Suppose the aliens evolved on the dark side of a tidally locked planet and are busy braodcasting light signals at us?
More seriously though it's about timing. The longest a human civilisation has survived is a few thousand years. Assume the aliens broadcast "hello universe" for a few thousand years, what are the chances of SETI listening at the same time their broadcast reaches us? If the earth hadn't been hit by a random event 65 million years ago, SETI would be not be here now. SETI may have happened thousands or millions of years ago or may be millions of years on the future.
I suppose this is what one would expect from anyone with "open source space travel" in their sig. We are nowhere near approaching a "post scarcity society", go to Africa or India and tell the significant proportion of the earth's populaton that live in poverty that we are approaching a "post scarcity society"!
On the 3D printing front, gimme one that prints steel, aluminium alloys, etc. with the structural integrity of their conventially produced equivalents (i.e. not sintered) and I'll start to take this discussion seriously.
20km says most of what you need. How much fuel do you need to carry with reserves to go 20km into even a light (5-10 knot) head wind - answer, a lot. A lot of fuel means a big drone, I guess in most countries flying things over a certain size may be regulated...
Probably because of timing. We just assume that our civilisation will go on for ever, but our own history shows that all civilisations die out in only a few thousand years. Given that if an asteroid hadn't randomly hit earth 65 million years ago a species that developed radio could have evolved any time between 65 million year ago and anytime in the future. There is no reason to suppose that there is any species in the galaxy whose evolution and scientific development is coincident with ours.
A woman in a hot air balloon realised she was lost... She reduced altitude and spotted a man below. She descended a bit more and shouted: 'Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago but I don't know where I am.' The man below replied, 'You're in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You're between 52 and 53 degrees north latitude and between 1 and 2 degrees west longitude.' 'You must be an Engineer,' said the balloonist. 'I am,' replied the man, 'how did you know?' 'Well,' answered the balloonist, 'everything you have told me is probably technically correct, but I've no idea what to make of your information and the fact is, I'm still lost. Frankly, you've not been much help at all. If anything, you've delayed my trip and wasted my time.'
The man below responded, 'You must be in Management.' 'I am,' replied the balloonist, 'but how did you know?' 'Well,' said the man, 'you don't know where you are or where you're going. You have risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise which you've no idea how to keep and you expect people beneath you to solve your problems. The fact is you are in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow, it's my fault.
That's how it will stimulate the economy. Loads of consultancies will frighten companies into upgrading their systems to cope with the change. CIO's of said companies have nothing to loose in getting the board to reduce profits for a year or two and invest in IT infrastructure...
That said it would be a bit easier from a psycological point of view if they just didn't put the clocks back in the autumn, rather than adding 2 hours in spring
The risk the risk of collision through inattention may be lowered, but what happens when one car has a blow-out or mechanical failure. Some people drive too close but no as close as these road trains would!
But then again I think of it as a bit like wine-tasting. Tasting as many langauges as possible gives me the ability to identify what goes best with what, how do I know if a task is more suited to Perl than assembler - only because I have used both. That said there has to be limits, if I have been using Java exclusively for a few months, it may be a lot quicker for me do some data mangling in Java even though it may require 10x as many lines of code the equivalent Perl (simply because I'll have to switch my brain into Perl mode, which at my great age is a sloooowwww process).
So I still like to use as many languages as I can and I regularly use (i.e. write production apps/utilities in) about 3 or 4. Sometimes taking the time to look at the little langauges gives me a head start on what will come out in the more mainstream langauges in a year or two.
Surely then there is a huge amount of energy required to create the extra 3 DeLoreans? If they all exist somewhere in the time line when they didn't before, since E=mc^2 you need a huge amount of energy to conjure the extra mass into being
It's not hubris, it is our second-law-of-thermodynamics destiny. It is why we exist.
The sun is busy doing it's thing, chucking heat out all over the universe, except for this one little annoying planet that is covered in plants and trees. The damn things keep capturing the carbon and eventually store it as fossil fuels, all that energy locked up and unable to escape.
The gods of thermodyanics want an earlier return on their investment, so we evolve to burn the fuel, chop down the trees and generally put back as entropy what was rightly universal entropy before those pesky trees got in the way.
Have you thought about it in terms of property? If you think of land, it is often leased. The lessor pays for the use of the land, possibly even improving it in some way, but at the end of their lease they have no money and no land (except any profit they made from the use of the land).
