It's that stupid raised piece, or notch to allow someone to move it with a finger or thumbnail. Logitech has the pattent on one, Radio Shack the other, or perhaps it's Acacia and Tessera, or... No Prenda was copyrights... and Apple refuses to license either. So Apple calls them ugly.
This is dependent on the computer, as not all computers have an external mic in socket, though there may be workarounds even for them.
Someone above pointed out that for some macbooks there is an ifixit explanation of how to replace the mic, where the suggestion was made to simply disconnect it, and don't put anything new in it's place. If you are worried about this voiding the warrantee here are a few other suggestions.
Check to see if plugging in an external mike capable headset into the audio jack/socket switches the audio in to the headset. If so, you should be able to use the mute switch on the headset to disable the mic by default. If the mic is only disabled if there is a connection from the mic ring on a 4 conductor jack to ground, and only if there is the appropriate resistance, you can make that connection through an appropriate valued resistor. This may need to be done on a cable that supports external speakers if you have a single audio plug that supports both audio out and audio in, presuming you want to hear the audio of your computer.
If you want to be able to make use of the mic on the laptop, you should be able to simply unplug that plug, and the computer (most modern computers in the past 10 years anyway) should switch back to the internal mic. Alternatively switch to a headset that has a mic from the cable that disables the mic. Or if your computer supports a bluetooth phone headset, you should be able to use that for audio.
Another alternative that may automatically disable the internal audio i/o is to plug a usb sound adapter into the computer, or a hub. (Or plug in a usb hub/doc that has audio capabilities.)
You could also plug in a white noise generator, or an mp3 player with a continuous loop of someone providing a boring recitation of the constitution. If the mic port is "available" you could tape an in-ear speaker to the port with one of those feeding it audio. The down side here is that it is possible to 'learn' what you are feeding it, and cancle it out, boost the gain on the rest to recover what people are saying near the computer. You may need to provide a randomized, or mixed feed that goes through a long period between repititions, but changes rapidly. You may need a good random number generator to drive that, but that's a different topic.
If none of those are workable options for you, I'm not sure what to suggest.
Fix for the mic would be to either short to ground (tip) the mic lead of a headset plug, or if the macbook checks resistance link a 1k ohm reistor between tip and the mic lead, and make sure that the computer switches to using the external mic when you plug something in that provides a suitable resistance.
This could all be built within a 90 degree 3.5mm plug , or even a 2.5mm plug if necessary. It won't be quite flush with the side of the macbook, and if they use a common plug for speakers and mic, you may need to add a socket for headphones, or build this into a replacement plug for the headphones you prefer. You would likely need a 4 conductor plug for the mic ring.
Optionally pick up a usb sound adapter from a manufacturer in china, and make sure that the computer switches to that as the default audio i/o device, and never plug a mic into the adapter, or plug in a mic that's turned off.
If you want to be annoying to the people trying to listen, find a recording of someone reciting the constitution, and feed that into the mic in jack from an mp3 player on a continuous loop.
However due to the way that information is compartmentalized within the NSA, it is entirely possible that Snowden has more information than a senior NSA official may be aware that the NSA has. There is a wel known security policy that states that information should only be provided to eople on a need to know basis, and it is entirely possible that up to now the senior NSA official may not have had a need to know just how much data the NSA collects. For that matter, it is possible that the official may still not have a need to know, or never have it.
As long as you live in her basement, or it costs less to call you than call the manufacturer's tech support, you'll be your mother's first line tech support person. You know what to do about the first situation. The latter situation may just be an extension, except that she will save up tech support problems for your next visit. You do plan on stopping in for Dad's Birthday, right?
What I find amazing is the apparent ignorance of what Amateur Radio Operators have to do to get their license in the first place, or what the limitations are. Yes, hams are involved in emergency communications, but that has as much to do with situation awareness as anything else.
