I read that read that in the unmanned tests of the Vostok spacecraft, they played tapes in the cabin to test the comm system, and there is speculation from that of pre-Gagarin human spaceflights.
To squelch the rumors, the story told is that the Soviets then played tapes of vocal choruses. No one would believe that they orbited the entire Soviet Army Men's Choral Group . . .
It used to be that not only has it been hard to cancel or reschedule a trip without eating the cost, it is hard to get a medical excuse. Heck, at a doctor visit for another matter, I was given a handful of prescription anti-histamine so I could go on a trip with a serious cold. Doctors "tough it out" and go all kinds of places with colds (or worse -- there are all kinds of upper respiratory stuff with all profiles of sore throats, phlegm, and fevers).
Or at least that used to be the system until SARS/H1N1. Has this changed? Will an airline cheerfully let you reschedule if you tell them you have a fever and a bad sore throat, or do they demand "a doctor's note"?
There are rational arguments to advance in regard to "don't worry", and we geeks here can "handle the truth."
When someone is trying to tell me they don't want to discuss this any further and this is the end of the conversation, that is when I really start to worry.
What incentive is there to purchase and expensive plane ticket to go from one place without health care to another across an ocean? If people want to migrate, they will come to the US. The Central America scenerio might, just might come into play if the US places travel restrictions on West Africa.
C'mon people. I have frequently gotten a cold, even though they say the only way to catch one is to touch your eyes and nose, and I consciously try not to touch my eyes and nose, especially when I need to be around people with a cold. I suffer from colds.
This is sort of like the Nicholas Cage film where our hero (Cage, of course), suits up to face the Plague or the Deadly Nerve Gas, and his boss coaches him, "You'll do OK, pal, the suit will protect you. That is unless your nose starts to itch, you brush against your face mask with your hand inadvertedly, and you loosen the positive pressure seal on the mask. If you do that, there are no guarantees. Your only hope is to jam this syringe through your sternum into your heart and hope that his experimental antibody that has never been tested before happens to work . .."
People have not worked with half-mask respirators and other gear doing orchard spraying or other such work? No matter how careful you are with the gear, you end up touching something -- oops, let's just wash our hands and then shower down real good.
The original idea behind the Saturday AM cartoons is that the kids are up early on Saturday AM whereas the parents get to sleep in.
The reason kids are up bright an early because they have an enforced bedtime so the parents (ahem) can get some quality time . . . with each other.
Teens on the other hand will want to sleep in because they are left to their own bed time, they may be up late either because of social activities, extracurricular activities such as sports, or if they are obnoxious grinds, they may have to study that much if they want to do all the homework the teachers pile on students these days. Also, teens start to need more sleep at a time when our school and social cultures lead them to sleep less.
OK, what kind of food waste am I putting in the municipal trash?
Chicken leg quarters were on sale, so we cooked a bunch of them in the oven. We ate the chicken meat, and we made a soup from the pan drippings, but we now have a big pile of chicken bones.
I picked a whole bunch of apples off the ground from the home orchard. Since they have been on the ground, I peel them before eating them. Also, I haven't quite "turned the corner" in controlling the Apple Maggot Fly, so portions of the apples start rotting. I cut those part off, which generates even more food waste. That apple waste should not go in a home compost pile as it would just breed more apple maggot flies. Don't know of the hardiness of the larvae and pupae of this breed of fruit fly in a municipal composter. But if I had a home orchard let alone had apple maggots in it, in the State of Washington I would have already been lined up against the wall.
So I fill up a curbside bin with cooked chicken bones and apple peels, without the benefit of using a plastic grocery bag as "primary containment", besides, such bags are contraband too, and just brew a smelly mash of these items as I accumulate them in the bin in the week prior to garbage day.
So an otherwise correct Delphi 7 program that uses strings won't compile? They couldn't bring themselves to keeping the legacy string types and introducing a "Ustring" or some such new type?
The 32-bit to 64-bit change is a big jump, but int (32-bit) and long (64-bit) have the same meaning in Java whether 32 or 64 bit, and the "integer models" of C and C++ are OS dependent, but they made some effort to ease the transition. Here, you are telling me that Delphi 2009+ is a totally different and incompatible language from Delphi 7, that they didn't even make an attempt at a smooth migration path?
