> ''dear MS, when will you learn what your users want?''
Microsoft doesn't design or market for the end users. That's neither here nor there for them.
Uptake of Microsoft products is determined mostly by OEMs and the CTOs of large corporations. THAT is who they design and market for. Every time you hear them say, "Our customers were asking for..." and you want to scream that a much larger number of people were asking for something different, stop and ask yourself, "but which of these things would a larger number of OEMs and large-corp CTOs be asking for?" That's who they listen to. That's who they design for. That's who they market for.
*shrug*. Most of the software that I use is driven by the features that *developers* want, which for the end users isn't really a lot better, though it's not really worse either, and it sure is better for advanced users such as myself.
I've seen Windows 7 RC1. It's a big, important upgrade that you won't want to be without, along the lines of XP SP2.
As for the "it should be a free upgrade to Vista" folks, meh. If you're operating on a budget, try reading some product reviews before you spend the bucks. You'll note that the 7 upgrade costs the same whether you're upgrading from Vista or from XP. XP is still under extended support for several more years, so there's no reason you can't wait and go straight from XP SP3 to 7 SP2 if you want. If you couldn't wait and just had to have Vista ad interim, that's your decision.
As for me, I still have several etch systems at work that I need to upgrade to lenny one of these months...
That's actually pretty clever. Show LOTR because people will actually want to watch it, and then once you get them inside watching television you can follow it up with a Star Wars marathon and then you gradually work your way down the quality meter until you've got them watching Jerry Lewis telethons and My Mother the Car. By then they'll be too lethargic and braindead to even remember to vote, much less want to bother. Problem solved.
In a company the size of the one you're in, the people who are hired to actually run the IT department, manage infrastructure, and so on, are people who have experience doing that sort of thing. Your experience doing helpdesk stuff doesn't put your resume at the top of the stack.
One solution is to take an IT position with a smaller employer, the kind of employer that only *has* one or two people in the IT department, total, and can't afford a person just for nothing but helpdesk. You'll still have to do helpdesk-type work, but you'll also have other duties, which will gain you other kinds of experience, which will build your resume. Also, having a variety of duties will help you retain your sanity, since you won't be banging your head against the same stupid wall all the time. If you do well in such a position, you could even end up being the head of the IT department when the former guy leaves, or, if the organization is small enough, you might actually hire in as the head of a one-man department, as I did several years ago.
There are employers out there who have a hard time filling IT positions, and in some cases they believe they would not be ABLE to hire an IT person at all, because they cannot afford to pay what a large corporation pays. Small public libraries, that aren't part of a larger system or consortium, are one really good example of this; at least half of all library "system administrators" are librarians with normal user-level computer skills who got roped into looking after the computers because there was nobody else. In a lot of cases it falls in the director's lap by default, and believe me, the director has Other Things To Do, so many of them would dearly love to hire an actual IT person. I doubt very much if libraries are the only industry where this happens.
Budgets are tight right now, so you can't expect to waltz into the first place that strikes your fancy and have a job there by next Tuesday, but if you float your resume around enough places, you may be able to find a place that will take a chance on you.
Once you have experience doing the kind of work you want to do (even if it's not been your whole job), you can put that experience on your resume and then try to work your way into larger employers where you can maybe focus more on just the kind of work you like, and possibly make more money doing it. Or you might find that you actually like the variety of duties and the atmosphere of a small employer; I have found it quite enjoyable myself.
> Most of their hyper-inflation apocalypse scenarios they state that gold > will be the new currency, but time and time again nations that have went > through hyper-inflation have reverted to bartering instead.
Sure, during the crisis people barter.
But gold also generally retains value. If you can manage to hold onto the gold through the crisis, it consistently comes out the other side with most of its value intact. Paper currency often loses its value when governments collapse; gold doesn't.
Gold is, of course, not the only thing that behaves this way. There are other precious metals (platinum, iridium, silver,...), not to mention gemstones, and foreign currencies will often fit the bill assuming the crisis is geographically contained (which is *usually* the case). When it became obvious that Germany was going to be losing WWII in the immediate future, the Deutch Mark lost its value, but Germans who were holding Pounds Sterling or Swiss Francs still had money.
Capital goods (that is, durable equipment needed to produce other goods; e.g., a refinery is a capital good) generally also retain most of their value if you can hold on to ownership of them, although historically you can't always rely on the new government to recognize your ownership, and capital goods tend to be difficult to transport on short notice if, say, you need to get across a border.