If you are interested in getting into amateur radio, go for it. The barrier to entry for the technician license is to correctly answer 25 questions out of 35 questions out of a pool of about 350 questions, and a nominal fee of less han $20 per exam attempt. If'n you're an overachiever, for that same fee, and learning of a few more questions, you can walk out having passed all three exams.
Granted there are limitations that might affect a few readers, affecting people with felony convictions, and such. And there's the minor issue of buying equipment. Quite a bit of low cost equipment in the VHF/UHF showing up on the market over the past couple of years, as that's the range of frequencies that China is happy to let it's Amateur Operators use, since it is pretty much a line of sight set of frequencies. If you want longer range comms, you're going to want to look for other deals, unless you've got cash burning a hole in your wallet.
Considering the Nova episode 'making things faster' with David Pouge as the host presented this over a month ago, and they have production lead time delayse amounting to months, I'm with the people suggesting that this is a repeat. And hardly qualifies as 'news'.
That said, cool.
Also noted in the Nova episode was that the physical path that the fiber-optic route takes is going to be longer than the path that the microwave route takes.
If they are not doing it already, I would suspect that the next step will be to move the repeater electronics up to the microwave dishes at the intermediary locations. My experience with telcom is that this is usually housed in the shelter at the base of the towers, however if they can locate it with the dishes it will eliminate a path distance of at least twice the sum of the elevations of the dishes, divided by the velocity factor of the media they use to connect those, (roughly 1 for dry waveguide, and usually between.6 and.9 for different varieties of co-ax media.) It's not a lot, but if they are looking to eliminate every possible delay, that's got to be in their plans.
...at least in this day and age. The trick is to remember that any information that is recorded to any form of media, can be stolen, copied, or given away. If you want to maintain something in privacy, it can't leave your head. You can't write it down, or draw, or paint the idea. You can't make a tape of it or a video of it. You can't say it to your lover or spouse.
Of course that makes it incredibly difficult to act on what you maintain in privacy, but that is more of a problem of getting others to work with you in suport of that idea.
There is a presumption of privacy codified in law, however that presumption does not seem to be all that relavent to our current state of govornment or business, so you are pretty much stuck with what you can control. At the moment that's pretty much restricted to what's in your head.
As I read the comments, it looks like people are missing a bet on what the practice that the cariers are doing can provide.
People are noting that techincally competent people can easily bypass the restrictions, and others are noting that the vast majority of the public is not sufficiently technically competent to work around it.
I'm reminded a bit of the drug dealer situation in most places. It's trivially easy for most people to find a supplier for nearly any drug that someone has an interest in getting. Most people don't go looking for them for whatever reason, but it's not because they don't know where to go, or at least if they thought about it a bit they could figure it out. The same is likely to be true of media content.
So, user George doesn't know how to get around these filters, but it's likely that one of George's friends does, or one of George's friends knows someone who can. If this ever became a significant issue, I suspect that people would set up secure chat servers (or even a https based site) where they let their neighbors know they can request whatever movie they are interested in, and through a bot on the server they get back a link to the file already downloaded, or to the file being downloaded, and they can start watching. The link may be to a torrent proxy that goes and gets the bits of the files from other people offering the same sort of a service, and none of the people providing this service actually have copies of the files maintained on their systems either. (Yes, that somewhat defeats the purpose of a torrent, but the idea is to provide a service to end users, not necessarily be a good torrent netizen.) To reduce the likelyhood that the person providing the service is adversly affected, he or she may require that the 'customer' run a torrent proxy on their system that the load of torrent traffic gets distributed across. Better operators will do something like build their software package to prevent spam bots from running on the customer's computers. That may even be all that the customer is asking for from the service provider, and the torrent operation may be going on completely transparently to them.
I know, that seems complex. But from an end user perspective for the movies, it looks like I log into a secure web server, identify the movie I want to watch, and get a link to that movie. I click on that link, and I start watching the movie. Perhaps George texts or IMs a movie title to Bill, who texts back a URL that George then enters in their web browser, or even follows right on their phone or pc.
