That's pretty much the whole stock market game. Take advantage of market fluctuations before someone else does. It doesn't matter if you create those fluctuations yourself or not.
That's not defined in the report. It's not a technical report, it's a financial one. It's talking more about the market fluctuations.
Here's the beginning of the "what happened" section.
WHAT HAPPENED? May 6 started as an unusually turbulent day for the markets. As discussed in more detail in the Preliminary Report, trading in the U.S opened to unsettling political and economic news from overseas concerning the European debt crisis. As a result, premiums rose for buying protection against default by the Greek government on their sovereign debt. At about 1 p.m., the Euro began a sharp decline against both the U.S Dollar and Japanese Yen.
Around 1:00 p.m., broadly negative market sentiment was already affecting an increase in the price volatility of some individual securities. At that time, the number of volatility pauses, also known as Liquidity Replenishment Points ("LRPs"), triggered on the New York Stock Exchange ("NYSE") in individual equities listed and traded on that exchange began to substantially increase above average levels.
By 2:30 p.m., the S&P 500 volatility index ("VIX") was up 22.5 percent from the opening level, yields of ten-year Treasuries fell as investors engaged in a "flight to quality," and selling pressure had pushed the Dow Jones Industrial Average ("DJIA") down about 2.5%.
Furthermore, buy-side liquidity3 in the E-Mini S&P 500 futures contracts (the "E-Mini"), as well as the S&P 500 SPDR exchange traded fund ("SPY"), the two most active stock index instruments traded in electronic futures and equity markets, had fallen from the early-morning level of nearly $6 billion dollars to $2.65 billion (representing a 55% decline) for the E-Mini
Nope, but the fed gives money back to states (and therefore cities). Federal funds pay for a lot of things. There are several interstates (and auxiliary interstate highways) there too.
Oh, I was definitely not saying to ignore the problem. I was stating that people do not get along. The only effective leadership is to have leaders who are respected for their decision making ability, and can be trusted. Throughout history, there have been some great leaders who have shaped the world we live in today. In the current environment, even the greatest leader can't thrive without the corruption undermining the ranks under them, therefore corrupting that leadership.
The post I replied to was basically saying to disband our current political systems, and we could all play nicely together. The "Can't we all get along?" method just does not work. It leads to inconsistent decisions and distributed blame when there's a problem. No, people don't get along. If there's anything any of us should have learned from grade school history classes, we don't get along. We never have. These conflicts could be something like the color of your rain barrel, or nations may fight over race, religion, or land. Those are only a few examples. They go from pissing matches about nothing, to huge bloody wars
When the revolution comes, you'll be the second group against the wall.
There is one thing that has been proven time and time again. People do not get along. They do not agree. And despite any opinions that they may have, they are easily swayed with promises, bribes, threats and coercion. They are impossible to satisfy.
People fall into 3 groups.
1) Those who lead.
2) Those who follow.
3) Those who get the fuck out of the way.
I suggest that you fall into group #3 very rapidly.
Oh, I'm not defending them. I'm sure with enough information, we'd see who was really benefiting from the change. It could be anyone, from the union finding a way to keep employees on the road (why did it take 6 hours to drive 3 blocks?), to the company supplying the paint and decals (specially reflective, for her pleasure).
There was a reference to the signs being easier for the driver to read, and therefore they didn't look away from the road as long while driving (so they have more time to send the twitter saying "I'm passing Wall St."), I really doubt it has much of anything to do with driver safety.
The stupidest part is, road signs, like everything else, have a finite life. They are stolen, damaged, or whatever. It's been a while since I spoke with any DOT folks about such matters, but as I recall, there's something like a 7 to 10 year lifespan, where they will change the signs regardless if they "need" it. I only found that out when I was at a local DOT shop, and asked about a pile of old street signs. So, in the cycle where they'd normally be changed, an extra $27M has been allocated to change them. Nah, there's no corruption in government, I swear. (where's my kickback?)
There's a mention of the Federal Highway Administration being involved. It's probably a national rule, and I suspect the fed gov't may be able to refuse road funds for failure to comply to minimum safety standards. blah, blah, blah.