That gets back to my original question/observation. It does seem that there is a "Lost World" of Delphi programmers and application users still living in the era of Delphi 7, either out of sloth, inertia, legacy systems, or that Embarcadero has gone off into the ozone layer of the stratosphere with their product offerings, and this Lost World is cut off from the Embarcadero World.
Oh, don't move to Atlanta because you are experienced in Delphi. The traffic alone in the Atlanta Metro area will make the 6-figure pay not worth it.
Is there a divide between the community using Borland Delphi (say, Delphi through Version 7) and the current Embarcadero Delphi offerings?
I kinda quit upgrading my Delphi install after Version 7 having switched to Java for the work I am doing going forward. I needed a 64-bit capable Delphi for something so I downloaded the Embarcadero Trial of one of the current Delphi versions.
Besides New Delphi being a complete pig on resources, there is no comparison of its machine "footprint" to Visual Studio let along Classic Delphi (of which Delphi 7 is the "standard" because that is where Classic Delphi development stopped). I didn't do much with the trial install because I couldn't figure out the settings and modes on the compiler and I consider myself an old Delphi-hand. Attempting to compile a legacy Delphi 7 app with it resulted in a barrage of compiler errors.
When I need to "do something 64-bit" (also cross-platform) in Delphi, I have switched to Lazarus/Free Pascal, which I understand is targeting Delphi 7 for clonage -- kinda like Linux distros targeting something somewhat but not completely unlike XP for the GUI experience with Microsoft having gone off into the ozone UI-wise with Windows 8.
So, is it just me, or do others view Delphi 5-6-7 as the Windows 2000/XP of that world and the new Embarcadero offerings as being a whole 'nother language culture?
Didn't they have these episodes of "Cops" where the patrol officer would pull a car over for a "minor traffic infraction", run the plates, find out the vehicle was stolen, and a high speed chase would ensue?
No offense to your 2004 Focus, but it has been years since I watched the program, but the stolen car was always a Saturn?
I know that auto theft is a felony and the police are there to protect and serve, and this car was some poor dude's ride before it got boosted. But the cops engage in a high-speed chase to recover . . . a Saturn? Which ends up wrapped around a light pole in most of the "episodes"? "Sir, we recovered your car . .."
So is it really worth the danger to the public to give chase to a criminal who has boosted a 10-year old Saturn?
So, you will go to your local national-chain hardware store, some zit-faced teen will take the hinge, put it into a scanner, disappear "into the back", come back with the new part still warm from the process, and tell you, "Take this up front and tell them to charge to twelve dollars."
You will then take it home and then figure that it is a tenth mm too big in all dimensions to fit?
Is this going to be like the class trip to the State Capitol? There are these "souvenir" machines into which you place some coins. It is not injection molding as that would produce something semi-durable. Rather, it is vacuum forming where in a process somewhat but not completely unlike glass blowing, this really cheesy soft plastic is pushed against a mold, only the machine puts on a show that it is doing something important. And out pops this floppy statue of the head and shoulders (I think the sculpture term is a "bust") of the Great Emanacipator engravened with "Land of Lincoln."
I have a 4-cyl gas engine grass cutting tractor that requires a tune up inasmuch as it has breaker-point ignition. That tractor dates from the early 1980s, though.
The BAS has always been on this tear "oh, noes, missile defense" because they have always been ideologically against any side breaking out of the Cold War Mutually Assured Destruction stand-off. There are always engineering trades in what these defense systems or what defensive systems could do or couldn't do back to the days of walled cities in Mesopotamia (Iraq).
I remember in the "run up" to the First Iraq War (the "Gulf War') about an interview with some high-ranking Saudi dude being concern-trolled "what about Iraq attacking the oil fields (with Scuds)?" The Saudi official smiled somewhat patronizingly at the news dude and responded, "We are equipped with the Patriot" at the time when the US public didn't know a Patriot from a Tory or that anyone was mad enough to use an ack-ack missile against a Scud rocket.
