Bigger antenna? Better reception system? Or do you have extensive information on the RF reception capabilities of all alien spacecraft?
There are some nice people from the government who would like to talk to you. Either the ones who secretly have crashed UFOs in underground research facilities, or the ones in the nice white jackets who will take you up to Happy Hill to relax in a padded room.
Either way, it doesn't matter much to the rest of us, trollie.
Beyond Brickmack's correct assertion, there's something more important. They have freakin' intergalactic spaceships. You don't think a species with intergalactic spaceships wouldn't have a better method of translating any arbitrary language to their own, than... say... Google Translate.:)
If we had continued working towards colonizing the moon and Mars, our technology would have grown better to meet those goals.
The horse carriage would have never grown into the horseless carriage, and finally the modern automobile, if we all lived together on a 2 square mile island. There's no reason to drive 150mph, if it would shorten your trip to under 1 minute.
If there were regular commuter flights from Earth to Mars, you can be sure we'd have improved. Look at the difference between a Model 14 Benoist and the Concorde, Airbus A380, or Boeing 787.
The demand drives innovation. Over the last century, we redefined the demand from crossing a small body of water faster, to being able to fly around the world faster.
We want to get from Point A to Point B in something bigger, faster, and cheaper. The Concorde won on the faster, but died because it was anything but cheaper. That, unfortunately, is the fate of suborbital aircraft.
When we redefine Point A and Point B to be Earth to another planet, we'll find better ways to do it. When that is extended out to other stars, our technology will grow even more.
Too late. We've been broadcasting a wealth of signals out to them. At about 85 light years out, they'll be listening to Hiter's Nuremberg rallies. By the time they find out that we've even invented nuclear weapons, they'll be well on their way.
They may be concerned when they see we have achieved space travel. Their concern will drop as they watch our space programs dissolve into obscurity.
Having colonies out there is a better chance that not having them at all. They may only be interested in the easy farming of over 7 billion humans (or as they'd say 7 billion delicious servings of human), and less interested in the thousands on other worlds. And there's a chance for those colonists to move elsewhere or defend themselves, once they see the broadcasts of an invasion of Earth.
I would hope any colonization ship would have the ability to continue moving, in case the new home planet were found to be unsuitable.
Humans make a great slave labor force. Well, the ones that aren't served.
Where else in this part of the galaxy can you pick up 7.1 billion slaves, who will willingly work for slips of paper representing the idea of an exchange for goods and services? That, and they reproduce so readily, culling 50% of the population, their numbers will return in just a couple decades.
There's so many of them, you could have them build monuments to your memory. You can have them stack stones. You could even have them do it in the desert, and they'll not only do it, but they'll admire them as one of their greatest feats.
Is the trip too long? You could pick up just a seed population of say 1000, and end up with millions of obedient subjects when you deliver them. Nothing is better than a cargo that grows during shipment.
The trick to their obedience is to tell them that they have free will, but make them worship and obey you under threat of perpetual torment. Most of those fools will believe anything. Just watch out for the atheists. They'll see right through most of those scams, and try to take over your ship. Make up something about an occupying evil, and the brainwashed masses will turn against them.
The intergalactic war is getting closer. We can hear the explosions now. It's only a matter of time before they get here. It's a good thing our space program has done so well, and we've started colonizing other planets, otherwise our species would be lost forever.
Oh.. fuck.. We don't have a space program, only a high altitude orbital flight program. Well, it's been nice knowing you all.
The same things have been happening throughout history. People tend to forget quickly. Things you mention for other countries have happened in the US multiple times in the last century. The actors change, but the stories remain the same. Or....
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
- George Santayana
To be fair, the NSA did it right. It's simply permission for "Everything". Why mess around with all those pesky "who" and "why" questions, when we already know the answers to those questions are classified.
Try reading the story. Oh ya, this is Slashdot, that's too much to ask. I'll summarize.
She talked to the police and the US Consulate. It took a while for her to get the staff to even understand what happened, and the police were clueless since she was speaking in English, and probably quickly and emotionally.
Probably not worth prosecuting. He won't be a repeat offender in their country, since he was going home soon. She was also going home, so they wouldn't have the only witness in country to testify.
I'd suspect even with a mountain of evidence, including video of the event happening, they would have let them leave, or possibly make him leave the country early.
I'm sure they both tripped on the stairs, or at least someone will try to claim it.