In time a network of providers of the service will exist, or several networks. It might be done through something like IRC, and the various providers will check to see who's closest to the end user and get a link close to them.
I'm going to echo that you need to know what the exam criteria are. There are exams that have the limitation that the only capabilities that your calculator is allowed to have are plus, minus, multiply and divide, which would eliminate all of the scientific capabilities listed through this thread. Often those exams don't really need a calculator at all, except to allow the person taking the test to feel that they can check the result that they got through other methods.
As for having the ability to use a slide rule, I've found that pretty much everything I need to do that I can use a slide rule for, can be handled just as fast using a basic four function calculator. An exception would be figuring out square roots, which on a four function calculator involves a lot of trial and error, and for a slide rule is essentially a single slide to solve.
Both are breakable, and neither functions very well as a defensive tool in situations where batteries are unavailable.
Hey, considering that your phone is communicating your contact list through your cell phone carrier with Apple, Google or Microsoft (a couple of other possibilities of course, but pretty much all of them happening across your phone carrier data infrastructure) it's likely that your contact's pictures are already being indexed by the NSA.
If the bursts happened 10 billion years ago were common all over at that time, (as was asked by the ggp a/c) then the observations would be dirstributed much more randomly across the sky than observation indicates. Observation suggests that the large number of gama ray bursts that happened 10 billion years ago, appear to have happened across a region of space that is heavily weighted in one direction. A circle with a radius of 10 billion light years has a circumfrence of 2*pi*10 billion light years, or a bit over 68 billion light years. In that circumfrence, a region of 4 billion light years spans (4/68 * 360 = 360/17 = ~ 21.17) or just over 21 degrees of arc. This is a little more than the arc of the sky that the sky moves in a period of an hour.
That is not to say that we are not observing gamma ray bursts in other directions at an approximate distance of 10 billion light years, just that there appears to be an unusually large number from within this region of space at that time.
You have asked a separate question, which is 'if aliens did the same measurement far away, would they see a sphere-like structure centered around us or them?' While I think it's a reasonable question, it does have an ambiguity, and based on my understanding of Einstein's general relativity law may not be such a reasonable question. The ambituity is 'far away', what is 'far away'? Accross the solar system, galaxy, or the visible limit of the universe?
However a thought experiment based on the question seems to me to be reasonable. Let's assume that some level of simultaniousness can exist. (which has problems I won't get into.) Let's presume that both the cluster of events we're seeing, and we, have a sphere 10 billion years in diamater centered on each of us. There should be a 'ring' where those two spheres intersect, that is 10 billion years from each of us. Take a point on that ring, and lets assume your aliens are there. That point would appear to us to be some 60 degrees across the sky from this cluster of events some 10 billion years ago. What would they see across the sky at a distance of some 10 billion light years? Well, we know they won't be seeing us for at least another 9.5+billion years. Additionally what we are seeing as an arc of approx 4 billion light years across is unlikely to be a perfect match for what they see at 10 billion light years, however we'll allow for the fact that they should see some variation of what we see. That said, a sphere some 4 billion light years across from the point in common 10 billion light years away from each of us, would still span an arc of approx 21 degrees for them, as it does for us. Based on the information I'm mentally working with, they are likely to see a cluster of gamma ray bursts from within this region as well. They are likely seeing a different appearance of the structure than we do, but they would be seeing it from a different angle anyway. They are unlikely to be able to perceive the events as a sphere around either of us, just as we do not perceive of this structure as a sphere around us, or anyone else at this time.
Does that help? (And if someone with a better understanding of cosmology than I have want's to pipe in with a correction, I'm OK with that.)
Get Poser, or something similar, and start replacing the face picks of all your contacts with pics of poser models asses selected for a best match to the contact's ass. Remember to find an appropriate image for companies and agencies. I'm thinking a Hydra would be appropriate for the NSA, Medusa for the FBI, Mantis for the CIA, etc.