For commercial artists, copyright provides a similar transaction - I write a song, you sing my song and earn money from it, when you stop singing my song you have what ever profit you made I still have my song.
What seems to vex people is having to pay a copyright holder for non-commercial use, and indeed most copyright laws allow for things like educational copying but they do not provide for other forms of non-commercial use.
May be a solution to this is that the rights holder gets either a percentage of profits (hard to enforce) or a much bigger fee for each performance, but we get the the right to copy for non-commercial use. Of course we would then pay more to go to gigs and bars playing music, sports, etc. but the choice is there.
Any solution like this means deploying execuatbles to user client machines. I've worked in many organisations where this is simply not possible. Things like batch and (as I suggested above) and Excel macro - assuming office is installed - are sometimes the only viable option.
In fact I once worked somewhere where everything was locked down so tight that it was impossible to even email an executable into the organisation. I REALLY needed to get a little exe on to a machine on that network, so I wrote a base64 decoder in Excel-VBA, encoded the exe, emailed it in and used the Excel decoder to decode it so that I could run it.
Bound to get shouted down on here but use an Excel macro (assuming your users have office installed). I know it may feel abit wierd but it gives you a shed load of stuff (saving, loading, etc) for free, the users know how to use it, you have no executables to deploy - just put the file/template in a shared folder and the macro language is pretty much VB.
You can even use a VBA macro to call a batch file, so anything you can't do with VBA, can be in a batch file with a VBA front end.
Software also originates from a different branch of human endeavour; it tends to come from people with a Scientific/Engineering background. People in these fields are used to sharing ideas - publishing papers and the like, and it is small step from publishing a new algorithm in an academic journal to publishing the software that implements that algorithm.
People in these fields recognise that ideas are relatively cheap and need to be tested by peer review (in a way that’s what we are doing now on this forum) and that as well as the kudos of contributing to the greater good, improved employment prospects (and a more fun life) can come from being an expert in a field, and one way of demonstrating expertise is to publish..
As the parent says, a work of art is the end point, it is similar in that it needs to be published, but it is not a means to an end, it is the end itself.
People seem to love to dream up ever more convoluted ways for terrorists to attack. The reality is that the simpler the approach, the more likely the success. We keep being told about these bogie men with missiles and nuclear material, what we see in reality is a guy with an ass full of TNT or a mobile phone triggered bomb.
When you have people willing to die for the cause why go for anything more? I say it's vapourware and the next N terrorist attacks will be suicide bombings and hijackings. They have got the airports disrupted to a ridiculous degree, why give up on hat now?
Oh come off it. I've been building radio gear since I was 8 years old. I didn't even know "the math" existed.
Get a plan for a simple radio (I suggested a crystal set above) and just build it. Be impressed by you achivement, build something else (e.g. test gear). Start to wonder how it works, build something else, build some more, when they don't work, start to find out what the components do and fault find - that's where the real learning starts
Build a crystal set. It's simple and magic. With only a diode, inductor (coil), tuning capacitor and head phones you get real radio. You can build one with just a hammer and nails on a piece of wood (or you can be more sophisticated if you want and use screws or even do soldering, it's up to you).
If you want to build wireless equipment it is a good learing curve about what is important - i.e. capacitance, inductance and the antenna (all them transistors etc are just added extras).
Google and you will turn up loads of free on line designs for crystal sets. Remember if it doesn't work first time, keep trying. Building analogue Radio gear can require much more skill and accuracy than simple digital stuff.
For some strange definition of BIG. I am sat in a room full of programmers, like many others in the world. We will spend 8+ hours a day 5 days a week writing apps, not a robot in sight. When I get time at home I wirte some embedded stuff for fun (I hope you would include this in the definition of "robot"). So this year I have probably done several thousand lines of app code in Java and less than 100 lines in C for embedded.
Now I am far from average, because I am the only person I know of here (out of ~40 programmers) that does any embedded at all..Quite a few people here do PHP in their spare time for friends and profit.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like Vanity Fair is going to drip feed us this stuff for a while... does it add anything we didn't already know?
Suppose the aliens evolved on the dark side of a tidally locked planet and are busy braodcasting light signals at us?