War is always about PR (i.e. deception). Everyone knew the Scud couldn't hit anything (except in some lucky for the enemy, unlucky for us shots). The Saudi leaders were just too happy to go along with "the Patriot is a Scud defense shield" because they knew that strategically, the Scud was of no consequence and this way they could tell their people to "just chill, bro, the Americans shared with us the Patriot" as the Scuds rained down. The US hurredly gave the Israelis the Patriot to get them to "just chill, bro", but everyone was coming out of the woodwork about how the Patriot was just a sham defense against an incoming missile not aimed at anything.
The "Patriot works" fit Saudi propaganda interests, but went against the Israeli propaganda at the time because they Israelis were itchy to get into the fight of "Scud hunting", where air attacks against this mobile platform that couldn't hit anything in the first place were regarded as futile by the U.S.. The Israelis argued that their pilots would press futile attacks against the Scud more aggressively because they were defending their women and children against the largely ineffective Scud attacks, but the US argued this was Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti's war aim, to lob Scuds to draw the Israelis in to fracture the coalition.
As for Palestinians and the war fighting power they have, suicide bombing are perhaps the most effective thing they have to inflict Israeli casualties, but it really works against them propaganda wise. The singularly most effective thing they had going was the First Intifida, where they were using rock-throwing young people as rubber-bullet sponges. From a propaganda standpoint, that was devastating in its effectiveness of portraying the Israeli troops as hateful goons, whether this was true or not, but the optics on TV were rapidly undermining Israel as a just cause. Why the PLO gave up on a tactic that was working I have no idea, but this may speak to why the conflict has dragged on so long when the Palestinians have demographics and world sympathy in their corner. The Palestinians may simply have bad leaders.
The rocket attacks are a kind of middle ground tactic in sacrificing your own guys. It is not the casualties inflicted by the rocket attacks, it is the 100:1 casualties of your own people that is a feature-not-a-bug, of rallying your own people and of getting Americans to pray in their Christian churches "for an end to the violence."
As to why the Israelis are playing along be inflicting so many casualties, maybe that is a feature-not-a-bug. For one thing, they are targeting "the leaders" and trying to be creative in a tactical sense with their tech for giving telephone warnings. Maybe the Israeli calculus is "the leaders talk tough but they are not that keen on being blown up themselves."
Also, on one hand, Israel is a "Western" country where people get all hand-wringy about the "violence" (I use scare quotes because what is taking place is a war between two sides with irreconcilable national interests and not some unexplained "violence"). On the other hand, Israel is a Middle Eastern country with a substantial Oriental Jewish population displaced from Cairo, Baghdad
What you have to realize is that Brent Spiner (the "mad scientist" in Area 51 who related "we don't get out much") had been hacking the alien tech since the early 1950s so Goldblum didn't have to do that much.
Getting back on topic, the Rebels in St/ar Wars smuggled the plans to the Death Star, which the Grand Moff/Toff/Dufus thought would do the rebels no good because the Death Star was properly engineered.
The Rebel engineers studied those plans and found a weakness in that reactor exhaust port thingy. Maybe there were her flaws, but this is what they were able to find.
As to the WW-II style anti-aircraft, the whole attack on the Death Star was supposed to be the Battle of Midway and Waldron's Lost Squadron running their suicidal torpedo attack down to the last man with the tide of the battle reversing at the last minute (the dive bombers sinking the carriers of Kido Butai at Midway, Luke using The Force to guide his last blaster shot to the exhaust port after Han Solo drove off his pursuers in "Star Wars").
This telling of the tale resonanted with the audience in the late 70's, whose parents of The Greatest Generation told the stories of the WW-II battles. When I first told a friend at work "The whole Star Wars ending scene is just the Battle of Midway", there was this recognition on his part, where he related his father being a Navy submarine combat veteran. Stories of how WW-II was fought from different vantage points was what our generation grew up with.
Halfway there wasn't really any way there. The Fairchild Planar Process was the real breakthrough but Kilby had the broad patent claims on something commercially unworkable.
A lot is made about how hard it is to detect radio signals and how SETI is pseudoscience because all of the terms in the Drake Equation are wild guesses.