Bonus points for doing r/g stereo of the images, or 3d if the phone supports that directly.
Good dependency management keeps track of such things for you over the long term as well. apt-get _will_ tell you of libraries that were installed in support of applications that you've since removed, and gives you the ability to remove those libraries as well with the auto-remove function. It does not automatically remove them with the application, which can leave cruft on your system, but has the advantage that if you've found the library handy for some program you're writing, but haven't explicitly toled the package management system that your app depends on it, you're not breaking your own application.
You are aware it it the British police saying this? You know, where the strictest of gun laws in the USA is orders of magnitude more permisive than what is allowed in England?
I was trying to keep it simple. I'm not an astrophysicist, don't have the references necessary handy, and so on. As far as the calculations being off, I'd far rather in this case have calculated on the low side than on the high side. If everyone keeps correcting me by pointing out that my calculations are low, it just supports the conclusion that we'll be even farther out there than people expected.
Essentially my statement is that when the sun 'goes' we may see the loss of the planet earth, and all that we've done and created on earth, but what we've created will provide evidence that we existed. Whether it's still recognizable, has useful information on finding out where it came from and where we were at the time is a different subject.
Personally I how that our descendants find a way to get enough of us off this rock, and out of this solar system before that happens, and in that case there will likely be graffiti spread through our solar system, and out into a good part of the galaxy noting our existence, but I'm not counting on it any more.
You may be right. Though 3k light years seems a bit far to me, even in 100 million years. But then no matter whether it's 40 light years, or 3k light years, what happens to our sun at that point is unlikely to have much of an impact on Voyager 1. In any case, the path Voyager takes is not going to be a straight line, even between galaxies should it be traveling that far.
If the supernova that this detector is designed to spot comes from within our galaxy, as they are looking for, then the star that exploded did so less than 100,000 years ago (approximately). That is well within the lifespan of our solar system.
Our sun is not likely to generate a supernova, as it has too little mass. Because there is no companion star in orbit of our sun, it is not even likely to go nova. The expectation is that several hundred million, or a billion or so years from now the sun will run out of hydrogen and switch to burning helium. At that time the energies involved will cause the sun to grow to become a red giant, which is likely to have consumed both Mercury and Venus, and possibly Terra as well. Once the energy of that process is released, (i.e. the sun runs out of Helium) the sun will collapse to a white dwarf, that will be about the size of the earth. It will continue to consume whatever remaining Hydrogen and Helium atoms are in it, but unless it collides with another star or star remnant, that's going to be the end of it's energy releasing days.
As to it destroying all traces of our existence, not so much. Even if everything in orbit and on the moon, and even the planet earth itself are destroyed, we have a lander on Titan that is likely to survive, several landers on Mars that may still be recognizable, and several interstellar missions that will still be moving. Voyager 1 is currently traveling at 17km/s, or 61,200km/h. (Which does exceed escape velocity for the sun.) While that speed will drop over time before the gravity of the sun is overcome by the gravity of other stars that will affect the flight path of Voyager 1, it is not expected to drop below 10km/s or 36,000km/h. At that speed it will travel 315,360,000 kilometers per year, a little over 1051 light seconds. (over 17 light minutes.) It will take over 1,800,000 years to travel a light year. In 100 million years it will be over 40 light years from the sun. While that may not be any great shakes as far as intergalactic distances go, it's definately far enough to avoid the effects of even a supernova if our sun were massive enough to go that route. It is possible that it will be destroyed by other stars going supernova in that time, or more likely later, but that is not a given. So even if we don't get off this rock, which I sincerely hope we can accomplish before we destroy ourselves, I expect that there will still be a trace of our existence in the universe.
Slashdot Mirror
It's that stupid raised piece, or notch to allow someone to move it with a finger or thumbnail. Logitech has the pattent on one, Radio Shack the other, or perhaps it's Acacia and Tessera, or... No Prenda was copyrights... and Apple refuses to license either. So Apple calls them ugly.
