A terawatt signal radiating uniformly would produce 1e12 / (4*pi*(4e16)^2) w/m^2 = 5.0e-23 w/m^2. With a dish the size of Arecibo (7.3e4 m^2) that's -144 dBm (decibels referred to milliwatts). For comparison, the received GPS signal strength is ~ -133 dBm. With a slightly narrower bandwidth, or signal processing techniques that can work at lower SNR (eg looking for a carrier wave over extended periods -- exactly the sort of stuff SETI@home does) that extra order of magnitude isn't hard to come by.
Okay, so a civilization living around Proxima Centauri could plausibly hear our strongest signals. Two possibilities:
1) While intelligent and technologically advanced life isn't exactly uncommon, we aren't so lucky as to have a neighbor as close as 4.2 light years, and the closest is really more like 2,000 light years away, and just happens to be on the other side of a radio-wave inhibiting nebula.
2) There is a civilization around Proxima Centauri, but they no longer use radio waves of any significant wattage for transmission so we can't hear them, and The Untenable Contradiction of Fermitor the Merciless carries significant weight among their scientists, so they assume it's pointless to try to listen for us.:P
That's my biggest problem with Fermi's Paradox, which is that if you take it as an idea which should in some way guide your actions, then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you don't take it that way, but rather merely as a point of philosophical interest which shouldn't guide your actions, then you ignore it and keep running SETI.
Your attempt at being funny fails. The abbreviation "nm" has long been a standard for nautical miles, too.
We all know that. See, "nm" has two possible meanings, and he intentionally chose the one that lead to a ridiculous outcome instead of the one that was obviously intended. This is what is called in humor circles "a joke", and yes it was funny.
Of course the exchange rate itself doesn't mean anything.
However changes in the relative exchange rate do. This is what people mean when they talk about the "performance" of the dollar. It has nothing to do with a Euro being 1.5 U.S. dollars. It has a lot to do with it having been 1.6 or 1.4 dollars the month before.
I think the problem with the Parable of the Broken Window is that it encourages you to come away thinking that this is a "trick" which can be used to stimulate the economy, and that perhaps on that basis things like wars, death, and destruction are blessings in disguise, and perhaps should even be duplicated intentionally.
Yet the truth is that more or less everything that happened in the Parable would have still happened with the same benefit if the store owner in question had payed the same money to improve his store, rather than simply repair it. A new skylight, or replace an old window with insulating double-pane, and so forth. If you can imagine breaking a window on purpose to create the resulting economic stimulus, surely you can imagine doing something beneficial and non-destructive with the same effect.
So while it's true that the Parable shows how a seemingly economic negative can result in an overall positive, on the one hand that doesn't help the shop keeper who may not have been able to afford a window repair in the first place, and on the other that does not make the destructive event is truly positive, it simply means there's a silver lining. Should we find ourselves in another true Depression, starting World War III is not the way we should try to get out of it if you see what I mean.
I was just going by fatalities, which were about 400,000 for the U.S.
The actual deployed force was in the millions, yes, which certainly during the war meant there was an even bigger labor shortage and caused the biggest labor upset of the century by requiring women to enter the workforce.
I know what unconditional love is, I simply do not claim to love everyone unconditionally. You on the other hand have no idea what selfishness is. The problem with this country and the world are heartless bastards like the one who started this mess, and people like you who refuse to take a stand against them and say this is unacceptable. No, you're more concerned with the "hypocrites" who are intolerant of intolerance. You care more about your self perception as a non-hypocritical unconditionally compassionate and tolerant person than with the actual amount of compassion and tolerance in the world. Because you know what? Tolerating intolerance betrays an inherent lack of real compassion for the victims of intolerance. Thus you do them an injustice, while feeling morally superior for not being a hypocrite. That is true selfishness, and true hypocrisy.
Ah, I was incorrectly extrapolating from when California/Oregon were buying electricity from Texas a few years back that this implied it was actually electricity created in Texas.
