Fermi isn't about detecting signals, it's about seeing the effects in system.
If there were any other intelligent species, they would of mined the asteroid belt by now. We should see the reflections off their solar panels, and other evidence of their handiwork... Even if they were extinct.
You're making a lot of assumptions here. What if nobody made it to this solar system? What if they're on their way, but haven't arrived yet? What if they were here a billion years ago, lived on Venus or Mars and did mine the asteroid belt? Why do we assume that artifacts would still be here or that we would recognize them? What if this arm of the galaxy is some boring backwater and another arm is the hip place to be?
There are too many unknowns to be making strong negative assertions.
The impediment to intergalactic travel isn't finding willing volunteers. It's cost, pure and simple. We'll send out exploration ships only when it's either dirt cheap to do it or the entire population is behind the effort and willing to foot the cost.
Building a generation ship will easily be one of the most expensive and large-scale projects that our species has ever undertaken. A couple of willing colonists can't afford this alone. They need the entire population behind them.
Were you watching the same video that I was? The only video in the article was one of a cameraman getting what must have been a great shot of the big-ass-table in action. Too bad we couldn't get that video!
Dunno if polarisation lenses can be done as contacts, since those have to be exactly right, rotation-wise.
Most modern polarized monitors use circular polarization, which could be easily implemented in contacts. Linear polarization was an issue even with fixed glasses, as a little tilt of the head would blend the views together and make you feel sick.
A halfway-house would be nice - good default installation but easy tweaking via GUI as users got more advanced and confident.
Actually, this is one of the reasons that I really like Gnome. As much as many people malign it, you can tweak Gnome considerably with gconf-editor. It's not as clicky-clicky as tweaking KDE, but it's not difficult to use. There are even slick UIs for configuring things left out of the default Gnome control panels (like TweakUI is for Windows), like GConfPerf and gTweakUI.
Queen, through talent and hard work, created Bohemian Rhapsody. "The public" did nothing to contribute to this, aside from existing, which I suspect they'd do whether Queen made music or not.
What the public did was allow Queen to have exclusive rights to the song for a finite amount if time. If Queen was so intent on limiting others' use of the song, they should have kept it to themselves. It's not like the monopoly granted by copyright is somehow the natural state of things. The public exchanged copyright protection of the work for unfettered access to the work one it started "getting old". Bohemian Rhapsody is now effectively a part of our culture and Queen was payed an enormous sum of money and fame in exchange for it.
Re:Ubuntu annoyances?
on
Ubuntu Kung Fu
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Doing something as root should have a reminder that you're doing something dangerous, not a shortcut.
The funny thing is that the ISPs are on the wrong side of the power gradient here. The end users likely don't give a shit if they're connecting to the internet through AT&T or Comcast or whoever. They will care if they can't reach Google (or any other 'content' provider), though. If Google doesn't pay up and AT&T throttles traffic to Google, what are AT&T expecting to happen?
It's a normal distribution, though, so about 68% percent are within one standard deviation of the mean. Depending on the scaling parameter of the distribution and the accuracy (error) of your intelligence tests, you could plausibly even say that 50% of the population are at the mean.
(ie, my mouse died about a year ago and all my old spares were PS/2 only - my new KVM is limited to USB. It was worth it to me to buy a replacement locally rather than wait 3-5 days to get a new one in)
AKA, "What good is a Newegg, Mr Morden, if you have no mouse!"
And regardless of their intent, over 106,000 Alaskans still put down a vote for a convicted criminal. The extreme partisanship required to do that is beyond comprehension.
His wasn't just convicted of any old crime, either. It's a corruption conviction relating to his service in the position he was re-elected to.
Electing someone convicted of a crime unrelated to their office is one thing, but electing someone convicted of corruption in that office is an entirely different beast.
Sure, but you've worded that a little too restrictively. I'm almost certain that the vast majority of people who carry a gun with them (and this likely includes most police officers) experience nothing related to the gun but an uncomfortable lump when they sit down. They likely never encounter a situation where the gun saves or endangers them (or others).
Although, I have to admit that I'm a little creeped out typing this with the quote "The game of life is a game of boomerangs. Our thoughts, deeds and words return to us sooner or later with astounding accuracy." looming at the bottom of this page!