The meat of this proposal was answering the question whether anything like a terrestrial (analog) UHF TV station was "out there" anywhere up to about 400 light years. The search was "all sky" and didn't even involve highly directional (and hence high gain) antennas -- the plan was to use the feed horns, only, from the Big Dish at Goldstone, California.
The detection probability is a concrete formula in terms of factors such as the transmitting antenna gain (omni-directional), receiving antenna gain (low as they were going to use the feed horn), receiver noise figure (low -- at liquid helium temperature), data rate (one bit per observations -- you were trying to detect a beacon in the form of a pilot tone), and source entropy (very, very favorably low -- a crystal controlled carrier wave is a very stable, predictable signat that the JPL people had experience "picking out" from the background, even when needing to correct for Doppler, in "recovering" spacecraft that had lost their high-gain dish antenna).
If this project was ever conducted, they would have been able to rule out the presence of a UHF TV station out to 400 light years. Yeah, yeah, over what portion of life on another planet is there a civilization with UHF analog TV stations, and that question was asked during that seminar with a lot of wisecrack comments that the ET's have switched to fiber optic cable. But Fermi Paradox wise, were there an advanced Asimov-style intergalactic civilization, and were the civilization trying to get our attention, if they had a beacon anywhere near us, we would have found it by now.
That is, if this plan ever got funded. A quick look at Wikipedia suggests that owing to the spotty funding of SETI on account of anti-ET skepticism, maybe this simple search, which just needed some antenna time on the DSN and a digital FFT analyser, never took place.
Gosh, this is already 30 years ago, but the SETI project at JPL had the idea of an all-sky search for the pilot carriers of (alien) UHF TV stations out to a couple hundred light years. The search would cover large swaths of sky using just the wide aperture feed horns on the Deep Space Network (DSN) antennas.
JPL's DSN was in the business of tracking spacecraft in interplanetary space emitting very low levels of power in crystal-controlled "pilot tones" that could be detected at great distances, doing this front ends with noise temperatures at liquid helium values. The idea is that a terrestrial TV station carrier would be emitting enough narrow-band power to be detected at interstellar distances, even with wide aperture low-gain antennas. If a tone is crystal controlled, it is sufficiently narrow band to be picked out of the background with a FFT filter bank of millions and then later billions of channels.
Does a digital TV station even emit a carrier or a pilot tone signal anymore? 30 years ago when a Caltech seminar speaker was a JPL engineer who had received a Senator Proxmire "Golden Fleece" award for doing SETI, which the Senator from Wisconsin thought was a misuse of public money, his colleague joked about "the aliens switching everything to fiber optic cable", but digital TV was a distant dream then.
Since then, haven't we pretty much ruled out aliens announcing their presence with narrow-band radio emissions at the level of our technology out to a few hundred light years?
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To squelch the rumors, the story told is that the Soviets then played tapes of vocal choruses. No one would believe that they orbited the entire Soviet Army Men's Choral Group . . .
Or at least that used to be the system until SARS/H1N1. Has this changed? Will an airline cheerfully let you reschedule if you tell them you have a fever and a bad sore throat, or do they demand "a doctor's note"?
When someone is trying to tell me they don't want to discuss this any further and this is the end of the conversation, that is when I really start to worry.
What incentive is there to purchase and expensive plane ticket to go from one place without health care to another across an ocean? If people want to migrate, they will come to the US. The Central America scenerio might, just might come into play if the US places travel restrictions on West Africa.
This is sort of like the Nicholas Cage film where our hero (Cage, of course), suits up to face the Plague or the Deadly Nerve Gas, and his boss coaches him, "You'll do OK, pal, the suit will protect you. That is unless your nose starts to itch, you brush against your face mask with your hand inadvertedly, and you loosen the positive pressure seal on the mask. If you do that, there are no guarantees. Your only hope is to jam this syringe through your sternum into your heart and hope that his experimental antibody that has never been tested before happens to work . . ."
People have not worked with half-mask respirators and other gear doing orchard spraying or other such work? No matter how careful you are with the gear, you end up touching something -- oops, let's just wash our hands and then shower down real good.