$27 million is nothing in the big picture of transportation funds. The 2010 MTA operating budget was $13.4 billion. You could add or remove $27 million from that, and it wouldn't be noticeable.
On the other hand, I'm sure they'd prefer to do other things than install 250,000 new street signs.
You make it sound like it's impractical. Well, I guess because you said so. I've had receivers which do audio normalization (or dynamic range control), which work very well in home theaters. You don't have to screw around with the volume so you can hear someone whispering in one scene, and then turn it down for the next loud scene. I was really spoiled after watching TV and movies exclusively in my home theater for about a year. I pretty much had two settings for the audio. One was for normal TV and general movies. The other was for action movies (about 10% louder). When I added a TV in another room, it really threw me that the volume changed so significantly. I had to sit there with the remote in my hand, so I could turn up quiet scenes, and turn down loud scenes. It was very distracting.
Really, it's not state of the art technology. It's been around for a while. There isn't really a reason that the broadcast station can't set a normalization threshold, other than the fact that they may need to spend a bit of cash to make it happen. But, it's not in the best interest of the stations. They're being paid to allow the ads through that are over volume, regardless of the comfort (or annoyance) of the viewers.
Ya, the wording wasn't future-proof. I don't know exactly how you'd say the following. Maybe the second person who has a time machine can go back and fix the past, to fix the future. They'll just need to be sure to make a way to tell their future selves that they must do it. You can't ask the first person with a time machine to do it, they'll have that whole damned "you can't change the timeline" attitude. You know, step on a butterfly and all that nonsense.
BTW, the tablet in her hand just says "July IV, MDCCLXXVI" You're thinking of the poem that is in a tablet at the base of the statue.
On with the poem.
Please don't send us your ugly;
Your genetically disposed to eat too much fast food, and complain that they eat because they're big boned;
Your discount shoppers, who will exclusively buy foreign products, and destroy the economy;
Your future business leaders, who look at the bottom dollar and not the impact, who will outsource your jobs;
Your corrupt and idiotic politicians, who will run senseless wars, and make the worst decisions possible;
I think he's referring to compression on the proxy, before it's sent down the line to him. I had some cell provider several years ago, whose bundled software automatically set the browsers proxy server to their server. It was awful. Most pictures came through so overcompressed that you couldn't make out what it was suppose to be. What was worse was that when I plugged the laptop back into the regular network, the proxy server changes stuck. So my pages were still ugly, and they still took forever to download. As it turns out, they over use their proxy server, so it's slow no matter what.:) I guess if he's in the same situation, it would appear to be the same experience either way.
Every cybernetic soldier needs an IP. How else are they going to communicate with their command nodes? You didn't think the CNC nodes were invented by spambot authors, did you?
Here at Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, we take great pride in the advancement of our own programs, regardless of the impact on others. Some people would consider our Aperture Science artificial intelligence program a failure, but we have proven that our EI's (Electronic Intelligence) can perform better than their fleshy counterparts.
Our Global Cybernetic Soldier Program (estimated launch Q4 2012) will be the most significant advancement in technology ever.
For more information you can read more about our status at scc.mil, assuming you have the appropriate clearance and implant.
I know there has been some flexibility to those rules, but honestly they make sense.
I could come out and say I'm making a movie, but don't have a script, actors, or a production company. They could list every person with an idea, but that would just pollute the database. It doesn't totally appear to be the case. The two guys were involved in an Australian television show, "Getaway", and some other works. I'm not familiar with them, so I'll have to just go with what I did find.
I seriously doubt IMDb's problem is with the torrent release. It does show that they are not pursuing the typical revenue path of a movie, which can easily be used to question the authenticity. It could also seem to be an attempt to hijack attention from any of the other 5 movies named "The Tunnel" that were (or will be) released in 2009/2010.
I would say this is more likely a bit of publicity whoring, which seems to be happening a lot here on Slashdot. "Oh look at [me|my product|my company]. We're being treated unfairly by [large corp|large organization|government|special interest group]." Now the little project that would have had an audience of a handful of people has been thrust into the spotlight, even if for only the 15 seconds of fame. It's a shame Slashdot has been slipping from being a good news source, to being an outlet for publicity whores.
