First I am not a religious crackpot, and I am most certainly a scientist. I also think your statement is accurate. However:
I would argue that there are other things in life than science.
Sometimes it's fun just to kick back and play with unknowns and possibilities - albeit in a rational manner. I agree that it does not produce anything useful - except entertainment. But entertainment is useful too. And because our brains are excellent at abstraction, perhaps this "useless" thinking can one day stimulate someone to have a spark of genius and create something useful.
Not to mention 1/d^2. The further out you are, the weaker the signals get.
Then consider this. Most radio and TV transmitters power down at night - they need extra power during the day because they're fighting with the sun. At night the sun is conveniently hidden below the horizon so less power is needed.
But now put yourself outside our solar system, looking in. You will mostly "see" the Earth at night from your point of view. You would only see the "day" side as the Earth begins to move behind the sun. For half the year you would be getting half the day side and half the night side, for a quarter of the year you would get only the night side, and for another quarter of a year the Earth would be pretty much eclipsed.
Therefore you would never ever perceive the full radio output of the Earth. That would be blocked by the sun - unless of course you're outside the ecliptic plane - but in that case you wouldn't receive too many broadcasts from the Arctic/Antarctic, either.
And with no guarantee that alien civilizations will use radio
There's no guarantee, but I am fairly hopeful. Successful creatures are the ones which survive. In order to be able to survive, a creature has to be keenly aware of its surroundings - temperature, vibration, chemical composition and light. Apart from creatures on our planet that live deep in the ocean or inside caves (where there is no light), pretty much every living thing is aware of light in some manner, and has a response to it. "Sight" - in one way or another, is a very important sense. Would alien creatures see the way we see, or the same frequencies we see? Probably not. But unless they live under the ocean or in a cave, or their world is so dark for some reason that there is no light, it's a safe bet that they will have some form of sight.
Going from there, light is just about the only way to perceive the existence of a universe outside your world. If you can see and if your planet's atmosphere lets you peek outside of it, you will see at least your local star(s). This is the dawn of wondering about what lies outside the planet around you - this big ball of fire in the sky that no one can reach. If a world was covered in a high dust cloud that never let light in, then the blind creatures below would probably never feel the need to look up and consider that there is a cosmos. But a fairly transparent atmosphere automatically creates an unanswered question for any intelligent mind. What is it, how did it get there, etc.
Assuming technological progress, some form of method (be it trial and error or something akin to our scientific method) would be used to examine this daystar more closely. Stars can be examined and measured by the heat they give off, but visible light (whatever frequency range they see) is a very good way to examine it. If you have sight, you will want to look at things more closely. And if you have sight, eventually you would probably stumble upon the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum because stars tend to be fairly "noisy", they interfere with circuitry, etc. Any civilization that manages to discover electricity must eventually stumble upon radio if only in an effort to find out what causes their more sensitive circuits to not work as expected. Likewise any civilization that manages to split light with a prism would eventually wonder if there's more.
If this alien world has a night side (it might not, if it was in a binary system or had some giant moon always over the "night" side), seeing stars would probably accelerate the process further. The cosmos is full of radio energy. Creatures are designed to perceive their surroundings. Intelligent, technological creatures manage to see beyond their natural senses and push back the boundaries. We do not consciously perceive magnetic fields, but we know about them. We cannot explain gravity (is it a particle, a wave, a curve in space?) but we can measure it and predict it. We can't "see" all the forces and tensions involved in the structures we build, but we can calculate them. We cannot directly "see" atoms, but we have theorized about them since ancient Greece. If it exists, I think that eventually given enough time, an intelligent society will discover it. The first rule of intelligence, after all, is the thirst for knowledge.
Now, transmitting and receiving DATA via radio waves - that is NOT a given. Certainly there would be no reason for them to do it the way we do it even if they did. But being aware of the existence of radio frequencies per se I would expect from any advanced culture that can see, that manages to light up its world at night through electricity, and has some curiosity about the universe.
American tax dollars at work. Because it's very important to have a perfect handshake when you work for a company that needs a government bailout to stay afloat after bankruptcy.
You barely hear about Afghanistan even on television nowadays. Or Iraq, for that matter. Certainly you get a great deal more info on Lindsay Lohan, Tiger Woods, and Angelina Jolie than you do on two wars that have been going on for nigh on 9 years now. Wars that have cost billions of dollars. Wars in which thousands of American soldiers have died, and hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis. Yet it's all conveniently swept under the table. In fact the only time you're reminded there's a war is if the authorities want to take another of your rights away.
But remember, Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, and we have always been at peace with Eurasia.
The only way this will work to evade military grade infra red detection is if 1) you are not moving - people tend to notice a "cold patch" moving against a background - it's almost as good as a hot one; and 2)if you can manage to match the background heat exactly, thus masking your shape. Unfortunately if you're being viewed by something that's moving (like a helicopter or drone), you have no idea at what angle you are being viewed from at any point in time. This complicates matters.