Frankly I consider the Roadster a more likely success than the Volt, at least if they can survive long enough to start shipping cars in reasonable volume.
The Roadster costs $100,000 mostly because it stacks enough LiIon batteries to provide the current for a 0-60 time to rival any other sports car, and to give it a 250 mile range. $100k is not very expensive for a sports car. It blows away Ferraris in the same price range.
The Volt on the other hand is only a great idea if it gives you enough battery power to make your daily commute without using the gas engine. It is going to cost around $50,000 with only a 40 mile range, which I would wager has a lot to do with the fact that it has to be a more practical 5-person family sedan rather than a tiny 2-seater Lotus body, and has to have an ICE even though it's small, and thus weights a lot more. The Roadster's weight is pretty much entirely in the battery packs.
People already question whether or not a Prius is worth it economically, and at least perceived economy is a major reason people buy them. I don't see a family/commuter car costing twice as much to be a huge seller or game change. I'd love to be wrong, because I think the Volt -is- a fantastic idea, but it seriously has to come down in price to stand anything remotely resembling a chance.
The Roadster on the other hand seems to be just at the right price for what it is.
Neither will usher in an era of alternative vehicles as it stands, imo. I'm not sure that means either should be denied the title of "innovative", however.
Consider a similar situation: the government places orders for all sorts of war supplies. Tanks, planes, food, ammo, etc. They all get loaded up on trucks and trains and taken to sea ports. At the ports they are loaded onto cargo ships. Once full, the ships leave port, sail out to sea, and shove everything into the ocean.
And just for good measure, a large fraction of the ships themselves are also sunk.
Don't forget the part where they take a few hundred thousand young men onto those ships and shove them into the ocean as well... I'm sure that stimulated the economy... At least it fixed any unemployment problem we had...
I work for Honda and I don't want to see GM or Ford go belly up because it would hurt us as well as Toyota. We've already had to deal with numerous suppliers shutting down due to GM/Ford plant closures. A good portion of our suppliers built parts for multiple OEMs. When the bigger ones go belly up, the ripple is felt throughout the supply chain.
So I can understand the need for this kind of thing to maintain stability in our economy. It's similar in motivation to the bank bailout, and much as I don't like it, there is some logic there.
I don't see why that means that in the course of throwing billions to the Big 3, a small pittance couldn't be thrown to Tesla in the name of "encouraging alternative energy/transportation".
Seriously, if saving GM means Tesla has to croak, I think we screwed up.
So... not familiar with the environmental risks of LiIon batteries, eh? Hint: The whole battery pack is less of a "nightmare" than the 12V lead-acid battery your car contains as a mere auxiliary to the environmental problems it causes in normal operation.
Your idea is correct but PLEASE pick a better example to illustrate it with. Betamax was more expensive and had much shorter recording time per tape. For most consumers, these disadvantages very rationally trumped its higher video resolution.
Exactly. If VHS was DVD, then Betamax was BluRay only with half the capacity of DVD.
It's not so fungible that it isn't subject to transmission inefficiencies.
In other words it does matter where the electricity comes from. Because that hydro power in Washington isn't going to Maine under any circumstances, and when Washington has to get power from coal plants in Texas they pay out the nose for it.
5k/year for a hobby actually isn't too bad when it comes to hobbies.
Yeah compared to all possible hobbies. But it's quite a lot for a hobby that for someone only as nuts as the average MMO player costs under $200 a year.:P
No, I don't think he has a last name of Rasterman. I think that's his internet handle, and thus the connection between his name and 2D graphics is rather deliberate.:P
According to the Rasterman, when used with his updated illume stack and new Elementary widget set, E17 can now run in just 32MB of RAM, on an ARM9 processor clocked at 317MHz.
yeah but the scene from the future where he's interacting with present Peter? I mean that scene was fantastic. I really dont' care when shows copy other movies or shows, this is clearly a copy of The Fly or god knows whatever comic book storyline, but it's compelling to me due to the character interactions.