It's the same illusion that people see when looking at photos of mars. It's very easy to get disoriented looking at satellite/aerial photography, without a lot of practice.
here is a fun place to look at craters. Remember, in the Northern hemisphere, North of the Tropic of Cancer, the shadowed side will be to the south, and the illuminated side will be to the north. That's how you can tell that this is a pyramid and this is a crater
There's a cool one on Mars, that looks like a saucer shaped spaceship crashed into a hill, until you look closely at the shadowed and lit sides. I can't seem to find a link to the picture though.
To the best of my knowledge, all jails record phone calls. I'm sure they intercept the dialed number as well as the calls. Getting the number the technical way, especially when it's tapped out by hand, is harder than just listening to the operator saying "Operator, please connect me to 212 555 1212".
They have a bit less interest in the phone number than the actual conversation.
Most inmates are in prison for a reason. They got caught, usually because they made stupid mistakes. Their first call out may say all kinds of interesting things like "get all the drugs out from under my bed and get rid of them" or "I didn't finish getting rid of the body, it's in the trunk of a black sedan parked on 5th street", or "Wipe out all the porn on my computer, I'm in enough trouble already."
It sounds stupid, but this story came out today. Here's a little bit of the story. The version I heard on the radio was much nastier, since they discussed details on exactly how it was to be done.
The father of a Florence prison inmate was accused Monday of trying to bring heroin into the prison and expecting to receive $22,000 after his son distributed the heroin to other inmates.
Donald Curtis Denney was arrested Friday inside the Federal Correctional Institution by the FBI and was charged Monday with possessing heroin with the intent of distributing it.
FBI agent Harry Deal of Pueblo wrote in a court affidavit that a substance believed to be heroin, wrapped in plastic and placed inside the finger portion of a rubber glove, was found in a body cavity of Denney.
Oh, I wish it was so easy. No, I grew up in a rather rural area. This isn't really all that long ago, it was the late 1970's through mid 1980's. But they hadn't upgraded their infrastructure. They finally upgraded their equipment in the late 80's, so I could start doing tone dialing.
Hmm, come to think of it, they split the area into two exchanges in the real late 80's. So they couldn't have had more than 10,000 subscribers, both residential and businesses across several small townships. (does 4 traffic lights make a city?)
You don't know how great it was to finally get cable there. We got our TV service from a 50' mast, and a C/KU satellite dish, both of which got hit by lightning frequently. The only thing better was moving the hell away from there and never going back.:)
It would be a little slicker to dial the number like that. It can be done. But I'm sure half the people here don't remember pulse dialing. For quite a few years, I had to change the strings for my modem from ATDT to ATDP so I could dial.:)
It doesn't look like the same size provides an adequate room for edge cases to not skew the results.
At one company, I did scored ratings. It seemed like a big complicated system, but it boiled down to be pretty simple. People were voting 1 to 5 on a set of pictures. There were thousands of sets handled by the system at any given point, and multiple millions of votes stored in our logs.
In the first 10 results, we could have a tremendously skewed result. Say a 4.5
In the first 100 results, we'd see them drift. maybe now 2.5
In the first 10,000 results, it would be closer to a consistent number. 4.2, for the sake of this example.
To encourage voting, and reduce complaints of "where's my score", we didn't publish any scores until there were at least 50 results. It made for the occasional complaint of "why did my score change so much", which we could address by providing their logs (timestamps and votes).
So, 100 guys in Australia, and an unknown sample group in Hong Kong? Nope, not good enough, especially where they're trying to say it covers 50% of the world population.
God, yet another insignificant study without enough information.
96 models, and a sample set of 94 (plus some number in the Hong Kong group).
At least it leads to their site, which appears that it may do a better job at getting a good sample group.
It, of course, can't take into account moods, personal history, etc. Like, the most beautiful woman in the survey could look just like my exgirlfriend/exwife. It's very likely I'd immediately score her lower.
BTW, encountering an alien race with either kind of situation I mention here would still be considered "close" in terms of evolutionary development from a larger universal time perspective. We would be lucky to encounter multi-cellular life forms of any kind or a non-corporeal life form where the technological differences would be absolutely moot. I bet most "habitable worlds" with life are mostly a variation of bacterial sludge and algae.
Don't worry, they think the same of us.