I would expect time travel to exist at every point in time, since theoretically a person/persons capable of time travel would eventually visit pretty much every year for whatever reason (if only to avoid bumping into themselves). Remember that they have the whole future ahead of them, so lots of trips to different times in the past can be scheduled. If a future WITH time travel exists, then essentially time travel must appear simultaneously across the entire past, even if the future people are visiting different years sequentially.
Since humans are by no means perfect, and accidents do happen, some people previously unaware of the existence of time travel would presumably find out about it one way or another. Via dropped pens, or strange looking time travel machines, or other unexplained phenomena (please, no UFO crackpot theories). In your example you are assuming only one visit. If the technology existed to do it once, I don't see why it can't be done multiple times.
The problem is that some people do not like having terms dictated to them, "problems" or not. It's the principle of the thing. An "agreement" is between TWO parties. An EULA is one party telling another party what to do. Only the funny thing is, back in my day, usually it was the guy that was doing the paying that got to have a say.
Microsoft at least isn't calling it EULA anymore. They are calling it a CONTRACT.
So I think this is kinda cute - I print out said "contract". I make some modifications, add or remove some clauses. And I am still waiting for an authorized Microsoft rep to come to my place and sign said "contract".
They have a geographical monopoly across virtually all of Canada. If you live in an area serviced by them, you have a choice between Rogers and Rogers. Are you seriously asking people to give up entirely on the internet?
Put it this way - he's not a professor of statistics.
Other people can do research too, you know. So long as they publish their results, and the professor of statistics who is part of the review process doesn't see any flaws in the math. You really don't need a "license to practice research". You will, however, only be taken seriously if your research makes sense - Spanish teacher or not.
It would be easier just to slip some polonium into his sushi. Seriously. First you have to find out which pacemaker he uses. Then you have to get your hands on one. Then you have to learn how to hack it. Then you have to get close enough to him for long enough to do it - I mean it's not like these things have huge antennas and are controlled by satellite. Usually it's done in the doctor's office, and the antenna has to be brought real close to the skin. Seriously, a guy with a good rifle and a bullet is still a lot cheaper.
Are you seriously trying to argue an independent audit is not a good thing?
Yes. Because you will have 1000 people arguing about 1000 different ways to do the job better, while in the meantime people DIE.
Until they start releasing service packs and flashing EPROM chips on pacemakers and people start dying after the "update", there's no need to see the code. The machine as a whole has been demonstrated to have a statistically significant chance of bettering a given type of patient's life in clinical trials. If you want to nit pick I suggest you get a better, more satisfying life.
I want medical devices to run code which has been proven.
It has been proven. See clinical trials above.
While you are at it, would you like them to make sure that you know the exact chemical composition of the medically safe plastics used? How about knowing why they chose exactly that length of electrode? While we're at it, why not hold several trials comparing different types of conductor. You'll also need to know the impact different battery types might have. In fact, 50 years and $2 trillion dollars later, you will know everything there is to know about installing and designing pacemakers. But you will not have saved a single life.
Do you have any idea what a clinical trial IS? The software is an integral part of the pacemaker, and the pacemaker has been shown to work with success rate X. Could better code be written? I'm sure it could. Could a better pacemaker be designed? Sure it could. In the future better drugs will be made, better techniques will be discovered, and medicine in general will improve. However not being allowed to look at the source code is not a crime and it's not immoral. The machine as a whole including its code has been proven to have a given performance. Period. If you think you can build a better pacemaker - design and build one yourself.
I wouldn't know, since it's not my lifestyle. However from what I see and read, the trade suffers from a distinct lack of ethics and an abundance of greed and selfishness. Not exactly what one would call the hallmarks of professionalism. While I am sure that, like in any business, there are some who can claim that their word or their handshake is as good as an iron clad contract and an army of lawyers, I would assume that just like the rest of the world, there's a hell of a lot of lying, cheating and murdering scum who don't give a shit about anyone or anything.
How long before this algorithm is hacked and reverse engineered, and anyone can use an app to tell if your letter was written using this app or not? That way clearly you would be flagged as an unstable person who has to rely on an application to moderate your abundant hostility. Job application refused!
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong kind of got lucky too ... have you SEEN Calista Flockhart?
Well you have to admit that at least she is a slight improvement over Chewbacca...
Well as I understand it earth has gone through a number of catastrophic die-offs that killed most of the life on the planet like... 7 times?
Yeah. So if you believe in re-incarnation you know how many times Al Gore has been passing through. I wonder what the trilobites were driving...
First I am not a religious crackpot, and I am most certainly a scientist. I also think your statement is accurate. However:
I would argue that there are other things in life than science.
