Even if intelligent civilization extinct themselves, we should still see their TV broadcasts before their extinction.
TV is really bad for detecting. It never gets powerful enough to be detectable before it becomes more advantageous to send over wire. Even then, they appear to get mixed on the edge of the heliosphere so they really aren't determinable from background noise. Best shot is to look for radar waves used for keeping track of aircraft and mapping the solar system.
They just aren't there! Why can't people of science accept this?
Because people of science require evidence, and right now the information we have is piss poor. The sorts of things they are talking about are pretty much the work of comic book super science. Currently, we could only detect ourselves out to about 100 years from what I've read. Interstellar medium really does a number on the EM waves of our communications which are so weak as to be not much more than background noise outside our solar system.Best search for life will be getting spectrographic data from planets and their atmospheres and we can't do that yet. Best current idea for intelligent life is looking for radar waves which would be fairly rare in nature but useful to civilization in tracking air and space craft as well as other objects in a solar system.Still, we aren't even doing that yet.
I'm puzzled why this is marked informative. My question wasn't looking for an explanation of how carbon dating works, but rather how you date something that doesn't/didn't have carbon. There's no carbon half-life to examine in moon rocks, right??? Or did I have a complete brain freeze here?
Their last sentence. The same method is used but they don't use C but some other element using Radiometric Dating. Probably several other elements and their ratios at creation and the present from a mineral sample where Rubidium-strontium Dating is mentioned for determining the age of lunar samples.
Astronomers have observed the gravitational lens effect of dark matter in the distant universe. Something is there.
Please, don't respond to Anonymous Cowards. They're mostly all just trolls spouting stuff they know is wrong so they can "start a discussion."
There are multiple observations made in the past 80 years that have caused us to look for an answer, galactic rotation, gravitational lensing, details dealing with the CMB, etc. All the easy things like more matter, changes to the laws of gravitation, lots of black holes, were the first things looked at and have failed to provide any solutions. Slowly, all these different paths are leading to the same conclusion that there is some form of matter that does not interact with the EM forces, or probably any force except for gravity. One person here once stated that "Just because something is eating the catfood at night doesn't mean there's a cat nobody has ever seen" However, at this point, something is eating the cat food, using the litter box, scratch the furniture, getting cat hair all over everything, and if you knock on the walls and say 'meow', something is saying 'meow' back at you. If the answer isn't a cat in the walls that nobody has ever seen, it's going to be a lot stranger than just cat in the wall that nobody has ever seen. Same with solutions like MOND. If the laws of gravity need to be changed to fit the evidence collected so far, we're not talking about just an additional tweak or two. It's complicated that nobody can come up with a hypothetical solution that will fit gravitational rotation curves in more than two dimensions, let alone also the other directions the evidence is coming from.
In some areas better food production, in other ways much worse.
Yep. And in the several maps that I've seen so far, the only places that have widespread better production will be the US and Canada. Pretty much everything else is hit hard (along with Texas to Kansas of the US). I always wonder if that has something to do with the US's denial of global warming.
If I want to know how to do something I go to youtube.
If I want to know how to do something, I look really hard for a web page with written instructions. The last thing I want is to have to listen to somebody's idiot background music while they fumble around 'doing' something that could be described in a few bullet points.
Sure, some youTube videos suck. Guess what, lots of written web pages suck too. There are plenty of cases where written instructions lack spacial references, skip steps, use terminology to explain that if you knew enough to know you wouldn't need the instructions. Sometimes being show in a video is quicker and better. Use the best tool for the best solution. With both videos or written instructions, you'll probably have to look up three or four to get an idea of different methods, make sure you're doing it right, and get a clear understanding.
Ya, I know lost of people who swear by Robinson head that I won't argue with, but they're also all mechanical fabricators with good tools who are going to be the ones to have to take apart what they put together.
The arguments against voter ID are equally illegitimate. Who does not have ID? Seriously? I don't buy it all.
No, you'd pay for it. Voter qualifications are largely left to the states although their are things they cannot do. One of those is a poll tax. If you require an ID and require payment for the ID, that would be a poll tax. All a state has to do would most likely be to give everybody their ID for free, or at least, that is where they'd have to start.
Every American has had a few choice words with stripping and jumping Phillips screws. Everybody hates them -- just not enough to bother replacing it.
Except that camming out is a feature if putting something together as if you overdrive, it won't break the bit or damage the thing being screwed together. Robinson doesn't strip as easy but it also doesn't cam out and thus, you eventually end up with a lot of broken robinson bits or split boards. While I hear the Robinson wouldn't sell bit with Ford a lot, I've also heard that he chose the Phillips head because it would cam out without damaging the product which is better for manufacturing (and a stripped Phillips head would be a customer issue).