From a security perspective, the principle of defense in depth would suggest that investing in a variety of different value-holding prospects is more likely to leave you with something worth having after the crisis. If you have bank accounts in the US, Japan, Switzerland, and Norway, plus a bag of diamonds, an oil refinery, and a cruise ship, you probably won't end up with nothing unless there's either an extremely severe worldwide crisis, or something along the lines of a gunshot to your head.
> IIRC, this reason for this forced transition was to get > small rural communities to switch over to DTV.
There's rural and then there's rural.
When they were talking about getting "rural" communities to switch over to digital television broadcasting, I think they were mostly talking about stations serving small cities (between five thousand and fifty thousand people; a large percentage of the population resides in communities in that size range.) If you live in rural New Mexico, you probably think a city of thirty thousand people sounds pretty urban, but to somebody living in one of the big cities on the coast, that's "rural".
Areas that are *actually* rural, like yours, don't have very many television stations in the first place (you probably mostly get signal from repeaters) and also don't account for very much of the population.
> But more than 238,000,000 people do...so, yeah. The DTV switch is kinda important.
No, it's not important. It's popular, but that's not the same thing.
Even if 238,000,000,000,000,000 people watch it, it's still just television, a form of entertainment. If millions of people were to suddenly *stop* watching it, nothing terrible would happen as a result. Lots of people watch it, but it's not *important* that they watch it. It's just something they do because they're bored. If a whole bunch of them decided to do something else instead, there would be no dire consequences.
> Why should we care [whether people upgrade their ability to watch]? > It's only television.
Because, if people stop watching television, they might inadvertently start thinking for themselves. For a lot of elected government officials, that's a nightmare scenario.
> I don't think a pea-sized rock falls fast enough
That might depends on how dense it is. Meteorites aren't necessarily silicate. They can potentially be composed of nickel and tungsten and whatnot, which has a somewhat higher terminal velocity.
Also, it's theoretically possible for a meteorite to strike the ground before slowing down to terminal velocity, if it starts out going *really* fast. In such cases, it would be undergoing significant deceleration all the down, due to the atmospheric friction, which incidentally would also create significant heat and, depending on what its composition is, possibly cause significant erosion and/or vaporization of the material. In other words, it might not have been pea-sized when it first entered the atmosphere; that might be what was left of it by the time it hit the surface. This can also explain the flash: it might have been caused not by the part of the meteorite that made it to the ground, but by the part that didn't.
Just because the CEOs are friends doesn't *necessarily* preclude that the companies could be at odds from a business perspective. I'm not aware of any particular reason to think Apple pulled away from ZFS because of anything specifically to do with Sun, but if there _were_ a reason to believe that, I wouldn't dismiss it just because the CEOs are friends.
You have to at least run the water for a moment. People can hear that, even through a closed bathroom door, and they'll notice if you don't, and it grosses them out. So simple courtesy dictates that you at least turn on the sink for a few seconds while you zip up. Think of it as a basic social skill.
Ha. Now you get to wonder whether I'm completely serious.
Oh, you haven't noticed? When people are holding hands in a non-sexual context, like helping your kid cross the street safely or not get lost in a crowd, they hold hands handshake-style, with each person keeping their four fingers together. When people are holding hands in a sexual context, they generally interleave their fingers between those of the other person.
> For most companies, the browser is just a UI into various enterprise apps.
No, most companies who use the browser that way also use it to browse the web. *This* is what has to stop, because IE6 is not suitable for browsing the web. Not only does it not do a decent job with web standards, but also, more important to most companies, it is terribly insecure and no longer supported.
I don't mind if they keep using IE6 (or IE4 for that matter, what do I care) for their intranet enterprise stuff, but if the employees need to be able to use the web (which is an almost universal requirement these days), they're going to need to *also* have some other browser installed, for browsing the web.
Frankly, if they're not going to keep IE up to date on its security patches (which implies IE8 at this point), then IE should be locked down so that it can *only* access the intranet, for security reasons. And then when users need to access the world wide web -- which they will -- you just roll out another browser. So then you have two browsers: an enterprise-intranet browser, and a web browser. Problem solved.
Of course, Microsoft is not encouraging this, because they don't have an easy and effective way to install IE6 and IE8 side by side on the same system and configure them independently. IMO, that should be their top priority for IE9: allowing it to be installed on the same system as an earlier version of IE, and configured and run independently. It is particularly important that the security configurations be independent: IE6 needs to be able to be locked to only a whitelist of trusted sites, while IE9 can browse the whole web.