Sometimes it's fun just to kick back and play with unknowns and possibilities - albeit in a rational manner. I agree that it does not produce anything useful - except entertainment. But entertainment is useful too. And because our brains are excellent at abstraction, perhaps this "useless" thinking can one day stimulate someone to have a spark of genius and create something useful.
Not to mention 1/d^2. The further out you are, the weaker the signals get.
Then consider this. Most radio and TV transmitters power down at night - they need extra power during the day because they're fighting with the sun. At night the sun is conveniently hidden below the horizon so less power is needed.
But now put yourself outside our solar system, looking in. You will mostly "see" the Earth at night from your point of view. You would only see the "day" side as the Earth begins to move behind the sun. For half the year you would be getting half the day side and half the night side, for a quarter of the year you would get only the night side, and for another quarter of a year the Earth would be pretty much eclipsed.
Therefore you would never ever perceive the full radio output of the Earth. That would be blocked by the sun - unless of course you're outside the ecliptic plane - but in that case you wouldn't receive too many broadcasts from the Arctic/Antarctic, either.
And with no guarantee that alien civilizations will use radio
There's no guarantee, but I am fairly hopeful. Successful creatures are the ones which survive. In order to be able to survive, a creature has to be keenly aware of its surroundings - temperature, vibration, chemical composition and light. Apart from creatures on our planet that live deep in the ocean or inside caves (where there is no light), pretty much every living thing is aware of light in some manner, and has a response to it. "Sight" - in one way or another, is a very important sense. Would alien creatures see the way we see, or the same frequencies we see? Probably not. But unless they live under the ocean or in a cave, or their world is so dark for some reason that there is no light, it's a safe bet that they will have some form of sight.
Going from there, light is just about the only way to perceive the existence of a universe outside your world. If you can see and if your planet's atmosphere lets you peek outside of it, you will see at least your local star(s). This is the dawn of wondering about what lies outside the planet around you - this big ball of fire in the sky that no one can reach. If a world was covered in a high dust cloud that never let light in, then the blind creatures below would probably never feel the need to look up and consider that there is a cosmos. But a fairly transparent atmosphere automatically creates an unanswered question for any intelligent mind. What is it, how did it get there, etc.
Assuming technological progress, some form of method (be it trial and error or something akin to our scientific method) would be used to examine this daystar more closely. Stars can be examined and measured by the heat they give off, but visible light (whatever frequency range they see) is a very good way to examine it. If you have sight, you will want to look at things more closely. And if you have sight, eventually you would probably stumble upon the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum because stars tend to be fairly "noisy", they interfere with circuitry, etc. Any civilization that manages to discover electricity must eventually stumble upon radio if only in an effort to find out what causes their more sensitive circuits to not work as expected. Likewise any civilization that manages to split light with a prism would eventually wonder if there's more.
If this alien world has a night side (it might not, if it was in a binary system or had some giant moon always over the "night" side), seeing stars would probably accelerate the process further. The cosmos is full of radio energy. Creatures are designed to perceive their surroundings. Intelligent, technological creatures manage to see beyond their natural senses and push back the boundaries. We do not consciously perceive magnetic fields, but we know about them. We cannot explain gravity (is it a particle, a wave, a curve in space?) but we can measure it and predict it. We can't "see" all the forces and tensions involved in the structures we build, but we can calculate them. We cannot directly "see" atoms, but we have theorized about them since ancient Greece. If it exists, I think that eventually given enough time, an intelligent society will discover it. The first rule of intelligence, after all, is the thirst for knowledge.
Now, transmitting and receiving DATA via radio waves - that is NOT a given. Certainly there would be no reason for them to do it the way we do it even if they did. But being aware of the existence of radio frequencies per se I would expect from any advanced culture that can see, that manages to light up its world at night through electricity, and has some curiosity about the universe.
They must think our planet is overrun by dinosaurs.
Heh. That will make them think twice before invading us.
American tax dollars at work. Because it's very important to have a perfect handshake when you work for a company that needs a government bailout to stay afloat after bankruptcy.
Nah - it's just that Steve Ballmer needs to wear a black turtleneck
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
You barely hear about Afghanistan even on television nowadays. Or Iraq, for that matter. Certainly you get a great deal more info on Lindsay Lohan, Tiger Woods, and Angelina Jolie than you do on two wars that have been going on for nigh on 9 years now. Wars that have cost billions of dollars. Wars in which thousands of American soldiers have died, and hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis. Yet it's all conveniently swept under the table. In fact the only time you're reminded there's a war is if the authorities want to take another of your rights away.
But remember, Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, and we have always been at peace with Eurasia.