More seriously though it's about timing. The longest a human civilisation has survived is a few thousand years. Assume the aliens broadcast "hello universe" for a few thousand years, what are the chances of SETI listening at the same time their broadcast reaches us? If the earth hadn't been hit by a random event 65 million years ago, SETI would be not be here now. SETI may have happened thousands or millions of years ago or may be millions of years on the future.
I suppose this is what one would expect from anyone with "open source space travel" in their sig. We are nowhere near approaching a "post scarcity society", go to Africa or India and tell the significant proportion of the earth's populaton that live in poverty that we are approaching a "post scarcity society"!
On the 3D printing front, gimme one that prints steel, aluminium alloys, etc. with the structural integrity of their conventially produced equivalents (i.e. not sintered) and I'll start to take this discussion seriously.
20km says most of what you need. How much fuel do you need to carry with reserves to go 20km into even a light (5-10 knot) head wind - answer, a lot. A lot of fuel means a big drone, I guess in most countries flying things over a certain size may be regulated...
Damn, just used up my mod points otherwise I would have modded you up.
Probably because of timing. We just assume that our civilisation will go on for ever, but our own history shows that all civilisations die out in only a few thousand years. Given that if an asteroid hadn't randomly hit earth 65 million years ago a species that developed radio could have evolved any time between 65 million year ago and anytime in the future. There is no reason to suppose that there is any species in the galaxy whose evolution and scientific development is coincident with ours.
You're hired
Nice try at the sig, although I think you have prepended an extra "To be" to the quote.
I think it was George Bernard Shaw who said something like:
The wise man adapts himself to the world but the fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the fool.
A woman in a hot air balloon realised she was lost...
She reduced altitude and spotted a man below. She descended a bit
more and shouted:
'Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an
hour ago but I don't know where I am.'
The man below replied, 'You're in a hot air balloon hovering
approximately 30 feet above the ground. You're between 52 and 53
degrees north latitude and between 1 and 2 degrees west longitude.'
'You must be an Engineer,' said the balloonist.
'I am,' replied the man, 'how did you know?'
'Well,' answered the balloonist, 'everything you have told me is probably
technically correct, but I've no idea what to make of your information
and the fact is, I'm still lost. Frankly, you've not been much help at all. If
anything, you've delayed my trip and wasted my time.'
The man below responded, 'You must be in Management.'
'I am,' replied the balloonist, 'but how did you know?'
'Well,' said the man, 'you don't know where you are or where you're
going. You have risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot
air. You made a promise which you've no idea how to keep and you
expect people beneath you to solve your problems. The fact is you are
in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but now,
somehow, it's my fault.
That's how it will stimulate the economy. Loads of consultancies will frighten companies into upgrading their systems to cope with the change. CIO's of said companies have nothing to loose in getting the board to reduce profits for a year or two and invest in IT infrastructure...
That said it would be a bit easier from a psycological point of view if they just didn't put the clocks back in the autumn, rather than adding 2 hours in spring
The risk the risk of collision through inattention may be lowered, but what happens when one car has a blow-out or mechanical failure. Some people drive too close but no as close as these road trains would!
But then again I think of it as a bit like wine-tasting. Tasting as many langauges as possible gives me the ability to identify what goes best with what, how do I know if a task is more suited to Perl than assembler - only because I have used both. That said there has to be limits, if I have been using Java exclusively for a few months, it may be a lot quicker for me do some data mangling in Java even though it may require 10x as many lines of code the equivalent Perl (simply because I'll have to switch my brain into Perl mode, which at my great age is a sloooowwww process).
So I still like to use as many languages as I can and I regularly use (i.e. write production apps/utilities in) about 3 or 4. Sometimes taking the time to look at the little langauges gives me a head start on what will come out in the more mainstream langauges in a year or two.
Mod the parent up. I'd done agile within Waterfall for about a decade before 2001.
Surely then there is a huge amount of energy required to create the extra 3 DeLoreans? If they all exist somewhere in the time line when they didn't before, since E=mc^2 you need a huge amount of energy to conjure the extra mass into being
Just make yourself one of these
www.norcalqrp.org/files/Epiphyte3Mnl.pdf
It's not hubris, it is our second-law-of-thermodynamics destiny. It is why we exist.
The sun is busy doing it's thing, chucking heat out all over the universe, except for this one little annoying planet that is covered in plants and trees. The damn things keep capturing the carbon and eventually store it as fossil fuels, all that energy locked up and unable to escape.