Really, we know of something like 10^21 stars in 200 billion galaxies. That allows for an awful lot of planets. The number of habitable planets is likely quite large. Hell, we have at least two planets in our system.
Assuming the religious nuts weren't right, and all of it was spontaneously created within a few days at the whim of some imaginary being in the sky, we know that the universe (as we know it) is about 13 billion years old. The earth is a baby, only about 4 billion years old.
If one of the planets that became habitable was created closer to the beginning of this universe, and it took 4 billion years for them to advance to our current level, that would only put them something like 9 billion years ahead of us.
In all practicality, nothing lasts forever. Not a lifeform, a civilization, or even a planet. It's very likely that great civilizations have come and gone in places that we can barely imagine. But if just one of those civilizations, that was born billions of years ahead of us, were to have still survived and became a space faring civilization, you'd have to think that they just may have mapped out the known universe and know which planets may be habitable in the future, and which species are likely to thrive and reach their level of technology someday.
If there are aliens, they'd be out there watching us. Maybe just the occasional visit. They'd also likely know that we aren't exactly the friendliest species in the universe. We can't even play nice with each other, why would you risk accidentally giving us space travel.
No, we are still way too primitive. We can name a UN liason to vising aliens, but that definitely doesn't mean that they'll just say "Oh ok, we have someone to talk to now. Come on, lets give you a space ship and let you guys travel the universe. Just promise not to start any fights." Sure.
Not that I'm saying world peace would bring them any sooner. We've proven, and continue to prove, that we are a dangerous and destructive species, which won't change any time soon. We do have exceptions in our species, but not enough to make us even a practical consideration.
Actually, you hit on something that must be adjusted for solar to work. Modern structures are rarely insulated enough. That insulation can be natural (semi-subterranean homes), or artificial (like XPS, EPS, and fiberglass). On a few occasions, I've had opportunities to look inside residential walls. Rarely are the walls insulated well. They're insulated well enough to pass inspection, and meet the bare minimum of the building codes. For example, I was replacing the wall around a tub/shower. On the outside wall, there was only about 3/4" encapsulated fiberglass behind the concrete block wall. I guess that was enough to pass inspection at the time. The person who owns the house noted that in the summer, the A/C couldn't keep up. All you had to do was touch any of the interior walls. You could feel the outside heat on the exterior facing walls (from inside) and even the interior walls (not facing outside). The heat from the attic was heating the interior walls too.
As long as it is acceptable to build houses as cheaply as possible, we will continue using more power than is required. So yes, solar can be way too expensive to supply even the power to just cool the house.
There are some very interesting projects that people have done for alternative methods of cooling homes. While you may be able to hack something together from your local big-box hardware store, you'll never see a full kit nor instructions on doing it there. The building codes in your are may expressly forbid some. I know plenty of people who live in planned communities, where they are not allowed by deed restrictions, to put up solar panels, windmills, or even change the construction of their roof (a white roof reflects more solar energy than a black shingle roof).
Slashdot Mirror
That's pretty much the whole stock market game. Take advantage of market fluctuations before someone else does. It doesn't matter if you create those fluctuations yourself or not.
That's not defined in the report. It's not a technical report, it's a financial one. It's talking more about the market fluctuations.
Here's the beginning of the "what happened" section.
Nope, but the fed gives money back to states (and therefore cities). Federal funds pay for a lot of things. There are several interstates (and auxiliary interstate highways) there too.
Oh, I was definitely not saying to ignore the problem. I was stating that people do not get along. The only effective leadership is to have leaders who are respected for their decision making ability, and can be trusted. Throughout history, there have been some great leaders who have shaped the world we live in today. In the current environment, even the greatest leader can't thrive without the corruption undermining the ranks under them, therefore corrupting that leadership.
The post I replied to was basically saying to disband our current political systems, and we could all play nicely together. The "Can't we all get along?" method just does not work. It leads to inconsistent decisions and distributed blame when there's a problem. No, people don't get along. If there's anything any of us should have learned from grade school history classes, we don't get along. We never have. These conflicts could be something like the color of your rain barrel, or nations may fight over race, religion, or land. Those are only a few examples. They go from pissing matches about nothing, to huge bloody wars
When the revolution comes, you'll be the second group against the wall.