> Enterprises support IE because it runs ActiveX controls. Until FF does this
It's not 1998 anymore, dude. Everyone, including Microsoft, has finally caught on to the fact that if you're using a global public network like the internet, where you can't trust all the data the user's going to view, allowing stuff like ActiveX is doubleplusunwise.
Firefox isn't going to run ActiveX controls. IE is going to *stop* running ActiveX controls. They're phasing it out gradually through a long multi-version staged deprecation, but they *are* phasing it out. Even IE6 no longer downloads and installs unsigned controls by default like IE used to do in the Completely Stupid Days (back when Outlook automatically executed attached code when you previewed the message, remember that?). IE6 doesn't install them by default, and IE7 tightened things up further, and IE8 restricts ActiveX even more. In another couple of versions, ActiveX will be totally completely unsupported.
Okay, so a third-party agency now has to motivate kids to get their grades up?
Man, when I was a kid, your *parents* did that.
They had a variety of methods. Some parents offered money for As and Bs. Some parents *charged* money for Ds and Fs. Some did both. Some parents used other forms of positive encouragement and/or other penalties for failure. A lot of kids just sort of *assumed* their parents would be upset if they flunked, and labored to avoid finding out any further details. Others wanted their parents to be proud of them, and were willing to work for it.
What all of these things have in common is this: the kids all knew that their parents *cared* about their grades, *and* the kids all knew that they personally were considered to be responsible for said grades.
Our parents used to help us with our homework, too. Well, okay, most of the time all they really had to do was remind us that we actually had to sit down and do it, now, before we could go play. But parents *did* this. And they made it stick, too. I was there. I remember. I didn't *like* doing homework, but I did it anyway. I had to.
> Another concern I have is the 'Client Security Agent' that students are > required to install and leave on their systems to use the network.
I don't know for sure about the one at your particular college, so YMMV, but in a lot of cases, the enforcement mechanism for Client Security Agents is DHCP. If you don't have the CSA on your computer reporting that you're all up-to-date and virus free and so forth, the DHCP server won't lease you an IP address or tell you where the nameservers are.
Really. I'm not making this up.
This being a site for computer nerds, I'm not going to explain in detail why that approach won't actually keep anyone who knows what they're doing off the network, other than to note that DHCP is on completely the wrong layer of the OSI model for that.
I guess these security agents aren't necessarily *entirely* worthless (particularly if they're mostly intended to protect against the zombified PCs of users who aren't entirely sure whether Microsoft XP is their internet service provider or their modem and cannot resist installing the ActiveX controls needed to view the online greeting cards they got in their Hotmail from people claiming to be former classmates of theirs from schools they never attended). But I sure wouldn't want to run a network that used one of those things as its primary form of protection.
> I'm doing something very similar at home right now - running pfsense > in a vmware machine on a Windows XP host as my internet firewall.
Wait, so let me get this straight: you're running a Windows-based firewall, to protect your Linux system from the network? That's just so... backwards. Next you'll be telling me you use MySQL for heavy-duty enterprise-level database stuff and Oracle for a small web-2.0 database of dubious importance.
> We can't even communicate in any meaningful way with squids,...What in the world > makes us think that it would be any easier to communicate with extraterrestrials?
Same thing that makes us think there *are* extraterrestrials: science fiction.
Frankly, even if there *were* extraterrestrials, which I find highly unlikely, and even if we *could* figure out how to communicate with them, which is even more unlikely, there wouldn't be any point to it. No conversation that could ever be conducted with a dozens-of-years latency could possibly be good for anything but a heap of frustration. Imagine the fifth-century Saxons trying to discuss the weather with the Ryukyuans, multiply the difficulties ten thousandfold, and you haven't even scratched the surface yet.
Utterly futile and completely pointless. Even more worthless than SETI, which is going some.
Slashdot Mirror
> ''dear MS, when will you learn what your users want?''
Microsoft doesn't design or market for the end users. That's neither here nor there for them.
Uptake of Microsoft products is determined mostly by OEMs and the CTOs of large corporations. THAT is who they design and market for. Every time you hear them say, "Our customers were asking for..." and you want to scream that a much larger number of people were asking for something different, stop and ask yourself, "but which of these things would a larger number of OEMs and large-corp CTOs be asking for?" That's who they listen to. That's who they design for. That's who they market for.