The gods of thermodyanics want an earlier return on their investment, so we evolve to burn the fuel, chop down the trees and generally put back as entropy what was rightly universal entropy before those pesky trees got in the way.
Have you thought about it in terms of property? If you think of land, it is often leased. The lessor pays for the use of the land, possibly even improving it in some way, but at the end of their lease they have no money and no land (except any profit they made from the use of the land).
For commercial artists, copyright provides a similar transaction - I write a song, you sing my song and earn money from it, when you stop singing my song you have what ever profit you made I still have my song.
What seems to vex people is having to pay a copyright holder for non-commercial use, and indeed most copyright laws allow for things like educational copying but they do not provide for other forms of non-commercial use.
May be a solution to this is that the rights holder gets either a percentage of profits (hard to enforce) or a much bigger fee for each performance, but we get the the right to copy for non-commercial use. Of course we would then pay more to go to gigs and bars playing music, sports, etc. but the choice is there.
Any solution like this means deploying execuatbles to user client machines. I've worked in many organisations where this is simply not possible. Things like batch and (as I suggested above) and Excel macro - assuming office is installed - are sometimes the only viable option.
In fact I once worked somewhere where everything was locked down so tight that it was impossible to even email an executable into the organisation. I REALLY needed to get a little exe on to a machine on that network, so I wrote a base64 decoder in Excel-VBA, encoded the exe, emailed it in and used the Excel decoder to decode it so that I could run it.
Bound to get shouted down on here but use an Excel macro (assuming your users have office installed). I know it may feel abit wierd but it gives you a shed load of stuff (saving, loading, etc) for free, the users know how to use it, you have no executables to deploy - just put the file/template in a shared folder and the macro language is pretty much VB.
You can even use a VBA macro to call a batch file, so anything you can't do with VBA, can be in a batch file with a VBA front end.
Software also originates from a different branch of human endeavour; it tends to come from people with a Scientific/Engineering background. People in these fields are used to sharing ideas - publishing papers and the like, and it is small step from publishing a new algorithm in an academic journal to publishing the software that implements that algorithm.
People in these fields recognise that ideas are relatively cheap and need to be tested by peer review (in a way that’s what we are doing now on this forum) and that as well as the kudos of contributing to the greater good, improved employment prospects (and a more fun life) can come from being an expert in a field, and one way of demonstrating expertise is to publish..
As the parent says, a work of art is the end point, it is similar in that it needs to be published, but it is not a means to an end, it is the end itself.
People seem to love to dream up ever more convoluted ways for terrorists to attack. The reality is that the simpler the approach, the more likely the success. We keep being told about these bogie men with missiles and nuclear material, what we see in reality is a guy with an ass full of TNT or a mobile phone triggered bomb.
When you have people willing to die for the cause why go for anything more? I say it's vapourware and the next N terrorist attacks will be suicide bombings and hijackings. They have got the airports disrupted to a ridiculous degree, why give up on hat now?
"There is no way round doing the math"
Oh come off it. I've been building radio gear since I was 8 years old. I didn't even know "the math" existed.
Get a plan for a simple radio (I suggested a crystal set above) and just build it. Be impressed by you achivement, build something else (e.g. test gear). Start to wonder how it works, build something else, build some more, when they don't work, start to find out what the components do and fault find - that's where the real learning starts
Build a crystal set. It's simple and magic. With only a diode, inductor (coil), tuning capacitor and head phones you get real radio. You can build one with just a hammer and nails on a piece of wood (or you can be more sophisticated if you want and use screws or even do soldering, it's up to you).
If you want to build wireless equipment it is a good learing curve about what is important - i.e. capacitance, inductance and the antenna (all them transistors etc are just added extras).
Google and you will turn up loads of free on line designs for crystal sets. Remember if it doesn't work first time, keep trying. Building analogue Radio gear can require much more skill and accuracy than simple digital stuff.
For some strange definition of BIG. I am sat in a room full of programmers, like many others in the world. We will spend 8+ hours a day 5 days a week writing apps, not a robot in sight. When I get time at home I wirte some embedded stuff for fun (I hope you would include this in the definition of "robot"). So this year I have probably done several thousand lines of app code in Java and less than 100 lines in C for embedded.
Now I am far from average, because I am the only person I know of here (out of ~40 programmers) that does any embedded at all..Quite a few people here do PHP in their spare time for friends and profit.