The logic is strictly fine. This issue is that that home invasions and encounters with violent armed aggressors is exceedingly rare. On the other hand legal gun ownership is very common and carry is not rare. So, while making decisions based on extremely rare possibilities may be strictly logically valid, it is not really the most rational course of action. To bring a car analogy into this, it would be like never wearing a seat-belt because it would hamper your escape should your car spontaneously explode.
Personally, I have no interest in carrying a gun because I've never in my life needed one and don't anticipate needing one. The hassle of dealing with a gun on me around my friends and work (where guns are prohibited) is a very real and measurable factor that affects my decision.
there also many gun owners who are not with us today, because in a confrontation, things escalated to deadliness that did not have to escalate to deadliness, had there been no gun around
I hate to say this, but [citation], please. While your logic here seems sound, I don't believe that the number of confrontations that have escalated to shoot-outs even registers as a blip compared to the number of gun owners. There are millions of legally owned firearms in the US and you can count the home invasion turned OK Corral shoot-out as less than a few dozen in years [citation].
Assuming that 1% of all gun owners were involved in such shootouts, there would need to be about 2.5 million shootouts (assuming 250M legally owned firearms (first link I could find)
To be doubly pedantic, the acronym LASER describes a process and not a product. Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation is a process by which you make coherent, sometimes monochromatic, light. So laser radiation would describe the radiation produced by the LASER process.
As a little followup: I use my phone exclusively in UMTS mode, so I'm never using the GSM network with it's transmission of SMS through the expensive paging channel. In UMTS, as I'm sure is the case for all of the 3G networks, SMS is just treated like any other low priority data, so the justification for charging more for transmission loses its meaning. I wonder if the telecom companies plan to keep charging so much for SMS long after the "need" to charge for it has evaporated (actually, I'm sure that they will).
Is there a way to send/receive SMS over a data connection in a manner that preserves all of the customs of conventional SMS (eg, send message to phone number from ordinary phone)? I seem to remember having the choice of using GPRS as the "data bearer" for SMS on one of my old phones, though I can't seem to find it on my current phone...
Slashdot Mirror
Fermi isn't about detecting signals, it's about seeing the effects in system.
If there were any other intelligent species, they would of mined the asteroid belt by now. We should see the reflections off their solar panels, and other evidence of their handiwork... Even if they were extinct.
You're making a lot of assumptions here. What if nobody made it to this solar system? What if they're on their way, but haven't arrived yet? What if they were here a billion years ago, lived on Venus or Mars and did mine the asteroid belt? Why do we assume that artifacts would still be here or that we would recognize them? What if this arm of the galaxy is some boring backwater and another arm is the hip place to be?
There are too many unknowns to be making strong negative assertions.
Building a generation ship will easily be one of the most expensive and large-scale projects that our species has ever undertaken. A couple of willing colonists can't afford this alone. They need the entire population behind them.
Were you watching the same video that I was? The only video in the article was one of a cameraman getting what must have been a great shot of the big-ass-table in action. Too bad we couldn't get that video!
Dunno if polarisation lenses can be done as contacts, since those have to be exactly right, rotation-wise.
Most modern polarized monitors use circular polarization, which could be easily implemented in contacts. Linear polarization was an issue even with fixed glasses, as a little tilt of the head would blend the views together and make you feel sick.
A halfway-house would be nice - good default installation but easy tweaking via GUI as users got more advanced and confident.
Actually, this is one of the reasons that I really like Gnome. As much as many people malign it, you can tweak Gnome considerably with gconf-editor. It's not as clicky-clicky as tweaking KDE, but it's not difficult to use. There are even slick UIs for configuring things left out of the default Gnome control panels (like TweakUI is for Windows), like GConfPerf and gTweakUI.
I bittorrent on my phone's internet, just to make back the money I spend on text messages the phone carrier doesn't have to pay for.
You laugh.
Queen, through talent and hard work, created Bohemian Rhapsody. "The public" did nothing to contribute to this, aside from existing, which I suspect they'd do whether Queen made music or not.
What the public did was allow Queen to have exclusive rights to the song for a finite amount if time. If Queen was so intent on limiting others' use of the song, they should have kept it to themselves. It's not like the monopoly granted by copyright is somehow the natural state of things. The public exchanged copyright protection of the work for unfettered access to the work one it started "getting old". Bohemian Rhapsody is now effectively a part of our culture and Queen was payed an enormous sum of money and fame in exchange for it.