This is dependent on the computer, as not all computers have an external mic in socket, though there may be workarounds even for them.
Someone above pointed out that for some macbooks there is an ifixit explanation of how to replace the mic, where the suggestion was made to simply disconnect it, and don't put anything new in it's place. If you are worried about this voiding the warrantee here are a few other suggestions.
Check to see if plugging in an external mike capable headset into the audio jack/socket switches the audio in to the headset. If so, you should be able to use the mute switch on the headset to disable the mic by default. If the mic is only disabled if there is a connection from the mic ring on a 4 conductor jack to ground, and only if there is the appropriate resistance, you can make that connection through an appropriate valued resistor. This may need to be done on a cable that supports external speakers if you have a single audio plug that supports both audio out and audio in, presuming you want to hear the audio of your computer.
If you want to be able to make use of the mic on the laptop, you should be able to simply unplug that plug, and the computer (most modern computers in the past 10 years anyway) should switch back to the internal mic. Alternatively switch to a headset that has a mic from the cable that disables the mic. Or if your computer supports a bluetooth phone headset, you should be able to use that for audio.
Another alternative that may automatically disable the internal audio i/o is to plug a usb sound adapter into the computer, or a hub. (Or plug in a usb hub/doc that has audio capabilities.)
You could also plug in a white noise generator, or an mp3 player with a continuous loop of someone providing a boring recitation of the constitution. If the mic port is "available" you could tape an in-ear speaker to the port with one of those feeding it audio. The down side here is that it is possible to 'learn' what you are feeding it, and cancle it out, boost the gain on the rest to recover what people are saying near the computer. You may need to provide a randomized, or mixed feed that goes through a long period between repititions, but changes rapidly. You may need a good random number generator to drive that, but that's a different topic.
If none of those are workable options for you, I'm not sure what to suggest.
Does the computer (or can the computer) support a bluetooth headset?
Fix for the mic would be to either short to ground (tip) the mic lead of a headset plug, or if the macbook checks resistance link a 1k ohm reistor between tip and the mic lead, and make sure that the computer switches to using the external mic when you plug something in that provides a suitable resistance.
This could all be built within a 90 degree 3.5mm plug , or even a 2.5mm plug if necessary. It won't be quite flush with the side of the macbook, and if they use a common plug for speakers and mic, you may need to add a socket for headphones, or build this into a replacement plug for the headphones you prefer. You would likely need a 4 conductor plug for the mic ring.
Optionally pick up a usb sound adapter from a manufacturer in china, and make sure that the computer switches to that as the default audio i/o device, and never plug a mic into the adapter, or plug in a mic that's turned off.
If you want to be annoying to the people trying to listen, find a recording of someone reciting the constitution, and feed that into the mic in jack from an mp3 player on a continuous loop.
However due to the way that information is compartmentalized within the NSA, it is entirely possible that Snowden has more information than a senior NSA official may be aware that the NSA has. There is a wel known security policy that states that information should only be provided to eople on a need to know basis, and it is entirely possible that up to now the senior NSA official may not have had a need to know just how much data the NSA collects. For that matter, it is possible that the official may still not have a need to know, or never have it.
They wrote it in ASM, using bios calls on a per character basis. It's really tight code.
As long as you live in her basement, or it costs less to call you than call the manufacturer's tech support, you'll be your mother's first line tech support person. You know what to do about the first situation. The latter situation may just be an extension, except that she will save up tech support problems for your next visit. You do plan on stopping in for Dad's Birthday, right?
Not really, it was written in assembly.
What I find amazing is the apparent ignorance of what Amateur Radio Operators have to do to get their license in the first place, or what the limitations are. Yes, hams are involved in emergency communications, but that has as much to do with situation awareness as anything else.