I was more confused by this line:
Mr Millar said he was still "blinking" over the news.
If Millarworld was founded by Mark Millar, and he currently runs it with his wife, then he really should have known that Netflix was bidding to buy it, and this should really not come as a surprise to him... unless "blinking" means that he got some cocaine in his eye during the acquisition party with all the hookers.
Considering that Millar has extreme success with turning his comics into movies, I suspect this is a case of being surprised all of his work and effort to get tied into the film industry (where all the money is) has finally come to pass in such a good deal.
Something doesn't smell quite right about this story - either it's wrong/misleading, or it's a ChiCom vanity project that was unplanned from science perspective.
Nowhere did I see that they said they weren't running the telescope. What I got from reading the article is the Chinese built this giant state of the art telescope and now want a prestigious celebrity scientist to head the project and will keep that position open till they get one. I doubt that head of project is really needed for anything but to put their name on the papers that are being written about the telescope and the for publication in astronomy journals.
...World of Warcraft is far more stable than Venezuela today.
I don't know about that, if a token is under 10k gold now, the WoW economy has crashed as last time I logged in as few months ago it was in the 20-30k range.
After checking, tokens have been going up and haven't been at 8k for years. For the last year it's been around 40k, jumping up to ~120k recently.
...World of Warcraft is far more stable than Venezuela today.
I don't know about that, if a token is under 10k gold now, the WoW economy has crashed as last time I logged in as few months ago it was in the 20-30k range.
No mate, this is all conspiracy theory. Venezuela is walking the same worn path that all communisms have walked. First it starts with the idea that you will create a new sort of man: the socialist man, a mythical human that is no longer interested in its own well-being or individual achievement.
No, first it starts with the existing system collapsing and the people losing confidence in them enough they are willing to drastically try something else.
I think the only way for a baseline neutral is opposing views. I don't think CNN's or Fox's bias are bad.
I do. I'm not familiar with CNN as I stopped going to them for new a long time ago and pretty much only go there when testing browsers because it's easy to type. FOX News, however, I am forced to watch when at my parent's house. They are horrible for lying through omission and seriously trying to generate false drama through their "two sides of the issue". They will bring up outrageous sounding issues and exclaim 'how can this go on?!?!' while giving crappy defenses of same issues. Usually the smell test doesn't match up and when I bother to spend five minutes looking things up, there is usually more details on more local news stations or public statement from said organizations that explains everything which were public knowledge weeks earlier and have nothing to do with either side of the Fox News arguments. (They almost all fall under "follow the money" or "not enough resources" rather than some political idealism.) If they were trying to do anything but create false dramatic news stories, and did any research, these things could easily be discussed but then would be non-issues. It's like any time some situation that seems too outrageous to exist is virally spread across the internet. Do a bit of research and it probably doesn't exist or isn't that outrageous once all the details are known.
I'm a UAW member. In my experience, they are responsive, helpful, and quite valuable. [...] I don't get the hate here.
If you genuinely believed in what you say, you wouldn't be using an anonymous coward account.
Well, I agree that most ACs are worthless trolls, but I'll put in that the main part is "...employer inevitably decides to violate your contract...". Unionization these days are all about dealing with employers who don't stick to the rules they tell their employees. Most peopel just want to show up and do their job for the wage agreed upon but instead get managers who change the terms and tell employees that complain to pray they don't change them more. HR exists only to protect managers, not enforce the business rules and ethics. Often won't even enforce laws when it's in the employees favor.
Not paid enough? Quit, because you can obviously get a better job.
Safety? Same thing, except OSHA is rooting for you, too.
Short form, paraphrased from Ann Landers and John Prine: "STFU, You have no complaints, you is what you is, you ain't what you ain't."
Well, let's be realistic. Pay and safety usually aren't the cause for unionization these days. I've seen my and other groups try and unionize. I've known people who have worked in the unions to help people unionize. The number one reason for people trying to unionize is bad management. Like in my group, you just need a time or two of vacations being canceled because the boss wants you to work extra shifts of the person they just fired to have Rush Limbaugh listening retired ex-military guys lead the way to unionization. Flaky managers with god complexes that will tell employees one thing yesterday and something contradictory today are what make people want to fight to be in unions. If it was just a matter of showing up to work for an agreed upon wage under written rules both sides kept to, unions today wouldn't have any people wanting to join.
I thought it was odd the emphasis on physical sciences and engineering versus experience in microbiology or infectious disease. A university biosafety officer is going to understand how to sterilize things better than a physicist.