The reason kids are up bright an early because they have an enforced bedtime so the parents (ahem) can get some quality time . . . with each other.
Teens on the other hand will want to sleep in because they are left to their own bed time, they may be up late either because of social activities, extracurricular activities such as sports, or if they are obnoxious grinds, they may have to study that much if they want to do all the homework the teachers pile on students these days. Also, teens start to need more sleep at a time when our school and social cultures lead them to sleep less.
But is he someone I need to know about to be not oblivious to current culture, that is, apart from "getting" Justin Bieber jokes on late night TV?
There you go -- there is tremendous incentive to run very old versions of software and the OS on account of the cumbersome FDA approval process.
Chicken leg quarters were on sale, so we cooked a bunch of them in the oven. We ate the chicken meat, and we made a soup from the pan drippings, but we now have a big pile of chicken bones.
I picked a whole bunch of apples off the ground from the home orchard. Since they have been on the ground, I peel them before eating them. Also, I haven't quite "turned the corner" in controlling the Apple Maggot Fly, so portions of the apples start rotting. I cut those part off, which generates even more food waste. That apple waste should not go in a home compost pile as it would just breed more apple maggot flies. Don't know of the hardiness of the larvae and pupae of this breed of fruit fly in a municipal composter. But if I had a home orchard let alone had apple maggots in it, in the State of Washington I would have already been lined up against the wall.
So I fill up a curbside bin with cooked chicken bones and apple peels, without the benefit of using a plastic grocery bag as "primary containment", besides, such bags are contraband too, and just brew a smelly mash of these items as I accumulate them in the bin in the week prior to garbage day.
Ewwwwwwww!
Woman says to him, "You look new here, where were you before?"
Man says, "I just was released from a long prison term . . . for killing my wife."
"Oh, so you're single, then!"
Why will Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel die before his wife does . . . because he wants to!
The 32-bit to 64-bit change is a big jump, but int (32-bit) and long (64-bit) have the same meaning in Java whether 32 or 64 bit, and the "integer models" of C and C++ are OS dependent, but they made some effort to ease the transition. Here, you are telling me that Delphi 2009+ is a totally different and incompatible language from Delphi 7, that they didn't even make an attempt at a smooth migration path?
That gets back to my original question/observation. It does seem that there is a "Lost World" of Delphi programmers and application users still living in the era of Delphi 7, either out of sloth, inertia, legacy systems, or that Embarcadero has gone off into the ozone layer of the stratosphere with their product offerings, and this Lost World is cut off from the Embarcadero World.
Oh, don't move to Atlanta because you are experienced in Delphi. The traffic alone in the Atlanta Metro area will make the 6-figure pay not worth it.
I kinda quit upgrading my Delphi install after Version 7 having switched to Java for the work I am doing going forward. I needed a 64-bit capable Delphi for something so I downloaded the Embarcadero Trial of one of the current Delphi versions.
Besides New Delphi being a complete pig on resources, there is no comparison of its machine "footprint" to Visual Studio let along Classic Delphi (of which Delphi 7 is the "standard" because that is where Classic Delphi development stopped). I didn't do much with the trial install because I couldn't figure out the settings and modes on the compiler and I consider myself an old Delphi-hand. Attempting to compile a legacy Delphi 7 app with it resulted in a barrage of compiler errors.
When I need to "do something 64-bit" (also cross-platform) in Delphi, I have switched to Lazarus/Free Pascal, which I understand is targeting Delphi 7 for clonage -- kinda like Linux distros targeting something somewhat but not completely unlike XP for the GUI experience with Microsoft having gone off into the ozone UI-wise with Windows 8.
So, is it just me, or do others view Delphi 5-6-7 as the Windows 2000/XP of that world and the new Embarcadero offerings as being a whole 'nother language culture?
No offense to your 2004 Focus, but it has been years since I watched the program, but the stolen car was always a Saturn?
I know that auto theft is a felony and the police are there to protect and serve, and this car was some poor dude's ride before it got boosted. But the cops engage in a high-speed chase to recover . . . a Saturn? Which ends up wrapped around a light pole in most of the "episodes"? "Sir, we recovered your car . . ."