If you are interested in getting into amateur radio, go for it. The barrier to entry for the technician license is to correctly answer 25 questions out of 35 questions out of a pool of about 350 questions, and a nominal fee of less han $20 per exam attempt. If'n you're an overachiever, for that same fee, and learning of a few more questions, you can walk out having passed all three exams.
Granted there are limitations that might affect a few readers, affecting people with felony convictions, and such. And there's the minor issue of buying equipment. Quite a bit of low cost equipment in the VHF/UHF showing up on the market over the past couple of years, as that's the range of frequencies that China is happy to let it's Amateur Operators use, since it is pretty much a line of sight set of frequencies. If you want longer range comms, you're going to want to look for other deals, unless you've got cash burning a hole in your wallet.
Considering the Nova episode 'making things faster' with David Pouge as the host presented this over a month ago, and they have production lead time delayse amounting to months, I'm with the people suggesting that this is a repeat. And hardly qualifies as 'news'.
That said, cool.
Also noted in the Nova episode was that the physical path that the fiber-optic route takes is going to be longer than the path that the microwave route takes.
If they are not doing it already, I would suspect that the next step will be to move the repeater electronics up to the microwave dishes at the intermediary locations. My experience with telcom is that this is usually housed in the shelter at the base of the towers, however if they can locate it with the dishes it will eliminate a path distance of at least twice the sum of the elevations of the dishes, divided by the velocity factor of the media they use to connect those, (roughly 1 for dry waveguide, and usually between .6 and .9 for different varieties of co-ax media.) It's not a lot, but if they are looking to eliminate every possible delay, that's got to be in their plans.
...at least in this day and age. The trick is to remember that any information that is recorded to any form of media, can be stolen, copied, or given away. If you want to maintain something in privacy, it can't leave your head. You can't write it down, or draw, or paint the idea. You can't make a tape of it or a video of it. You can't say it to your lover or spouse.
Of course that makes it incredibly difficult to act on what you maintain in privacy, but that is more of a problem of getting others to work with you in suport of that idea.
There is a presumption of privacy codified in law, however that presumption does not seem to be all that relavent to our current state of govornment or business, so you are pretty much stuck with what you can control. At the moment that's pretty much restricted to what's in your head.
No, I'm not much happy with that either.
As I read the comments, it looks like people are missing a bet on what the practice that the cariers are doing can provide.
People are noting that techincally competent people can easily bypass the restrictions, and others are noting that the vast majority of the public is not sufficiently technically competent to work around it.
I'm reminded a bit of the drug dealer situation in most places. It's trivially easy for most people to find a supplier for nearly any drug that someone has an interest in getting. Most people don't go looking for them for whatever reason, but it's not because they don't know where to go, or at least if they thought about it a bit they could figure it out. The same is likely to be true of media content.
So, user George doesn't know how to get around these filters, but it's likely that one of George's friends does, or one of George's friends knows someone who can. If this ever became a significant issue, I suspect that people would set up secure chat servers (or even a https based site) where they let their neighbors know they can request whatever movie they are interested in, and through a bot on the server they get back a link to the file already downloaded, or to the file being downloaded, and they can start watching. The link may be to a torrent proxy that goes and gets the bits of the files from other people offering the same sort of a service, and none of the people providing this service actually have copies of the files maintained on their systems either. (Yes, that somewhat defeats the purpose of a torrent, but the idea is to provide a service to end users, not necessarily be a good torrent netizen.) To reduce the likelyhood that the person providing the service is adversly affected, he or she may require that the 'customer' run a torrent proxy on their system that the load of torrent traffic gets distributed across. Better operators will do something like build their software package to prevent spam bots from running on the customer's computers. That may even be all that the customer is asking for from the service provider, and the torrent operation may be going on completely transparently to them.
I know, that seems complex. But from an end user perspective for the movies, it looks like I log into a secure web server, identify the movie I want to watch, and get a link to that movie. I click on that link, and I start watching the movie. Perhaps George texts or IMs a movie title to Bill, who texts back a URL that George then enters in their web browser, or even follows right on their phone or pc.
