It's all just propaganda. Before he started running he was advocating for a 500% increase in H1-B visas in 2013
The problem with Cruz is that just because he may now be offering you your favorite candy instead of candy corn, he's still doing it outside the same beat-up windowless van.
Slashdot Mirror
Given where this appears to have come from, any coders who refuse to work on the botnet when asked are likely executed.
If N. Korea doesn't get around to executing them, they will likely starve to death instead.
...which means we know that 15ish years prior to when we checked, there wasn't anybody over there transmitting artificial radio signals in our direction powerful enough to reach us.
That is certainly more than not knowing that. But what we probably ought to start off doing is just gathering as much information about those nearby systems as our current tech level and human ingenuity allows, instead of looking for one specific thing all over the universe (eg: SETI). We are at the point where we really don't even know what we don't know yet. But if we find something interesting, (which may or may not be life related), those are the systems we are capable of sending probes to. You're absolutely right that looking for interesting things hundreds of light years away isn't liable to be very productive until we have the capability of traveling there in a reasonable amount of time.
Spain didn't travel to the New World until after they'd found and colonized the Canaries. Portugal didn't sail straight to China on the first try. They explored the coast of Africa, and in the process worked out how the winds and currents in that area could help them go further faster. We definitely should be concentrating on things that are on the outer edge of what we know how to reach today.
But we don't know that. There are about 50 star systems within 15 light years of us. On the planetary level we have almost no idea what's in all of them.
It was never meant to be a descriptive mathematical formula, like Bernouli's Equation. Its just a way to break questions about the amount of life in the universe down into manageable chunks that can be reasoned about. Complaining that its not a real equation is like a software engineer going up to a network engineer and telling them a "protocol stack" is a joke because its not a real design pattern. Perhaps you are technically right, but seriously, find more productive things to attack.
“It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds.
That was a joke, the logic doesn't really work. For instance, there are an infinite number of integers, not every one of them is even, but there are still an infinite number of even integers. Not to mention that there are not in fact an "infinite" number of worlds. There may be a large number of them, but that number isn't inifinite.
Right. Ronald Reagan/George HW Bush got 63%, John McCain/Mitt Romney got 62%
No, McCain only got about 56% of the white male vote. So a 7 point swing up in that demographic in a single cycle is certainly feasible, since that's what happened last cycle. A similar swing up again would get them close to 70%.
So the real question here is will that upward trend continue, or is 62-ish% that party's white-male ceiling, and the McCain election was just an aberration? It isn't tough to find people out there arguing the former. Admittedly, the aberration theory seems to best satisfy Hanlon's Razor at the moment. But we only get datapoints for inter-cycle theories like this once every 4 years, so its tough to separate the evidence from the noise.
Yes, it is possible. I can remember when Ronald Regan first ran in 1976 and Saturday Night Live making jokes about how racist and ridiculously far right he was. (Left the hood up on his white robe. Har-har-har.) In 1980 Carter specifically helped Regan get the nomination because he felt Regan would be easier to beat in the general. Boy did that ever backfire.
*Anybody* can win if they can somehow get a major party nomination. There are only 2 choices at that point, at least 30% of the electorate will vote for one of them no matter what, so all you have to do is make other person unacceptable to more than half of the 40% of voters left in play. Sometimes they will even screw up and do that for you. Or something bad will happen, and voters will feel like the party in power needs to be punished (eg: Iran crisis, stagflation, financial meltdown, etc.) There's a lot of time in the next 6 moths for stuff to happen. A President Trump is quite possible at this point.
There are legitimate arguments in favor of the Superdelegates. They are mostly elected officials, who are the poor bastards who have to run with their names under whoever the idiot at the top of the ticket is. This means they are pretty much by design going to be more focused on the candidate who can win a general election in their district than a typical voter is. To vote otherwise would be to slit their own throats. This is also why its rare they go against the voters in their district, and when they do its usually in favor of a centrist not an extremist.
They are not unaccountable for this choice. As an elected official, if you hate the choice they made at the convention, its well within your power to vote to remove them from office the next time they are up for election (for the vast majority of them, that will be this November).
But really the only time one might expect them to swing an election one way or the other, would be if someone totally unacceptable to the rest of the country (eg: Trump) were to win the popular vote. In that case, you could argue they are a feature, not a bug. In fact, that's precisely why they are designed into the system. Combine them with proportional pledged delegate allocation that the Democrats use, and Trump likely could not have won the primary if it had be run under the Democrat's rules. Again, many would consider this a feature, and "fixing" it a really bad idea.
In this particular election, Hillary is likely to win a majority of the pledged delegates before the convention. FiveThirtyEight will even give you a predicted date somewhere on their website (which sadly they've rearranged since last night). So if they were to be any kind of issue whatsoever in this election, it would be to swing the election to Bernie. I don't see that happening. So really, they will end up being a total non-issue, just like in 2008 (after a similar amount of screaming).
I'm hoping this election cycle results in the GOP splitting in two. The racists, fascists, and religious fundamentalists can be loaded into one party while the sane Republicans who don't mind working WITH people on the opposite side of the aisle to get things done can be in a second party.
That's effectively already happened. This is why Congress hasn't been able to do anything for 6 years. It contains three parties, none of which can muster the majority required to pass legislation.