I'll give you that scene being awesome, sure. Which if I remember correctly happened before they showed all the scenes with Mohinder beating up the abusive husband and jumping around on the ceiling and so forth, which could be part of why I was dissapointed that what started as an obvious The Fly homage became a blatant ripoff. I mean I don't mind when a show takes ideas from others. The whole show is basically stealing from X-Men, which is cool, right up until someone with the power to have 3 metal claws sprout from their wrists fights someone with magnetic powers wearing a red and purple bucket on their head.
Oh well it's just one subplot. Sylar is still one of the best and most unique villians I've seen, and the rest of the show is good too.
I blame the writing weaknesses on it's own success. Which is to say, it's not so bad I mind. At this point, I can deal with everyone not being immediately witty and just seeing the seeds sown in the last two seasons come to bear some sort of fruit. Mohinder with powers that are transforming him into something weird? Hell yes!
So far I find this season to be vastly better than season 2 (which I think can be blamed mostly, but not entirely, on the writer's strike), and comparable to season 1, and I love what they're doing with Sylar and Peter.
Mohinder's story, though, is just way too "The Fly" for me. Let's see, first he tries his experimental research on himself, gains superior speed, agility, and climbing (even down to performing nearly identical gymnastics), becomes more manly and sexually aggressive, only then he begins to see weird changes including skin sloughing off, and becomes a danger to his love interest. I mean, the actor even looks a lot like Jeff Goldblum with the curly hair. Maybe it's an intentional nod, but it's just too blatant.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't know that.
No shit, I just said it was a possibility.
A terawatt signal radiating uniformly would produce 1e12 / (4*pi*(4e16)^2) w/m^2 = 5.0e-23 w/m^2. With a dish the size of Arecibo (7.3e4 m^2) that's -144 dBm (decibels referred to milliwatts). For comparison, the received GPS signal strength is ~ -133 dBm. With a slightly narrower bandwidth, or signal processing techniques that can work at lower SNR (eg looking for a carrier wave over extended periods -- exactly the sort of stuff SETI@home does) that extra order of magnitude isn't hard to come by.
Okay, so a civilization living around Proxima Centauri could plausibly hear our strongest signals. Two possibilities:
1) While intelligent and technologically advanced life isn't exactly uncommon, we aren't so lucky as to have a neighbor as close as 4.2 light years, and the closest is really more like 2,000 light years away, and just happens to be on the other side of a radio-wave inhibiting nebula.
2) There is a civilization around Proxima Centauri, but they no longer use radio waves of any significant wattage for transmission so we can't hear them, and The Untenable Contradiction of Fermitor the Merciless carries significant weight among their scientists, so they assume it's pointless to try to listen for us. :P
That's my biggest problem with Fermi's Paradox, which is that if you take it as an idea which should in some way guide your actions, then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you don't take it that way, but rather merely as a point of philosophical interest which shouldn't guide your actions, then you ignore it and keep running SETI.
Your attempt at being funny fails. The abbreviation "nm" has long been a standard for nautical miles, too.
We all know that. See, "nm" has two possible meanings, and he intentionally chose the one that lead to a ridiculous outcome instead of the one that was obviously intended. This is what is called in humor circles "a joke", and yes it was funny.
Yeah, but the West left most of their worst religious-nutball-inspired-violence behind hundreds of years ago. Muslims are still doing it.
Most but not all. I wouldn't want my religion being judged based on abortion clinic bombers.
It is fair to say that the Islamic world has a serious problem with violent extremists, a problem that must be addressed.
To mockingly say "Religion of Peace indeed", and imply that Muslims in general are engaging in violence, is not only unfair it's bigotry.
They aren't transparently substituted, unless you don't consider the cost.
Of course the exchange rate itself doesn't mean anything.
However changes in the relative exchange rate do. This is what people mean when they talk about the "performance" of the dollar. It has nothing to do with a Euro being 1.5 U.S. dollars. It has a lot to do with it having been 1.6 or 1.4 dollars the month before.