I suspect this guy will end up dead to the world. Probably not physically, but when the government has a deceased record, he's less likely to have a valid drivers license and passport.
I'm glad she got away. I wish more was done by the local authorities. Since they're both home, there's no chance he'd be prosecuted for it. Well, unless he should accidentally end up back in Poland without a passport or any identification.
[goes off to search for "live animal" air freight shipping from Argentina to Poland, and the delivery address of the jail]
I was invited into a company that was going through bankruptcy, and the previous C-level folks had already been indited for federal crimes.
I was given a short list of people to invite to leave, and full control to clear the slate of the entire IT staff, should I decide to.. Basically, I was to cut them all loose and start over, which as we all know is suicide. When I was ready for those who weren't team players, and detrimental to the company, the CEO said no. Hrm.
I was given laundry lists of things to do, and no budget to do it with. Some were little things like, desktops that were a decade old. Servers that were past EOL by any standards. I presented very reasonable plans for both, which were indefinitely delayed until they were almost too late.
I kept things mostly moving forward for the duration. When the bankruptcy was done, I was promised lots of things. Eventually, the new owner cut loose everyone that was not primarily at the home office. That was directly contrary to the CEO's continued assurances.
That night, I drank heavily and celebrated.
Now I'm doing SysAdmin work again. I get stuff done. I don't have to make grand decisions. I don't do presentations for company changing projects. I don't even have to hire or fire anyone. I understand more of the crap that management goes through, even though I do my best to isolate myself away from office politics. I have the luxury of going home when the work is done, and no one bothers me until the next work morning.
I won't argue with that. Well, the only thing I will point out is the same as I pointed out in another discussion elsewhere.
The government and military spying, both on enemies and your own people, has been going on since the invention of governments and militaries.
You can only assign blame specific incidents. The general idea has been around for an awful long time.
As long as we're somewhere on the sane side of McCarthyism and the Salem Witch Trials, I think we're mostly ok.. And for the record, I'm not a communist nor a witch.
The same could be said or implied of the Steubenville hackers. Maybe there's a general grudge against schools, jocks, or a general belief that the state's investigators are inept.
Of course, the public statements now are for the preservation of evidence, and assistance of the victim and the courts.
"I have my home wired up like a datacenter. Everyone else should want a huge amount of network capacity and capability so that it makes my already extravagant costs slightly cheaper."
What's wrong with building out your home network like a datacenter?:) I'm perfectly happy with GigE. It handles the servers, iSCSI to the SAN, and an isolated branch for the desktops. It's the uplink speeds we have to work on.. I could upgrade to 10GigE, but when will the uplinks even get close? I'm putting my change order in for 100MB/s down next week. It'll be a long time before we see even 1GB/s uplink speeds for the home..
I really miss having my stuff hosted in a good Tier 1 DC, where I really did have GigE uplinks that could support the speeds. I could transfer stuff very nicely there, and then copy it to the laptop to bring home. Sneakernet has always been faster than residential speeds for large transfers.
user@host:~$ ntpdate ntp0.bbc.co.uk && ntpdate uk.pool.ntp.org
6 Jun 21:14:58 ntpdate[14686]: adjust time server 132.185.132.130 offset -0.072700 sec
6 Jun 21:15:05 ntpdate[14687]: adjust time server 178.79.191.28 offset -0.074760 sec
It took a few seconds for each to respond, being I'm on the wrong side of the pond and all.
So they appear to participate in the centralized time system, that understands UTC, I don't see where their big problem is. 100 days to program a javascript clock to use their servers instead of the client machine?
I am surprised that they still do have a clock on there. Well, I never noticed when I went, but I wasn't really going to the BBC to check the time. Most people took clocks off of their web pages back in the late 90's, right along with dancing babies and blinking text.
Slashdot Mirror
Bigger antenna? Better reception system? Or do you have extensive information on the RF reception capabilities of all alien spacecraft?
There are some nice people from the government who would like to talk to you. Either the ones who secretly have crashed UFOs in underground research facilities, or the ones in the nice white jackets who will take you up to Happy Hill to relax in a padded room.
Either way, it doesn't matter much to the rest of us, trollie.
Your reading skills are either not up to snuff, or you know about an aggressive alien species on Mars conducting an intergalactic war.
Earth = big farm for theoretical aliens to collect slave labor from.