*shrug*. Most of the software that I use is driven by the features that *developers* want, which for the end users isn't really a lot better, though it's not really worse either, and it sure is better for advanced users such as myself.
> > I thought Windows was freeware... None of the torrent sites ever asked for payment.
> Freeware or malware?
Outlook and Windows Media Player are Microsoft's main malware products.
I've seen Windows 7 RC1. It's a big, important upgrade that you won't want to be without, along the lines of XP SP2.
As for the "it should be a free upgrade to Vista" folks, meh. If you're operating on a budget, try reading some product reviews before you spend the bucks. You'll note that the 7 upgrade costs the same whether you're upgrading from Vista or from XP. XP is still under extended support for several more years, so there's no reason you can't wait and go straight from XP SP3 to 7 SP2 if you want. If you couldn't wait and just had to have Vista ad interim, that's your decision.
As for me, I still have several etch systems at work that I need to upgrade to lenny one of these months...
That's actually pretty clever. Show LOTR because people will actually want to watch it, and then once you get them inside watching television you can follow it up with a Star Wars marathon and then you gradually work your way down the quality meter until you've got them watching Jerry Lewis telethons and My Mother the Car. By then they'll be too lethargic and braindead to even remember to vote, much less want to bother. Problem solved.
I'm telling you, Han will have that shield down. We have to give him more time.
In a company the size of the one you're in, the people who are hired to actually run the IT department, manage infrastructure, and so on, are people who have experience doing that sort of thing. Your experience doing helpdesk stuff doesn't put your resume at the top of the stack.
One solution is to take an IT position with a smaller employer, the kind of employer that only *has* one or two people in the IT department, total, and can't afford a person just for nothing but helpdesk. You'll still have to do helpdesk-type work, but you'll also have other duties, which will gain you other kinds of experience, which will build your resume. Also, having a variety of duties will help you retain your sanity, since you won't be banging your head against the same stupid wall all the time. If you do well in such a position, you could even end up being the head of the IT department when the former guy leaves, or, if the organization is small enough, you might actually hire in as the head of a one-man department, as I did several years ago.
There are employers out there who have a hard time filling IT positions, and in some cases they believe they would not be ABLE to hire an IT person at all, because they cannot afford to pay what a large corporation pays. Small public libraries, that aren't part of a larger system or consortium, are one really good example of this; at least half of all library "system administrators" are librarians with normal user-level computer skills who got roped into looking after the computers because there was nobody else. In a lot of cases it falls in the director's lap by default, and believe me, the director has Other Things To Do, so many of them would dearly love to hire an actual IT person. I doubt very much if libraries are the only industry where this happens.
Budgets are tight right now, so you can't expect to waltz into the first place that strikes your fancy and have a job there by next Tuesday, but if you float your resume around enough places, you may be able to find a place that will take a chance on you.
Once you have experience doing the kind of work you want to do (even if it's not been your whole job), you can put that experience on your resume and then try to work your way into larger employers where you can maybe focus more on just the kind of work you like, and possibly make more money doing it. Or you might find that you actually like the variety of duties and the atmosphere of a small employer; I have found it quite enjoyable myself.
> Most of their hyper-inflation apocalypse scenarios they state that gold
...), not to mention gemstones, and foreign currencies will often fit the bill assuming the crisis is geographically contained (which is *usually* the case). When it became obvious that Germany was going to be losing WWII in the immediate future, the Deutch Mark lost its value, but Germans who were holding Pounds Sterling or Swiss Francs still had money.
> will be the new currency, but time and time again nations that have went
> through hyper-inflation have reverted to bartering instead.
Sure, during the crisis people barter.
But gold also generally retains value. If you can manage to hold onto the gold through the crisis, it consistently comes out the other side with most of its value intact. Paper currency often loses its value when governments collapse; gold doesn't.
Gold is, of course, not the only thing that behaves this way. There are other precious metals (platinum, iridium, silver,
Capital goods (that is, durable equipment needed to produce other goods; e.g., a refinery is a capital good) generally also retain most of their value if you can hold on to ownership of them, although historically you can't always rely on the new government to recognize your ownership, and capital goods tend to be difficult to transport on short notice if, say, you need to get across a border.
From a security perspective, the principle of defense in depth would suggest that investing in a variety of different value-holding prospects is more likely to leave you with something worth having after the crisis. If you have bank accounts in the US, Japan, Switzerland, and Norway, plus a bag of diamonds, an oil refinery, and a cruise ship, you probably won't end up with nothing unless there's either an extremely severe worldwide crisis, or something along the lines of a gunshot to your head.