I think the problem with the Parable of the Broken Window is that it encourages you to come away thinking that this is a "trick" which can be used to stimulate the economy, and that perhaps on that basis things like wars, death, and destruction are blessings in disguise, and perhaps should even be duplicated intentionally.
Yet the truth is that more or less everything that happened in the Parable would have still happened with the same benefit if the store owner in question had payed the same money to improve his store, rather than simply repair it. A new skylight, or replace an old window with insulating double-pane, and so forth. If you can imagine breaking a window on purpose to create the resulting economic stimulus, surely you can imagine doing something beneficial and non-destructive with the same effect.
So while it's true that the Parable shows how a seemingly economic negative can result in an overall positive, on the one hand that doesn't help the shop keeper who may not have been able to afford a window repair in the first place, and on the other that does not make the destructive event is truly positive, it simply means there's a silver lining. Should we find ourselves in another true Depression, starting World War III is not the way we should try to get out of it if you see what I mean.
I was just going by fatalities, which were about 400,000 for the U.S.
The actual deployed force was in the millions, yes, which certainly during the war meant there was an even bigger labor shortage and caused the biggest labor upset of the century by requiring women to enter the workforce.
I know what unconditional love is, I simply do not claim to love everyone unconditionally. You on the other hand have no idea what selfishness is. The problem with this country and the world are heartless bastards like the one who started this mess, and people like you who refuse to take a stand against them and say this is unacceptable. No, you're more concerned with the "hypocrites" who are intolerant of intolerance. You care more about your self perception as a non-hypocritical unconditionally compassionate and tolerant person than with the actual amount of compassion and tolerance in the world. Because you know what? Tolerating intolerance betrays an inherent lack of real compassion for the victims of intolerance. Thus you do them an injustice, while feeling morally superior for not being a hypocrite. That is true selfishness, and true hypocrisy.
Ah, I was incorrectly extrapolating from when California/Oregon were buying electricity from Texas a few years back that this implied it was actually electricity created in Texas.
Hydro power isn't magic either. Using an electric car in Seattle will not cause any additional hydro power to be generated.
That is the correct argument against a Seattle Roadster being powered by hydro. Fungibility isn't.
Frankly I consider the Roadster a more likely success than the Volt, at least if they can survive long enough to start shipping cars in reasonable volume.
The Roadster costs $100,000 mostly because it stacks enough LiIon batteries to provide the current for a 0-60 time to rival any other sports car, and to give it a 250 mile range. $100k is not very expensive for a sports car. It blows away Ferraris in the same price range.
The Volt on the other hand is only a great idea if it gives you enough battery power to make your daily commute without using the gas engine. It is going to cost around $50,000 with only a 40 mile range, which I would wager has a lot to do with the fact that it has to be a more practical 5-person family sedan rather than a tiny 2-seater Lotus body, and has to have an ICE even though it's small, and thus weights a lot more. The Roadster's weight is pretty much entirely in the battery packs.
People already question whether or not a Prius is worth it economically, and at least perceived economy is a major reason people buy them. I don't see a family/commuter car costing twice as much to be a huge seller or game change. I'd love to be wrong, because I think the Volt -is- a fantastic idea, but it seriously has to come down in price to stand anything remotely resembling a chance.
The Roadster on the other hand seems to be just at the right price for what it is.
Neither will usher in an era of alternative vehicles as it stands, imo. I'm not sure that means either should be denied the title of "innovative", however.
That's fine, "fungible" still isn't a magic word and electricity is really not that fungible to begin with.
Consider a similar situation: the government places orders for all sorts of war supplies. Tanks, planes, food, ammo, etc. They all get loaded up on trucks and trains and taken to sea ports. At the ports they are loaded onto cargo ships. Once full, the ships leave port, sail out to sea, and shove everything into the ocean.
And just for good measure, a large fraction of the ships themselves are also sunk.
Don't forget the part where they take a few hundred thousand young men onto those ships and shove them into the ocean as well... I'm sure that stimulated the economy... At least it fixed any unemployment problem we had...