There is one thing that has been proven time and time again. People do not get along. They do not agree. And despite any opinions that they may have, they are easily swayed with promises, bribes, threats and coercion. They are impossible to satisfy.
People fall into 3 groups.
1) Those who lead.
2) Those who follow.
3) Those who get the fuck out of the way.
I suggest that you fall into group #3 very rapidly.
So, besides being a non-story, it's a totally non-story. {sigh} I really need to stop looking at idle.
Oh, I'm not defending them. I'm sure with enough information, we'd see who was really benefiting from the change. It could be anyone, from the union finding a way to keep employees on the road (why did it take 6 hours to drive 3 blocks?), to the company supplying the paint and decals (specially reflective, for her pleasure).
There was a reference to the signs being easier for the driver to read, and therefore they didn't look away from the road as long while driving (so they have more time to send the twitter saying "I'm passing Wall St."), I really doubt it has much of anything to do with driver safety.
The stupidest part is, road signs, like everything else, have a finite life. They are stolen, damaged, or whatever. It's been a while since I spoke with any DOT folks about such matters, but as I recall, there's something like a 7 to 10 year lifespan, where they will change the signs regardless if they "need" it. I only found that out when I was at a local DOT shop, and asked about a pile of old street signs. So, in the cycle where they'd normally be changed, an extra $27M has been allocated to change them. Nah, there's no corruption in government, I swear. (where's my kickback?)
There's a mention of the Federal Highway Administration being involved. It's probably a national rule, and I suspect the fed gov't may be able to refuse road funds for failure to comply to minimum safety standards. blah, blah, blah.
$27 million is nothing in the big picture of transportation funds. The 2010 MTA operating budget was $13.4 billion. You could add or remove $27 million from that, and it wouldn't be noticeable.
On the other hand, I'm sure they'd prefer to do other things than install 250,000 new street signs.
You make it sound like it's impractical. Well, I guess because you said so. I've had receivers which do audio normalization (or dynamic range control), which work very well in home theaters. You don't have to screw around with the volume so you can hear someone whispering in one scene, and then turn it down for the next loud scene. I was really spoiled after watching TV and movies exclusively in my home theater for about a year. I pretty much had two settings for the audio. One was for normal TV and general movies. The other was for action movies (about 10% louder). When I added a TV in another room, it really threw me that the volume changed so significantly. I had to sit there with the remote in my hand, so I could turn up quiet scenes, and turn down loud scenes. It was very distracting.
Really, it's not state of the art technology. It's been around for a while. There isn't really a reason that the broadcast station can't set a normalization threshold, other than the fact that they may need to spend a bit of cash to make it happen. But, it's not in the best interest of the stations. They're being paid to allow the ads through that are over volume, regardless of the comfort (or annoyance) of the viewers.
Oh dude, that's just too freaky. I can handle just about any other fetish, but those damned flurries are too freaky for me.
Ya, the wording wasn't future-proof. I don't know exactly how you'd say the following. Maybe the second person who has a time machine can go back and fix the past, to fix the future. They'll just need to be sure to make a way to tell their future selves that they must do it. You can't ask the first person with a time machine to do it, they'll have that whole damned "you can't change the timeline" attitude. You know, step on a butterfly and all that nonsense.
BTW, the tablet in her hand just says "July IV, MDCCLXXVI" You're thinking of the poem that is in a tablet at the base of the statue.
On with the poem.
Please don't send us your ugly;
Your genetically disposed to eat too much fast food,
and complain that they eat because they're big boned;
Your discount shoppers,
who will exclusively buy foreign products,
and destroy the economy;
Your future business leaders,
who look at the bottom dollar and not the impact,
who will outsource your jobs;
Your corrupt and idiotic politicians,
who will run senseless wars,
and make the worst decisions possible;
To those, we ask you to turn around and go back;
To the rest of you, welcome to America.
I think he's referring to compression on the proxy, before it's sent down the line to him. I had some cell provider several years ago, whose bundled software automatically set the browsers proxy server to their server. It was awful. Most pictures came through so overcompressed that you couldn't make out what it was suppose to be. What was worse was that when I plugged the laptop back into the regular network, the proxy server changes stuck. So my pages were still ugly, and they still took forever to download. As it turns out, they over use their proxy server, so it's slow no matter what. :) I guess if he's in the same situation, it would appear to be the same experience either way.