But, you know, acrylic is such a major component of man's natural environment...
Personally, I think fingerprints exist for the purpose of identification. It's such an obvious use, it must have been intended.
> IIRC, this reason for this forced transition was to get
> small rural communities to switch over to DTV.
There's rural and then there's rural.
When they were talking about getting "rural" communities to switch over to digital television broadcasting, I think they were mostly talking about stations serving small cities (between five thousand and fifty thousand people; a large percentage of the population resides in communities in that size range.) If you live in rural New Mexico, you probably think a city of thirty thousand people sounds pretty urban, but to somebody living in one of the big cities on the coast, that's "rural".
Areas that are *actually* rural, like yours, don't have very many television stations in the first place (you probably mostly get signal from repeaters) and also don't account for very much of the population.
> But more than 238,000,000 people do...so, yeah. The DTV switch is kinda important.
No, it's not important. It's popular, but that's not the same thing.
Even if 238,000,000,000,000,000 people watch it, it's still just television, a form of entertainment. If millions of people were to suddenly *stop* watching it, nothing terrible would happen as a result. Lots of people watch it, but it's not *important* that they watch it. It's just something they do because they're bored. If a whole bunch of them decided to do something else instead, there would be no dire consequences.
> Why should we care [whether people upgrade their ability to watch]?
> It's only television.
Because, if people stop watching television, they might inadvertently start thinking for themselves. For a lot of elected government officials, that's a nightmare scenario.
> One of my two very old TVs has a converter box...
> My other TV is an early 1990s model
Wait, so you have three TVs altogether?
> These actually can be quite interesting to browse --
> the Russian take on the Iranian election was kind of interesting.
Ugh. I don't even like watching election coverage from my own country.
> Never leave default passwords is Rule #1. Or at least in the top 3.
Actually, I think it's a corollary to Rule #2, "Only grant access to the people who actually need to have it." HTH.HAND.
> I don't think a pea-sized rock falls fast enough
That might depends on how dense it is. Meteorites aren't necessarily silicate. They can potentially be composed of nickel and tungsten and whatnot, which has a somewhat higher terminal velocity.
Also, it's theoretically possible for a meteorite to strike the ground before slowing down to terminal velocity, if it starts out going *really* fast. In such cases, it would be undergoing significant deceleration all the down, due to the atmospheric friction, which incidentally would also create significant heat and, depending on what its composition is, possibly cause significant erosion and/or vaporization of the material. In other words, it might not have been pea-sized when it first entered the atmosphere; that might be what was left of it by the time it hit the surface. This can also explain the flash: it might have been caused not by the part of the meteorite that made it to the ground, but by the part that didn't.
Well, duh. The nasal lining isn't designed to be immersed in alcohol.
Just because the CEOs are friends doesn't *necessarily* preclude that the companies could be at odds from a business perspective. I'm not aware of any particular reason to think Apple pulled away from ZFS because of anything specifically to do with Sun, but if there _were_ a reason to believe that, I wouldn't dismiss it just because the CEOs are friends.
> Because lots of men don't wash their hands
You have to at least run the water for a moment. People can hear that, even through a closed bathroom door, and they'll notice if you don't, and it grosses them out. So simple courtesy dictates that you at least turn on the sink for a few seconds while you zip up. Think of it as a basic social skill.
Ha. Now you get to wonder whether I'm completely serious.
Oh, you haven't noticed? When people are holding hands in a non-sexual context, like helping your kid cross the street safely or not get lost in a crowd, they hold hands handshake-style, with each person keeping their four fingers together. When people are holding hands in a sexual context, they generally interleave their fingers between those of the other person.
> For most companies, the browser is just a UI into various enterprise apps.
No, most companies who use the browser that way also use it to browse the web. *This* is what has to stop, because IE6 is not suitable for browsing the web. Not only does it not do a decent job with web standards, but also, more important to most companies, it is terribly insecure and no longer supported.
I don't mind if they keep using IE6 (or IE4 for that matter, what do I care) for their intranet enterprise stuff, but if the employees need to be able to use the web (which is an almost universal requirement these days), they're going to need to *also* have some other browser installed, for browsing the web.