I work for Honda and I don't want to see GM or Ford go belly up because it would hurt us as well as Toyota. We've already had to deal with numerous suppliers shutting down due to GM/Ford plant closures. A good portion of our suppliers built parts for multiple OEMs. When the bigger ones go belly up, the ripple is felt throughout the supply chain.
So I can understand the need for this kind of thing to maintain stability in our economy. It's similar in motivation to the bank bailout, and much as I don't like it, there is some logic there.
I don't see why that means that in the course of throwing billions to the Big 3, a small pittance couldn't be thrown to Tesla in the name of "encouraging alternative energy/transportation".
Seriously, if saving GM means Tesla has to croak, I think we screwed up.
environmental nightmare
So... not familiar with the environmental risks of LiIon batteries, eh? Hint: The whole battery pack is less of a "nightmare" than the 12V lead-acid battery your car contains as a mere auxiliary to the environmental problems it causes in normal operation.
Your idea is correct but PLEASE pick a better example to illustrate it with. Betamax was more expensive and had much shorter recording time per tape. For most consumers, these disadvantages very rationally trumped its higher video resolution.
Exactly. If VHS was DVD, then Betamax was BluRay only with half the capacity of DVD.
Since electricity is a fungible commodity
It's not so fungible that it isn't subject to transmission inefficiencies.
In other words it does matter where the electricity comes from. Because that hydro power in Washington isn't going to Maine under any circumstances, and when Washington has to get power from coal plants in Texas they pay out the nose for it.
Edison himself who claimed he was dangerous and slightly insane
Edison only said that as long as Tesla was the competition.
Now if I only I could convince my shrink that I'm actually a genius...
I don't think that's a good idea until after the trial is over.
Just sayin, IANAL, this is not legal advice and so forth.
5k/year for a hobby actually isn't too bad when it comes to hobbies.
Yeah compared to all possible hobbies. But it's quite a lot for a hobby that for someone only as nuts as the average MMO player costs under $200 a year. :P
No, I don't think he has a last name of Rasterman. I think that's his internet handle, and thus the connection between his name and 2D graphics is rather deliberate. :P
According to the Rasterman, when used with his updated illume stack and new Elementary widget set, E17 can now run in just 32MB of RAM, on an ARM9 processor clocked at 317MHz.
Cool!
Next step: Running E17 and an application! =D
yeah but the scene from the future where he's interacting with present Peter? I mean that scene was fantastic. I really dont' care when shows copy other movies or shows, this is clearly a copy of The Fly or god knows whatever comic book storyline, but it's compelling to me due to the character interactions.
I'll give you that scene being awesome, sure. Which if I remember correctly happened before they showed all the scenes with Mohinder beating up the abusive husband and jumping around on the ceiling and so forth, which could be part of why I was dissapointed that what started as an obvious The Fly homage became a blatant ripoff. I mean I don't mind when a show takes ideas from others. The whole show is basically stealing from X-Men, which is cool, right up until someone with the power to have 3 metal claws sprout from their wrists fights someone with magnetic powers wearing a red and purple bucket on their head.
Oh well it's just one subplot. Sylar is still one of the best and most unique villians I've seen, and the rest of the show is good too.
I blame the writing weaknesses on it's own success. Which is to say, it's not so bad I mind. At this point, I can deal with everyone not being immediately witty and just seeing the seeds sown in the last two seasons come to bear some sort of fruit. Mohinder with powers that are transforming him into something weird? Hell yes!
So far I find this season to be vastly better than season 2 (which I think can be blamed mostly, but not entirely, on the writer's strike), and comparable to season 1, and I love what they're doing with Sylar and Peter.
Mohinder's story, though, is just way too "The Fly" for me. Let's see, first he tries his experimental research on himself, gains superior speed, agility, and climbing (even down to performing nearly identical gymnastics), becomes more manly and sexually aggressive, only then he begins to see weird changes including skin sloughing off, and becomes a danger to his love interest. I mean, the actor even looks a lot like Jeff Goldblum with the curly hair. Maybe it's an intentional nod, but it's just too blatant.