The problem is our system naturally has a 2-party system as its stable state. So if you want a new party, the only realistic way to do it is take over one of the existing two. That's what the "Tea Party" has been doing for the last 8 years, and with their guy at the top of the ticket they've pretty much completed the process.
Trump is literally going to plaster the walls with Hillary
He'll certainly try. Bullying is pretty much his A, B, and C game. However, the one time he's tried that on a female opponent so far, it didn't seem to work as well as usual. And in general, bullying someone using an attribute shared by 51% of the electorate doesn't seem likely to be a winning strategy.
But the normal "rules" don't seem to apply to Trump. I could honestly see thing go very badly for someone, but I'm not sure yet which one of the two it will be. Either way its going to be fascinating to watch.
Actually I follow a lot of tweeps from the Arab world. As far as they are concerned Libya has gone far far better than Syria has under her replacement's watch. A lot of Syria's neighbors and the countries in Europe being flooded with their refugees would probably agree.
Turns out that intervening to stop a genocide may not make the land fart rainbows and unicorns afterwards, but it can prevent the genocide.
No....I'm not really a fan of Trump, but he pretty much seems to be an open book.
If so, then he's one of those fake Amazon books where the first few pages are prose written to look lucid enough to get past spam filters, followed by 3,000 pages of randomly generated text, designed specifically to scam money off of Amazon's $-per-page author pool.
Trump will need 70% of the white male vote to win the election without votes from every other voting bloc that he so far had managed to alienate. Not happening.
I wouldn't be so sure. Romney got 62% of the white male vote last time round. That isn't 70%, but its in hailing distance.
I believe that's referring to USA imports, not "imports" from other USA states. However, I suppose if you want to interpret it that way, for the purposes of this situation the effect would be the same.
Ack, sorry. Power of 10 problem. That's $400 billion, not $4 trillion. Power of 10 issues are why I generally try not to do napkin math.
What's the reasoning that inter-state sales should not be taxed? I really don't get that logic.
Essentially, that's how they divied up powers when the constitution was written. Individual states were responsible for activities that affected only themselves, and the Federal Government was responsible for regulating activities that involve multiple states and/or foreign governments. You can make arguments for this pro and con, but that's the historic reason for it.
If Congress really wanted to "fix" this within the Constitution, all they'd have to do is pass a law imposing a Federal sales tax on such transactions, at the rate specified by the states involved. Of course this would require our current congress actually passing a meaningful law, and one that goes against the Republican no-tax blood pledge to boot. So we are talking science fiction at this point.
but it would be a refreshing change of pace to have a legislative body that didnt operate to serve the allmighty dollar.
That tripped me up too. He was talking about using solar to replace the entire UK yearly energy production (which is about 35GW), not just that one plant.
The thing is, if we are using that rhetorical device, to be fair we should try it with Hinkly Point C's too. That would require about 11 of them, for a total cost of nearly $4 Trillion. I don't know how the NIMBYs are in the UK, but I can't imagine someone pulling off the construction of 11 nuke plants in a similarly-sized area of the US (eg: the state of Oregon).
I'd say the F-35 pretty much qualifies for being 'on earth'. Most of the time anyway.
It has cost $1.5 trillion. But that's for 171 of them. For each individual plane, that's "only" about $9 billion each. But that's amortizing the R&D costs (which I think it would be stretching things to call a "building". Per unit to build at this point, they are about $1 billion each. But either way, much cheaper.
It was actually kind of nice for the UK to build something that makes an F-35 look like a good use of money in comparison.
You could probably easily get that coverage by using rooftops. But then the UK isn't exactly known for its sunny days.
However, there are parts that certainly are known for wind. Utility-grade wind turbines can produce a bit over 2 MW. No doubt 1,600 of those would take up a lot of space (but generally in really remote windy places). Supposedly those turbines cost about $2 million per MW, which would mean you could get your 35GW for about $70 Billion. This new plant, for about half that amount, is only producing 3.2GW (less than 1/10th the power). You need more than 10 of these $35 billion nuke plants (for a grand total of $382 Billion) to produce all that electricity.
So comparatively, wind seems like a pretty dang good deal. Plus, when a wind turbine breaks down for some reason, you are only down 2MW until it gets fixed, rather than 1/11th of your entire country's output.
CERN says the creature may have been a marten.
Upon further research, CERN now says the creature was in fact delicious with a dash of Siriacha on it.
This will greatly help out the show Coma-Doof Warrior (the Mad Max guitar guy) puts on there. He already had trucks and flamethrowers. All he was missing was lasers.
under the 5th amendment he can't be compelled to "utter" the passphrase, but he can be compelled to provide the unencrypted contents in most jurisdictions.
So he could get himself out of prison tomorrow by getting another inmate to cut off his hands. Then he couldn't type it, and would have to "utter" the passphrase, which they can't force him to do.
ever believed Cruz's "H1-B visa stance". It's all just propaganda. Before he started running he was advocating for a 500% increase in H1-B visas in 2013
The problem with Cruz is that just because he may now be offering you your favorite candy instead of candy corn, he's still doing it outside the same beat-up windowless van.
You lost me at "SJW". Smart of you to hide it until near the end.