So is it really worth the danger to the public to give chase to a criminal who has boosted a 10-year old Saturn?
You will then take it home and then figure that it is a tenth mm too big in all dimensions to fit?
Is this going to be like the class trip to the State Capitol? There are these "souvenir" machines into which you place some coins. It is not injection molding as that would produce something semi-durable. Rather, it is vacuum forming where in a process somewhat but not completely unlike glass blowing, this really cheesy soft plastic is pushed against a mold, only the machine puts on a show that it is doing something important. And out pops this floppy statue of the head and shoulders (I think the sculpture term is a "bust") of the Great Emanacipator engravened with "Land of Lincoln."
I have a 4-cyl gas engine grass cutting tractor that requires a tune up inasmuch as it has breaker-point ignition. That tractor dates from the early 1980s, though.
How old is your car that it needs a "tune up"?
I remember in the "run up" to the First Iraq War (the "Gulf War') about an interview with some high-ranking Saudi dude being concern-trolled "what about Iraq attacking the oil fields (with Scuds)?" The Saudi official smiled somewhat patronizingly at the news dude and responded, "We are equipped with the Patriot" at the time when the US public didn't know a Patriot from a Tory or that anyone was mad enough to use an ack-ack missile against a Scud rocket.
War is always about PR (i.e. deception). Everyone knew the Scud couldn't hit anything (except in some lucky for the enemy, unlucky for us shots). The Saudi leaders were just too happy to go along with "the Patriot is a Scud defense shield" because they knew that strategically, the Scud was of no consequence and this way they could tell their people to "just chill, bro, the Americans shared with us the Patriot" as the Scuds rained down. The US hurredly gave the Israelis the Patriot to get them to "just chill, bro", but everyone was coming out of the woodwork about how the Patriot was just a sham defense against an incoming missile not aimed at anything.
The "Patriot works" fit Saudi propaganda interests, but went against the Israeli propaganda at the time because they Israelis were itchy to get into the fight of "Scud hunting", where air attacks against this mobile platform that couldn't hit anything in the first place were regarded as futile by the U.S.. The Israelis argued that their pilots would press futile attacks against the Scud more aggressively because they were defending their women and children against the largely ineffective Scud attacks, but the US argued this was Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti's war aim, to lob Scuds to draw the Israelis in to fracture the coalition.
As for Palestinians and the war fighting power they have, suicide bombing are perhaps the most effective thing they have to inflict Israeli casualties, but it really works against them propaganda wise. The singularly most effective thing they had going was the First Intifida, where they were using rock-throwing young people as rubber-bullet sponges. From a propaganda standpoint, that was devastating in its effectiveness of portraying the Israeli troops as hateful goons, whether this was true or not, but the optics on TV were rapidly undermining Israel as a just cause. Why the PLO gave up on a tactic that was working I have no idea, but this may speak to why the conflict has dragged on so long when the Palestinians have demographics and world sympathy in their corner. The Palestinians may simply have bad leaders.
The rocket attacks are a kind of middle ground tactic in sacrificing your own guys. It is not the casualties inflicted by the rocket attacks, it is the 100:1 casualties of your own people that is a feature-not-a-bug, of rallying your own people and of getting Americans to pray in their Christian churches "for an end to the violence."
As to why the Israelis are playing along be inflicting so many casualties, maybe that is a feature-not-a-bug. For one thing, they are targeting "the leaders" and trying to be creative in a tactical sense with their tech for giving telephone warnings. Maybe the Israeli calculus is "the leaders talk tough but they are not that keen on being blown up themselves."
Also, on one hand, Israel is a "Western" country where people get all hand-wringy about the "violence" (I use scare quotes because what is taking place is a war between two sides with irreconcilable national interests and not some unexplained "violence"). On the other hand, Israel is a Middle Eastern country with a substantial Oriental Jewish population displaced from Cairo, Baghdad
What you have to realize is that Brent Spiner (the "mad scientist" in Area 51 who related "we don't get out much") had been hacking the alien tech since the early 1950s so Goldblum didn't have to do that much.