Doing something as root should have a reminder that you're doing something dangerous, not a shortcut.
It does: #
It looks to be inaccessible. Here are the abstract and fulltext links.
The funny thing is that the ISPs are on the wrong side of the power gradient here. The end users likely don't give a shit if they're connecting to the internet through AT&T or Comcast or whoever. They will care if they can't reach Google (or any other 'content' provider), though. If Google doesn't pay up and AT&T throttles traffic to Google, what are AT&T expecting to happen?
Yeah, why dig that ditch yourself when you can just copy the one that somebody else dug.
Here you go. Now, I'll be checking up on you guys in a week and I expect to be impressed.
Along the same lines, have you seen the symbol shown in the Wikipedia article. WTF?! Are they trying to make it impossible to freehand draw circuits?
It's a normal distribution, though, so about 68% percent are within one standard deviation of the mean. Depending on the scaling parameter of the distribution and the accuracy (error) of your intelligence tests, you could plausibly even say that 50% of the population are at the mean.
I like Dave Foley's, "Religion is a gateway psychosis." It seems quite apt.
(ie, my mouse died about a year ago and all my old spares were PS/2 only - my new KVM is limited to USB. It was worth it to me to buy a replacement locally rather than wait 3-5 days to get a new one in)
AKA, "What good is a Newegg, Mr Morden, if you have no mouse!"
And regardless of their intent, over 106,000 Alaskans still put down a vote for a convicted criminal. The extreme partisanship required to do that is beyond comprehension.
His wasn't just convicted of any old crime, either. It's a corruption conviction relating to his service in the position he was re-elected to.
Electing someone convicted of a crime unrelated to their office is one thing, but electing someone convicted of corruption in that office is an entirely different beast.
Sure, but you've worded that a little too restrictively. I'm almost certain that the vast majority of people who carry a gun with them (and this likely includes most police officers) experience nothing related to the gun but an uncomfortable lump when they sit down. They likely never encounter a situation where the gun saves or endangers them (or others).
Although, I have to admit that I'm a little creeped out typing this with the quote "The game of life is a game of boomerangs. Our thoughts, deeds and words return to us sooner or later with astounding accuracy." looming at the bottom of this page!
The logic is strictly fine. This issue is that that home invasions and encounters with violent armed aggressors is exceedingly rare. On the other hand legal gun ownership is very common and carry is not rare. So, while making decisions based on extremely rare possibilities may be strictly logically valid, it is not really the most rational course of action. To bring a car analogy into this, it would be like never wearing a seat-belt because it would hamper your escape should your car spontaneously explode.
Personally, I have no interest in carrying a gun because I've never in my life needed one and don't anticipate needing one. The hassle of dealing with a gun on me around my friends and work (where guns are prohibited) is a very real and measurable factor that affects my decision.
there also many gun owners who are not with us today, because in a confrontation, things escalated to deadliness that did not have to escalate to deadliness, had there been no gun around
I hate to say this, but [citation], please. While your logic here seems sound, I don't believe that the number of confrontations that have escalated to shoot-outs even registers as a blip compared to the number of gun owners. There are millions of legally owned firearms in the US and you can count the home invasion turned OK Corral shoot-out as less than a few dozen in years [citation].
Assuming that 1% of all gun owners were involved in such shootouts, there would need to be about 2.5 million shootouts (assuming 250M legally owned firearms (first link I could find)
So... Don't leave us hanging! Did they find her cache of cash??
To be doubly pedantic, the acronym LASER describes a process and not a product. Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation is a process by which you make coherent, sometimes monochromatic, light. So laser radiation would describe the radiation produced by the LASER process.
As a little followup: I use my phone exclusively in UMTS mode, so I'm never using the GSM network with it's transmission of SMS through the expensive paging channel. In UMTS, as I'm sure is the case for all of the 3G networks, SMS is just treated like any other low priority data, so the justification for charging more for transmission loses its meaning. I wonder if the telecom companies plan to keep charging so much for SMS long after the "need" to charge for it has evaporated (actually, I'm sure that they will).
Is there a way to send/receive SMS over a data connection in a manner that preserves all of the customs of conventional SMS (eg, send message to phone number from ordinary phone)? I seem to remember having the choice of using GPRS as the "data bearer" for SMS on one of my old phones, though I can't seem to find it on my current phone...
If *that* were a problem we'd already be
Oh crap, it was a problem!