Every cybernetic soldier needs an IP. How else are they going to communicate with their command nodes? You didn't think the CNC nodes were invented by spambot authors, did you?
Here at Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, we take great pride in the advancement of our own programs, regardless of the impact on others. Some people would consider our Aperture Science artificial intelligence program a failure, but we have proven that our EI's (Electronic Intelligence) can perform better than their fleshy counterparts.
Our Global Cybernetic Soldier Program (estimated launch Q4 2012) will be the most significant advancement in technology ever.
For more information you can read more about our status at scc.mil, assuming you have the appropriate clearance and implant.
I know there has been some flexibility to those rules, but honestly they make sense.
I could come out and say I'm making a movie, but don't have a script, actors, or a production company. They could list every person with an idea, but that would just pollute the database. It doesn't totally appear to be the case. The two guys were involved in an Australian television show, "Getaway", and some other works. I'm not familiar with them, so I'll have to just go with what I did find.
I seriously doubt IMDb's problem is with the torrent release. It does show that they are not pursuing the typical revenue path of a movie, which can easily be used to question the authenticity. It could also seem to be an attempt to hijack attention from any of the other 5 movies named "The Tunnel" that were (or will be) released in 2009/2010.
I would say this is more likely a bit of publicity whoring, which seems to be happening a lot here on Slashdot. "Oh look at [me|my product|my company]. We're being treated unfairly by [large corp|large organization|government|special interest group]." Now the little project that would have had an audience of a handful of people has been thrust into the spotlight, even if for only the 15 seconds of fame. It's a shame Slashdot has been slipping from being a good news source, to being an outlet for publicity whores.
It's the same illusion that people see when looking at photos of mars. It's very easy to get disoriented looking at satellite/aerial photography, without a lot of practice.
here is a fun place to look at craters. Remember, in the Northern hemisphere, North of the Tropic of Cancer, the shadowed side will be to the south, and the illuminated side will be to the north. That's how you can tell that this is a pyramid and this is a crater
And of course, this is a tall building, at an airport that doesn't exist. :)
There's a cool one on Mars, that looks like a saucer shaped spaceship crashed into a hill, until you look closely at the shadowed and lit sides. I can't seem to find a link to the picture though.
To the best of my knowledge, all jails record phone calls. I'm sure they intercept the dialed number as well as the calls. Getting the number the technical way, especially when it's tapped out by hand, is harder than just listening to the operator saying "Operator, please connect me to 212 555 1212".
They have a bit less interest in the phone number than the actual conversation.
Most inmates are in prison for a reason. They got caught, usually because they made stupid mistakes. Their first call out may say all kinds of interesting things like "get all the drugs out from under my bed and get rid of them" or "I didn't finish getting rid of the body, it's in the trunk of a black sedan parked on 5th street", or "Wipe out all the porn on my computer, I'm in enough trouble already."
It sounds stupid, but this story came out today. Here's a little bit of the story. The version I heard on the radio was much nastier, since they discussed details on exactly how it was to be done.
Oh, I wish it was so easy. No, I grew up in a rather rural area. This isn't really all that long ago, it was the late 1970's through mid 1980's. But they hadn't upgraded their infrastructure. They finally upgraded their equipment in the late 80's, so I could start doing tone dialing.
Hmm, come to think of it, they split the area into two exchanges in the real late 80's. So they couldn't have had more than 10,000 subscribers, both residential and businesses across several small townships. (does 4 traffic lights make a city?)
You don't know how great it was to finally get cable there. We got our TV service from a 50' mast, and a C/KU satellite dish, both of which got hit by lightning frequently. The only thing better was moving the hell away from there and never going back. :)
It would be a little slicker to dial the number like that. It can be done. But I'm sure half the people here don't remember pulse dialing. For quite a few years, I had to change the strings for my modem from ATDT to ATDP so I could dial. :)
No. Use Google Maps, it will show you the way.
That's a lot safer than this one
Send us your young tall thin large breasted women!
It doesn't look like the same size provides an adequate room for edge cases to not skew the results.