Mars = next big rock from here, an a somewhat hospitable place to practice leaving this rock.
Beyond Brickmack's correct assertion, there's something more important. They have freakin' intergalactic spaceships. You don't think a species with intergalactic spaceships wouldn't have a better method of translating any arbitrary language to their own, than ... say ... Google Translate. :)
Dude, be careful saying stuff like that. I almost spilled my drink laughing.
It's a trick! They're the advance force, gathering intelligence on us. They've been reporting our advancement the whole time!
If we had continued working towards colonizing the moon and Mars, our technology would have grown better to meet those goals.
The horse carriage would have never grown into the horseless carriage, and finally the modern automobile, if we all lived together on a 2 square mile island. There's no reason to drive 150mph, if it would shorten your trip to under 1 minute.
If there were regular commuter flights from Earth to Mars, you can be sure we'd have improved. Look at the difference between a Model 14 Benoist and the Concorde, Airbus A380, or Boeing 787.
The demand drives innovation. Over the last century, we redefined the demand from crossing a small body of water faster, to being able to fly around the world faster.
We want to get from Point A to Point B in something bigger, faster, and cheaper. The Concorde won on the faster, but died because it was anything but cheaper. That, unfortunately, is the fate of suborbital aircraft.
When we redefine Point A and Point B to be Earth to another planet, we'll find better ways to do it. When that is extended out to other stars, our technology will grow even more.
As you said, our space technology isn't much more than a horse in carriage. Without a goal and a reason to do it, it will never become a reality. We're all one planetary ELE away from being the last of our species. We didn't even know about the meteor that hit Russia, until it came down, damaging 7,200 buildings, and injuring almost 1,500 people. They're considered too small... Imagine the damage from a few of these, if they made impact on more populated areas.
Too late. We've been broadcasting a wealth of signals out to them. At about 85 light years out, they'll be listening to Hiter's Nuremberg rallies. By the time they find out that we've even invented nuclear weapons, they'll be well on their way.
They may be concerned when they see we have achieved space travel. Their concern will drop as they watch our space programs dissolve into obscurity.
Having colonies out there is a better chance that not having them at all. They may only be interested in the easy farming of over 7 billion humans (or as they'd say 7 billion delicious servings of human), and less interested in the thousands on other worlds. And there's a chance for those colonists to move elsewhere or defend themselves, once they see the broadcasts of an invasion of Earth.
I would hope any colonization ship would have the ability to continue moving, in case the new home planet were found to be unsuitable.
Humans make a great slave labor force. Well, the ones that aren't served.
Where else in this part of the galaxy can you pick up 7.1 billion slaves, who will willingly work for slips of paper representing the idea of an exchange for goods and services? That, and they reproduce so readily, culling 50% of the population, their numbers will return in just a couple decades.
There's so many of them, you could have them build monuments to your memory. You can have them stack stones. You could even have them do it in the desert, and they'll not only do it, but they'll admire them as one of their greatest feats.
Is the trip too long? You could pick up just a seed population of say 1000, and end up with millions of obedient subjects when you deliver them. Nothing is better than a cargo that grows during shipment.
The trick to their obedience is to tell them that they have free will, but make them worship and obey you under threat of perpetual torment. Most of those fools will believe anything. Just watch out for the atheists. They'll see right through most of those scams, and try to take over your ship. Make up something about an occupying evil, and the brainwashed masses will turn against them.
The intergalactic war is getting closer. We can hear the explosions now. It's only a matter of time before they get here. It's a good thing our space program has done so well, and we've started colonizing other planets, otherwise our species would be lost forever.
Oh .. fuck .. We don't have a space program, only a high altitude orbital flight program. Well, it's been nice knowing you all.
The same things have been happening throughout history. People tend to forget quickly. Things you mention for other countries have happened in the US multiple times in the last century. The actors change, but the stories remain the same. Or ....
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
- George Santayana
To be fair, the NSA did it right. It's simply permission for "Everything". Why mess around with all those pesky "who" and "why" questions, when we already know the answers to those questions are classified.
I'd *LOVE* to move it in to my datacenter. It might be a hard sell for the boss though..
"So I have this really cool piece of IT history, we just need to move that row a few feet over. It shouldn't involve too much downtime." :)
Didn't she complain about you standing on her bed last time? At least that's what she told me when I came over to service her. :)
Try reading the story. Oh ya, this is Slashdot, that's too much to ask. I'll summarize.