The only way this will work to evade military grade infra red detection is if 1) you are not moving - people tend to notice a "cold patch" moving against a background - it's almost as good as a hot one; and 2)if you can manage to match the background heat exactly, thus masking your shape. Unfortunately if you're being viewed by something that's moving (like a helicopter or drone), you have no idea at what angle you are being viewed from at any point in time. This complicates matters.
True. Then time travel would be spotted "n" years before it is "discovered", "n" being your non-arbitrary number.
I would expect time travel to exist at every point in time, since theoretically a person/persons capable of time travel would eventually visit pretty much every year for whatever reason (if only to avoid bumping into themselves). Remember that they have the whole future ahead of them, so lots of trips to different times in the past can be scheduled. If a future WITH time travel exists, then essentially time travel must appear simultaneously across the entire past, even if the future people are visiting different years sequentially.
Since humans are by no means perfect, and accidents do happen, some people previously unaware of the existence of time travel would presumably find out about it one way or another. Via dropped pens, or strange looking time travel machines, or other unexplained phenomena (please, no UFO crackpot theories). In your example you are assuming only one visit. If the technology existed to do it once, I don't see why it can't be done multiple times.
So what is the problem?
The problem is that some people do not like having terms dictated to them, "problems" or not. It's the principle of the thing. An "agreement" is between TWO parties. An EULA is one party telling another party what to do. Only the funny thing is, back in my day, usually it was the guy that was doing the paying that got to have a say.
Microsoft at least isn't calling it EULA anymore. They are calling it a CONTRACT.
So I think this is kinda cute - I print out said "contract". I make some modifications, add or remove some clauses. And I am still waiting for an authorized Microsoft rep to come to my place and sign said "contract".
If time travel existed at some point in the future, we would have had evidence of its existence in the past...
fucking cancer, all of it
Boycott Rogers.
And switch to what, exactly?
They have a geographical monopoly across virtually all of Canada. If you live in an area serviced by them, you have a choice between Rogers and Rogers. Are you seriously asking people to give up entirely on the internet?
Put it this way - he's not a professor of statistics.
Other people can do research too, you know. So long as they publish their results, and the professor of statistics who is part of the review process doesn't see any flaws in the math. You really don't need a "license to practice research". You will, however, only be taken seriously if your research makes sense - Spanish teacher or not.
I dropped Dell from my shopping list a long, long time ago.
It would be easier just to slip some polonium into his sushi. Seriously. First you have to find out which pacemaker he uses. Then you have to get your hands on one. Then you have to learn how to hack it. Then you have to get close enough to him for long enough to do it - I mean it's not like these things have huge antennas and are controlled by satellite. Usually it's done in the doctor's office, and the antenna has to be brought real close to the skin. Seriously, a guy with a good rifle and a bullet is still a lot cheaper.
Are you seriously trying to argue an independent audit is not a good thing?
Yes. Because you will have 1000 people arguing about 1000 different ways to do the job better, while in the meantime people DIE.
Until they start releasing service packs and flashing EPROM chips on pacemakers and people start dying after the "update", there's no need to see the code. The machine as a whole has been demonstrated to have a statistically significant chance of bettering a given type of patient's life in clinical trials. If you want to nit pick I suggest you get a better, more satisfying life.
I want medical devices to run code which has been proven.
It has been proven. See clinical trials above.
While you are at it, would you like them to make sure that you know the exact chemical composition of the medically safe plastics used? How about knowing why they chose exactly that length of electrode? While we're at it, why not hold several trials comparing different types of conductor. You'll also need to know the impact different battery types might have. In fact, 50 years and $2 trillion dollars later, you will know everything there is to know about installing and designing pacemakers. But you will not have saved a single life.
Do you have any idea what a clinical trial IS? The software is an integral part of the pacemaker, and the pacemaker has been shown to work with success rate X. Could better code be written? I'm sure it could. Could a better pacemaker be designed? Sure it could. In the future better drugs will be made, better techniques will be discovered, and medicine in general will improve. However not being allowed to look at the source code is not a crime and it's not immoral. The machine as a whole including its code has been proven to have a given performance. Period. If you think you can build a better pacemaker - design and build one yourself.
The devices themselves are rigorously tested in clinical trials. If they pass those tests, what more do you want?
I wouldn't know, since it's not my lifestyle. However from what I see and read, the trade suffers from a distinct lack of ethics and an abundance of greed and selfishness. Not exactly what one would call the hallmarks of professionalism. While I am sure that, like in any business, there are some who can claim that their word or their handshake is as good as an iron clad contract and an army of lawyers, I would assume that just like the rest of the world, there's a hell of a lot of lying, cheating and murdering scum who don't give a shit about anyone or anything.
How long before this algorithm is hacked and reverse engineered, and anyone can use an app to tell if your letter was written using this app or not? That way clearly you would be flagged as an unstable person who has to rely on an application to moderate your abundant hostility. Job application refused!