At one company, I did scored ratings. It seemed like a big complicated system, but it boiled down to be pretty simple. People were voting 1 to 5 on a set of pictures. There were thousands of sets handled by the system at any given point, and multiple millions of votes stored in our logs.
In the first 10 results, we could have a tremendously skewed result. Say a 4.5
In the first 100 results, we'd see them drift. maybe now 2.5
In the first 10,000 results, it would be closer to a consistent number. 4.2, for the sake of this example.
To encourage voting, and reduce complaints of "where's my score", we didn't publish any scores until there were at least 50 results. It made for the occasional complaint of "why did my score change so much", which we could address by providing their logs (timestamps and votes).
So, 100 guys in Australia, and an unknown sample group in Hong Kong? Nope, not good enough, especially where they're trying to say it covers 50% of the world population.
God, yet another insignificant study without enough information.
96 models, and a sample set of 94 (plus some number in the Hong Kong group).
At least it leads to their site, which appears that it may do a better job at getting a good sample group.
It, of course, can't take into account moods, personal history, etc. Like, the most beautiful woman in the survey could look just like my exgirlfriend/exwife. It's very likely I'd immediately score her lower.
Don't worry, they think the same of us.
Really, we know of something like 10^21 stars in 200 billion galaxies. That allows for an awful lot of planets. The number of habitable planets is likely quite large. Hell, we have at least two planets in our system.
Assuming the religious nuts weren't right, and all of it was spontaneously created within a few days at the whim of some imaginary being in the sky, we know that the universe (as we know it) is about 13 billion years old. The earth is a baby, only about 4 billion years old.
If one of the planets that became habitable was created closer to the beginning of this universe, and it took 4 billion years for them to advance to our current level, that would only put them something like 9 billion years ahead of us.
In all practicality, nothing lasts forever. Not a lifeform, a civilization, or even a planet. It's very likely that great civilizations have come and gone in places that we can barely imagine. But if just one of those civilizations, that was born billions of years ahead of us, were to have still survived and became a space faring civilization, you'd have to think that they just may have mapped out the known universe and know which planets may be habitable in the future, and which species are likely to thrive and reach their level of technology someday.
If there are aliens, they'd be out there watching us. Maybe just the occasional visit. They'd also likely know that we aren't exactly the friendliest species in the universe. We can't even play nice with each other, why would you risk accidentally giving us space travel.
No, we are still way too primitive. We can name a UN liason to vising aliens, but that definitely doesn't mean that they'll just say "Oh ok, we have someone to talk to now. Come on, lets give you a space ship and let you guys travel the universe. Just promise not to start any fights." Sure.
Not that I'm saying world peace would bring them any sooner. We've proven, and continue to prove, that we are a dangerous and destructive species, which won't change any time soon. We do have exceptions in our species, but not enough to make us even a practical consideration.
Actually, you hit on something that must be adjusted for solar to work. Modern structures are rarely insulated enough. That insulation can be natural (semi-subterranean homes), or artificial (like XPS, EPS, and fiberglass). On a few occasions, I've had opportunities to look inside residential walls. Rarely are the walls insulated well. They're insulated well enough to pass inspection, and meet the bare minimum of the building codes. For example, I was replacing the wall around a tub/shower. On the outside wall, there was only about 3/4" encapsulated fiberglass behind the concrete block wall. I guess that was enough to pass inspection at the time. The person who owns the house noted that in the summer, the A/C couldn't keep up. All you had to do was touch any of the interior walls. You could feel the outside heat on the exterior facing walls (from inside) and even the interior walls (not facing outside). The heat from the attic was heating the interior walls too.
As long as it is acceptable to build houses as cheaply as possible, we will continue using more power than is required. So yes, solar can be way too expensive to supply even the power to just cool the house.
There are some very interesting projects that people have done for alternative methods of cooling homes. While you may be able to hack something together from your local big-box hardware store, you'll never see a full kit nor instructions on doing it there. The building codes in your are may expressly forbid some. I know plenty of people who live in planned communities, where they are not allowed by deed restrictions, to put up solar panels, windmills, or even change the construction of their roof (a white roof reflects more solar energy than a black shingle roof).