In time a network of providers of the service will exist, or several networks. It might be done through something like IRC, and the various providers will check to see who's closest to the end user and get a link close to them.
I'm going to echo that you need to know what the exam criteria are. There are exams that have the limitation that the only capabilities that your calculator is allowed to have are plus, minus, multiply and divide, which would eliminate all of the scientific capabilities listed through this thread. Often those exams don't really need a calculator at all, except to allow the person taking the test to feel that they can check the result that they got through other methods.
As for having the ability to use a slide rule, I've found that pretty much everything I need to do that I can use a slide rule for, can be handled just as fast using a basic four function calculator. An exception would be figuring out square roots, which on a four function calculator involves a lot of trial and error, and for a slide rule is essentially a single slide to solve.
Both are breakable, and neither functions very well as a defensive tool in situations where batteries are unavailable.
:%s/there/their/g
ZZ
Hey, considering that your phone is communicating your contact list through your cell phone carrier with Apple, Google or Microsoft (a couple of other possibilities of course, but pretty much all of them happening across your phone carrier data infrastructure) it's likely that your contact's pictures are already being indexed by the NSA.
It's there ass on the line when you call, or they call you.
If the bursts happened 10 billion years ago were common all over at that time, (as was asked by the ggp a/c) then the observations would be dirstributed much more randomly across the sky than observation indicates. Observation suggests that the large number of gama ray bursts that happened 10 billion years ago, appear to have happened across a region of space that is heavily weighted in one direction. A circle with a radius of 10 billion light years has a circumfrence of 2*pi*10 billion light years, or a bit over 68 billion light years. In that circumfrence, a region of 4 billion light years spans (4/68 * 360 = 360/17 = ~ 21.17) or just over 21 degrees of arc. This is a little more than the arc of the sky that the sky moves in a period of an hour.
That is not to say that we are not observing gamma ray bursts in other directions at an approximate distance of 10 billion light years, just that there appears to be an unusually large number from within this region of space at that time.
You have asked a separate question, which is 'if aliens did the same measurement far away, would they see a sphere-like structure centered around us or them?' While I think it's a reasonable question, it does have an ambiguity, and based on my understanding of Einstein's general relativity law may not be such a reasonable question. The ambituity is 'far away', what is 'far away'? Accross the solar system, galaxy, or the visible limit of the universe?
However a thought experiment based on the question seems to me to be reasonable. Let's assume that some level of simultaniousness can exist. (which has problems I won't get into.) Let's presume that both the cluster of events we're seeing, and we, have a sphere 10 billion years in diamater centered on each of us. There should be a 'ring' where those two spheres intersect, that is 10 billion years from each of us. Take a point on that ring, and lets assume your aliens are there. That point would appear to us to be some 60 degrees across the sky from this cluster of events some 10 billion years ago. What would they see across the sky at a distance of some 10 billion light years? Well, we know they won't be seeing us for at least another 9.5+billion years. Additionally what we are seeing as an arc of approx 4 billion light years across is unlikely to be a perfect match for what they see at 10 billion light years, however we'll allow for the fact that they should see some variation of what we see. That said, a sphere some 4 billion light years across from the point in common 10 billion light years away from each of us, would still span an arc of approx 21 degrees for them, as it does for us. Based on the information I'm mentally working with, they are likely to see a cluster of gamma ray bursts from within this region as well. They are likely seeing a different appearance of the structure than we do, but they would be seeing it from a different angle anyway. They are unlikely to be able to perceive the events as a sphere around either of us, just as we do not perceive of this structure as a sphere around us, or anyone else at this time.
Does that help? (And if someone with a better understanding of cosmology than I have want's to pipe in with a correction, I'm OK with that.)
The observation that we are not seeing them commonly appearing across the universe at a distance of some 10 billion light years.