Getting back on topic, the Rebels in St/ar Wars smuggled the plans to the Death Star, which the Grand Moff/Toff/Dufus thought would do the rebels no good because the Death Star was properly engineered.
The Rebel engineers studied those plans and found a weakness in that reactor exhaust port thingy. Maybe there were her flaws, but this is what they were able to find.
As to the WW-II style anti-aircraft, the whole attack on the Death Star was supposed to be the Battle of Midway and Waldron's Lost Squadron running their suicidal torpedo attack down to the last man with the tide of the battle reversing at the last minute (the dive bombers sinking the carriers of Kido Butai at Midway, Luke using The Force to guide his last blaster shot to the exhaust port after Han Solo drove off his pursuers in "Star Wars").
This telling of the tale resonanted with the audience in the late 70's, whose parents of The Greatest Generation told the stories of the WW-II battles. When I first told a friend at work "The whole Star Wars ending scene is just the Battle of Midway", there was this recognition on his part, where he related his father being a Navy submarine combat veteran. Stories of how WW-II was fought from different vantage points was what our generation grew up with.
. . . we loaded programs by flipping toggle switches for the binary op-codes until our finger bled. And we liked it!
http://www.ti.com/corp/docs/ki...
Halfway there wasn't really any way there. The Fairchild Planar Process was the real breakthrough but Kilby had the broad patent claims on something commercially unworkable.
you mean X86? (ba-doom boom!)
A lot is made about how hard it is to detect radio signals and how SETI is pseudoscience because all of the terms in the Drake Equation are wild guesses.
The meat of this proposal was answering the question whether anything like a terrestrial (analog) UHF TV station was "out there" anywhere up to about 400 light years. The search was "all sky" and didn't even involve highly directional (and hence high gain) antennas -- the plan was to use the feed horns, only, from the Big Dish at Goldstone, California.
The detection probability is a concrete formula in terms of factors such as the transmitting antenna gain (omni-directional), receiving antenna gain (low as they were going to use the feed horn), receiver noise figure (low -- at liquid helium temperature), data rate (one bit per observations -- you were trying to detect a beacon in the form of a pilot tone), and source entropy (very, very favorably low -- a crystal controlled carrier wave is a very stable, predictable signat that the JPL people had experience "picking out" from the background, even when needing to correct for Doppler, in "recovering" spacecraft that had lost their high-gain dish antenna).
If this project was ever conducted, they would have been able to rule out the presence of a UHF TV station out to 400 light years. Yeah, yeah, over what portion of life on another planet is there a civilization with UHF analog TV stations, and that question was asked during that seminar with a lot of wisecrack comments that the ET's have switched to fiber optic cable. But Fermi Paradox wise, were there an advanced Asimov-style intergalactic civilization, and were the civilization trying to get our attention, if they had a beacon anywhere near us, we would have found it by now.
That is, if this plan ever got funded. A quick look at Wikipedia suggests that owing to the spotty funding of SETI on account of anti-ET skepticism, maybe this simple search, which just needed some antenna time on the DSN and a digital FFT analyser, never took place.
JPL's DSN was in the business of tracking spacecraft in interplanetary space emitting very low levels of power in crystal-controlled "pilot tones" that could be detected at great distances, doing this front ends with noise temperatures at liquid helium values. The idea is that a terrestrial TV station carrier would be emitting enough narrow-band power to be detected at interstellar distances, even with wide aperture low-gain antennas. If a tone is crystal controlled, it is sufficiently narrow band to be picked out of the background with a FFT filter bank of millions and then later billions of channels.
Does a digital TV station even emit a carrier or a pilot tone signal anymore? 30 years ago when a Caltech seminar speaker was a JPL engineer who had received a Senator Proxmire "Golden Fleece" award for doing SETI, which the Senator from Wisconsin thought was a misuse of public money, his colleague joked about "the aliens switching everything to fiber optic cable", but digital TV was a distant dream then.
Since then, haven't we pretty much ruled out aliens announcing their presence with narrow-band radio emissions at the level of our technology out to a few hundred light years?