Frankly, if they're not going to keep IE up to date on its security patches (which implies IE8 at this point), then IE should be locked down so that it can *only* access the intranet, for security reasons. And then when users need to access the world wide web -- which they will -- you just roll out another browser. So then you have two browsers: an enterprise-intranet browser, and a web browser. Problem solved.
Of course, Microsoft is not encouraging this, because they don't have an easy and effective way to install IE6 and IE8 side by side on the same system and configure them independently. IMO, that should be their top priority for IE9: allowing it to be installed on the same system as an earlier version of IE, and configured and run independently. It is particularly important that the security configurations be independent: IE6 needs to be able to be locked to only a whitelist of trusted sites, while IE9 can browse the whole web.
> Enterprises support IE because it runs ActiveX controls. Until FF does this
It's not 1998 anymore, dude. Everyone, including Microsoft, has finally caught on to the fact that if you're using a global public network like the internet, where you can't trust all the data the user's going to view, allowing stuff like ActiveX is doubleplusunwise.
Firefox isn't going to run ActiveX controls. IE is going to *stop* running ActiveX controls. They're phasing it out gradually through a long multi-version staged deprecation, but they *are* phasing it out. Even IE6 no longer downloads and installs unsigned controls by default like IE used to do in the Completely Stupid Days (back when Outlook automatically executed attached code when you previewed the message, remember that?). IE6 doesn't install them by default, and IE7 tightened things up further, and IE8 restricts ActiveX even more. In another couple of versions, ActiveX will be totally completely unsupported.
Okay, so a third-party agency now has to motivate kids to get their grades up?
Man, when I was a kid, your *parents* did that.
They had a variety of methods. Some parents offered money for As and Bs. Some parents *charged* money for Ds and Fs. Some did both. Some parents used other forms of positive encouragement and/or other penalties for failure. A lot of kids just sort of *assumed* their parents would be upset if they flunked, and labored to avoid finding out any further details. Others wanted their parents to be proud of them, and were willing to work for it.
What all of these things have in common is this: the kids all knew that their parents *cared* about their grades, *and* the kids all knew that they personally were considered to be responsible for said grades.
Our parents used to help us with our homework, too. Well, okay, most of the time all they really had to do was remind us that we actually had to sit down and do it, now, before we could go play. But parents *did* this. And they made it stick, too. I was there. I remember. I didn't *like* doing homework, but I did it anyway. I had to.
What has happened to our culture? It's broken.
> Another concern I have is the 'Client Security Agent' that students are
> required to install and leave on their systems to use the network.
I don't know for sure about the one at your particular college, so YMMV, but in a lot of cases, the enforcement mechanism for Client Security Agents is DHCP. If you don't have the CSA on your computer reporting that you're all up-to-date and virus free and so forth, the DHCP server won't lease you an IP address or tell you where the nameservers are.
Really. I'm not making this up.
This being a site for computer nerds, I'm not going to explain in detail why that approach won't actually keep anyone who knows what they're doing off the network, other than to note that DHCP is on completely the wrong layer of the OSI model for that.
I guess these security agents aren't necessarily *entirely* worthless (particularly if they're mostly intended to protect against the zombified PCs of users who aren't entirely sure whether Microsoft XP is their internet service provider or their modem and cannot resist installing the ActiveX controls needed to view the online greeting cards they got in their Hotmail from people claiming to be former classmates of theirs from schools they never attended). But I sure wouldn't want to run a network that used one of those things as its primary form of protection.
> I'm doing something very similar at home right now - running pfsense
> in a vmware machine on a Windows XP host as my internet firewall.
Wait, so let me get this straight: you're running a Windows-based firewall, to protect your Linux system from the network? That's just so... backwards. Next you'll be telling me you use MySQL for heavy-duty enterprise-level database stuff and Oracle for a small web-2.0 database of dubious importance.
> We can't even communicate in any meaningful way with squids, ...What in the world
> makes us think that it would be any easier to communicate with extraterrestrials?
Same thing that makes us think there *are* extraterrestrials: science fiction.
Frankly, even if there *were* extraterrestrials, which I find highly unlikely, and even if we *could* figure out how to communicate with them, which is even more unlikely, there wouldn't be any point to it. No conversation that could ever be conducted with a dozens-of-years latency could possibly be good for anything but a heap of frustration. Imagine the fifth-century Saxons trying to discuss the weather with the Ryukyuans, multiply the difficulties ten thousandfold, and you haven't even scratched the surface yet.
Utterly futile and completely pointless. Even more worthless than SETI, which is going some.