She talked to the police and the US Consulate. It took a while for her to get the staff to even understand what happened, and the police were clueless since she was speaking in English, and probably quickly and emotionally.
Probably not worth prosecuting. He won't be a repeat offender in their country, since he was going home soon. She was also going home, so they wouldn't have the only witness in country to testify.
I'd suspect even with a mountain of evidence, including video of the event happening, they would have let them leave, or possibly make him leave the country early.
Rape is about power. Sex is secondary. He was assuring his power over her. Well, trying. He lost.
If he just wanted sex, he could have gotten a prostitute. Her pimp would have killed him for damaging his employee if he tried to do the same thing.
I'm sure they both tripped on the stairs, or at least someone will try to claim it.
I suspect this guy will end up dead to the world. Probably not physically, but when the government has a deceased record, he's less likely to have a valid drivers license and passport.
I'm glad she got away. I wish more was done by the local authorities. Since they're both home, there's no chance he'd be prosecuted for it. Well, unless he should accidentally end up back in Poland without a passport or any identification.
[goes off to search for "live animal" air freight shipping from Argentina to Poland, and the delivery address of the jail]
Been there, done that.
I was invited into a company that was going through bankruptcy, and the previous C-level folks had already been indited for federal crimes.
I was given a short list of people to invite to leave, and full control to clear the slate of the entire IT staff, should I decide to.. Basically, I was to cut them all loose and start over, which as we all know is suicide. When I was ready for those who weren't team players, and detrimental to the company, the CEO said no. Hrm.
I was given laundry lists of things to do, and no budget to do it with. Some were little things like, desktops that were a decade old. Servers that were past EOL by any standards. I presented very reasonable plans for both, which were indefinitely delayed until they were almost too late.
I kept things mostly moving forward for the duration. When the bankruptcy was done, I was promised lots of things. Eventually, the new owner cut loose everyone that was not primarily at the home office. That was directly contrary to the CEO's continued assurances.
That night, I drank heavily and celebrated.
Now I'm doing SysAdmin work again. I get stuff done. I don't have to make grand decisions. I don't do presentations for company changing projects. I don't even have to hire or fire anyone. I understand more of the crap that management goes through, even though I do my best to isolate myself away from office politics. I have the luxury of going home when the work is done, and no one bothers me until the next work morning.
I won't argue with that. Well, the only thing I will point out is the same as I pointed out in another discussion elsewhere.
The government and military spying, both on enemies and your own people, has been going on since the invention of governments and militaries.
You can only assign blame specific incidents. The general idea has been around for an awful long time.
As long as we're somewhere on the sane side of McCarthyism and the Salem Witch Trials, I think we're mostly ok.. And for the record, I'm not a communist nor a witch.
Most of this stuff dates back to the Bush Jr. administration... But hey, go ahead and blame the black guy.
The same could be said or implied of the Steubenville hackers. Maybe there's a general grudge against schools, jocks, or a general belief that the state's investigators are inept.
Of course, the public statements now are for the preservation of evidence, and assistance of the victim and the courts.
What's wrong with building out your home network like a datacenter? :) I'm perfectly happy with GigE. It handles the servers, iSCSI to the SAN, and an isolated branch for the desktops. It's the uplink speeds we have to work on.. I could upgrade to 10GigE, but when will the uplinks even get close? I'm putting my change order in for 100MB/s down next week. It'll be a long time before we see even 1GB/s uplink speeds for the home..
I really miss having my stuff hosted in a good Tier 1 DC, where I really did have GigE uplinks that could support the speeds. I could transfer stuff very nicely there, and then copy it to the laptop to bring home. Sneakernet has always been faster than residential speeds for large transfers.
I'm only surprised that I don't get frequent visits from O2STK.
At least I'm sure they're entertained by my phone calls, emails, and risque pictures.
... and it seems to be accurate.
It took a few seconds for each to respond, being I'm on the wrong side of the pond and all.
So they appear to participate in the centralized time system, that understands UTC, I don't see where their big problem is. 100 days to program a javascript clock to use their servers instead of the client machine?
I am surprised that they still do have a clock on there. Well, I never noticed when I went, but I wasn't really going to the BBC to check the time. Most people took clocks off of their web pages back in the late 90's, right along with dancing babies and blinking text.
Servers taken care of. What's the BBC billing address? :)