My guess is that they already have the people who figured out the sterilization process, and this positions is to track the designers work to make sure it will with stand and allow the process. Will those gaskets be attacked by the sterilzation agents? Are there any trapped compartments that can't be sterilized when the outer surface is? If so, how can the plans be altered so that everything gets properly sterilized?
Even an app as craptacular as Facebook doesn't need to be that large.
App? Why are people even bothering to complain about apps taking too much space? have you checked the RAM requirements of things like the webpages of Facebook or Office 365? I've caught both taking up to 3GB of RAM, just for a web page!
Some of the metal alloys in the original specification weren't being manufactured anymore. So newer alloys had to be qualified, tested, and certified,
So, why not just make the specified alloy again instead of coming up with a whole new one?
Pessimistic guess, patents. Optimistic guess, with the advances in metallurgy the cost increase of finalizing a new alloy and starting up production is worth any price increase as the expense of re-starting up production of the old alloy would cost about as much without benefits of the new alloys.
Let's forget about improving healthcare in the U.S.
Trouble is that there are two conflicting ideas on how to "improve" it. I don't think many people really want what we have now, but it's what we could get. One side wants government single payer, while the other wants free market get as good of heath care as your job can provide through wages or insurance.
My plan would be to make an actual certified computer engineer trade, and then require them to look at the code and sign off on it. Wouldn't make them liable for everything, but would dictate they have reviewed at the code for bare minimum of security diligence as dictated by the standards of a central authority.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if intelligent civilization extinct themselves, we should still see their TV broadcasts before their extinction.
TV is really bad for detecting. It never gets powerful enough to be detectable before it becomes more advantageous to send over wire. Even then, they appear to get mixed on the edge of the heliosphere so they really aren't determinable from background noise. Best shot is to look for radar waves used for keeping track of aircraft and mapping the solar system.
They just aren't there! Why can't people of science accept this?
Because people of science require evidence, and right now the information we have is piss poor. The sorts of things they are talking about are pretty much the work of comic book super science. Currently, we could only detect ourselves out to about 100 years from what I've read. Interstellar medium really does a number on the EM waves of our communications which are so weak as to be not much more than background noise outside our solar system.Best search for life will be getting spectrographic data from planets and their atmospheres and we can't do that yet. Best current idea for intelligent life is looking for radar waves which would be fairly rare in nature but useful to civilization in tracking air and space craft as well as other objects in a solar system.Still, we aren't even doing that yet.
I'm puzzled why this is marked informative. My question wasn't looking for an explanation of how carbon dating works, but rather how you date something that doesn't/didn't have carbon. There's no carbon half-life to examine in moon rocks, right??? Or did I have a complete brain freeze here?
Their last sentence. The same method is used but they don't use C but some other element using Radiometric Dating. Probably several other elements and their ratios at creation and the present from a mineral sample where Rubidium-strontium Dating is mentioned for determining the age of lunar samples.
Astronomers have observed the gravitational lens effect of dark matter in the distant universe. Something is there.
Please, don't respond to Anonymous Cowards. They're mostly all just trolls spouting stuff they know is wrong so they can "start a discussion."
There are multiple observations made in the past 80 years that have caused us to look for an answer, galactic rotation, gravitational lensing, details dealing with the CMB, etc. All the easy things like more matter, changes to the laws of gravitation, lots of black holes, were the first things looked at and have failed to provide any solutions. Slowly, all these different paths are leading to the same conclusion that there is some form of matter that does not interact with the EM forces, or probably any force except for gravity. One person here once stated that "Just because something is eating the catfood at night doesn't mean there's a cat nobody has ever seen" However, at this point, something is eating the cat food, using the litter box, scratch the furniture, getting cat hair all over everything, and if you knock on the walls and say 'meow', something is saying 'meow' back at you. If the answer isn't a cat in the walls that nobody has ever seen, it's going to be a lot stranger than just cat in the wall that nobody has ever seen. Same with solutions like MOND. If the laws of gravity need to be changed to fit the evidence collected so far, we're not talking about just an additional tweak or two. It's complicated that nobody can come up with a hypothetical solution that will fit gravitational rotation curves in more than two dimensions, let alone also the other directions the evidence is coming from.
In some areas better food production, in other ways much worse.
Yep. And in the several maps that I've seen so far, the only places that have widespread better production will be the US and Canada. Pretty much everything else is hit hard (along with Texas to Kansas of the US). I always wonder if that has something to do with the US's denial of global warming.
If I want to know how to do something I go to youtube.
If I want to know how to do something, I look really hard for a web page with written instructions. The last thing I want is to have to listen to somebody's idiot background music while they fumble around 'doing' something that could be described in a few bullet points.