Get Poser, or something similar, and start replacing the face picks of all your contacts with pics of poser models asses selected for a best match to the contact's ass. Remember to find an appropriate image for companies and agencies. I'm thinking a Hydra would be appropriate for the NSA, Medusa for the FBI, Mantis for the CIA, etc.
Bonus points for doing r/g stereo of the images, or 3d if the phone supports that directly.
Good dependency management keeps track of such things for you over the long term as well. apt-get _will_ tell you of libraries that were installed in support of applications that you've since removed, and gives you the ability to remove those libraries as well with the auto-remove function. It does not automatically remove them with the application, which can leave cruft on your system, but has the advantage that if you've found the library handy for some program you're writing, but haven't explicitly toled the package management system that your app depends on it, you're not breaking your own application.
You are aware it it the British police saying this? You know, where the strictest of gun laws in the USA is orders of magnitude more permisive than what is allowed in England?
I was trying to keep it simple. I'm not an astrophysicist, don't have the references necessary handy, and so on. As far as the calculations being off, I'd far rather in this case have calculated on the low side than on the high side. If everyone keeps correcting me by pointing out that my calculations are low, it just supports the conclusion that we'll be even farther out there than people expected.
Essentially my statement is that when the sun 'goes' we may see the loss of the planet earth, and all that we've done and created on earth, but what we've created will provide evidence that we existed. Whether it's still recognizable, has useful information on finding out where it came from and where we were at the time is a different subject.
Personally I how that our descendants find a way to get enough of us off this rock, and out of this solar system before that happens, and in that case there will likely be graffiti spread through our solar system, and out into a good part of the galaxy noting our existence, but I'm not counting on it any more.
You may be right. Though 3k light years seems a bit far to me, even in 100 million years. But then no matter whether it's 40 light years, or 3k light years, what happens to our sun at that point is unlikely to have much of an impact on Voyager 1. In any case, the path Voyager takes is not going to be a straight line, even between galaxies should it be traveling that far.
If the supernova that this detector is designed to spot comes from within our galaxy, as they are looking for, then the star that exploded did so less than 100,000 years ago (approximately). That is well within the lifespan of our solar system.
Our sun is not likely to generate a supernova, as it has too little mass. Because there is no companion star in orbit of our sun, it is not even likely to go nova. The expectation is that several hundred million, or a billion or so years from now the sun will run out of hydrogen and switch to burning helium. At that time the energies involved will cause the sun to grow to become a red giant, which is likely to have consumed both Mercury and Venus, and possibly Terra as well. Once the energy of that process is released, (i.e. the sun runs out of Helium) the sun will collapse to a white dwarf, that will be about the size of the earth. It will continue to consume whatever remaining Hydrogen and Helium atoms are in it, but unless it collides with another star or star remnant, that's going to be the end of it's energy releasing days.
As to it destroying all traces of our existence, not so much. Even if everything in orbit and on the moon, and even the planet earth itself are destroyed, we have a lander on Titan that is likely to survive, several landers on Mars that may still be recognizable, and several interstellar missions that will still be moving. Voyager 1 is currently traveling at 17km/s, or 61,200km/h. (Which does exceed escape velocity for the sun.) While that speed will drop over time before the gravity of the sun is overcome by the gravity of other stars that will affect the flight path of Voyager 1, it is not expected to drop below 10km/s or 36,000km/h. At that speed it will travel 315,360,000 kilometers per year, a little over 1051 light seconds. (over 17 light minutes.) It will take over 1,800,000 years to travel a light year. In 100 million years it will be over 40 light years from the sun. While that may not be any great shakes as far as intergalactic distances go, it's definately far enough to avoid the effects of even a supernova if our sun were massive enough to go that route. It is possible that it will be destroyed by other stars going supernova in that time, or more likely later, but that is not a given. So even if we don't get off this rock, which I sincerely hope we can accomplish before we destroy ourselves, I expect that there will still be a trace of our existence in the universe.
"Joe" from Tom Petty. Who needs lyrics when you can find a good looking girl who can play a guitar lick?