Sure, some youTube videos suck. Guess what, lots of written web pages suck too. There are plenty of cases where written instructions lack spacial references, skip steps, use terminology to explain that if you knew enough to know you wouldn't need the instructions. Sometimes being show in a video is quicker and better. Use the best tool for the best solution. With both videos or written instructions, you'll probably have to look up three or four to get an idea of different methods, make sure you're doing it right, and get a clear understanding.
Half of the main characters will die.
Just like every season.
Exactly, the part everybody wants to know, is "who lives?"
Ya, I know lost of people who swear by Robinson head that I won't argue with, but they're also all mechanical fabricators with good tools who are going to be the ones to have to take apart what they put together.
The arguments against voter ID are equally illegitimate. Who does not have ID? Seriously? I don't buy it all.
No, you'd pay for it. Voter qualifications are largely left to the states although their are things they cannot do. One of those is a poll tax. If you require an ID and require payment for the ID, that would be a poll tax. All a state has to do would most likely be to give everybody their ID for free, or at least, that is where they'd have to start.
Every American has had a few choice words with stripping and jumping Phillips screws. Everybody hates them -- just not enough to bother replacing it.
Except that camming out is a feature if putting something together as if you overdrive, it won't break the bit or damage the thing being screwed together. Robinson doesn't strip as easy but it also doesn't cam out and thus, you eventually end up with a lot of broken robinson bits or split boards. While I hear the Robinson wouldn't sell bit with Ford a lot, I've also heard that he chose the Phillips head because it would cam out without damaging the product which is better for manufacturing (and a stripped Phillips head would be a customer issue).
I was more confused by this line: Mr Millar said he was still "blinking" over the news. If Millarworld was founded by Mark Millar, and he currently runs it with his wife, then he really should have known that Netflix was bidding to buy it, and this should really not come as a surprise to him... unless "blinking" means that he got some cocaine in his eye during the acquisition party with all the hookers.
Considering that Millar has extreme success with turning his comics into movies, I suspect this is a case of being surprised all of his work and effort to get tied into the film industry (where all the money is) has finally come to pass in such a good deal.
Something doesn't smell quite right about this story - either it's wrong/misleading, or it's a ChiCom vanity project that was unplanned from science perspective.
Nowhere did I see that they said they weren't running the telescope. What I got from reading the article is the Chinese built this giant state of the art telescope and now want a prestigious celebrity scientist to head the project and will keep that position open till they get one. I doubt that head of project is really needed for anything but to put their name on the papers that are being written about the telescope and the for publication in astronomy journals.
...World of Warcraft is far more stable than Venezuela today.
I don't know about that, if a token is under 10k gold now, the WoW economy has crashed as last time I logged in as few months ago it was in the 20-30k range.
After checking, tokens have been going up and haven't been at 8k for years. For the last year it's been around 40k, jumping up to ~120k recently.
...World of Warcraft is far more stable than Venezuela today.
I don't know about that, if a token is under 10k gold now, the WoW economy has crashed as last time I logged in as few months ago it was in the 20-30k range.
No mate, this is all conspiracy theory. Venezuela is walking the same worn path that all communisms have walked. First it starts with the idea that you will create a new sort of man: the socialist man, a mythical human that is no longer interested in its own well-being or individual achievement.
No, first it starts with the existing system collapsing and the people losing confidence in them enough they are willing to drastically try something else.
I think the only way for a baseline neutral is opposing views. I don't think CNN's or Fox's bias are bad.
I do. I'm not familiar with CNN as I stopped going to them for new a long time ago and pretty much only go there when testing browsers because it's easy to type. FOX News, however, I am forced to watch when at my parent's house. They are horrible for lying through omission and seriously trying to generate false drama through their "two sides of the issue". They will bring up outrageous sounding issues and exclaim 'how can this go on?!?!' while giving crappy defenses of same issues. Usually the smell test doesn't match up and when I bother to spend five minutes looking things up, there is usually more details on more local news stations or public statement from said organizations that explains everything which were public knowledge weeks earlier and have nothing to do with either side of the Fox News arguments. (They almost all fall under "follow the money" or "not enough resources" rather than some political idealism.) If they were trying to do anything but create false dramatic news stories, and did any research, these things could easily be discussed but then would be non-issues. It's like any time some situation that seems too outrageous to exist is virally spread across the internet. Do a bit of research and it probably doesn't exist or isn't that outrageous once all the details are known.
I'm a UAW member. In my experience, they are responsive, helpful, and quite valuable. [...] I don't get the hate here.
If you genuinely believed in what you say, you wouldn't be using an anonymous coward account.
Well, I agree that most ACs are worthless trolls, but I'll put in that the main part is "...employer inevitably decides to violate your contract...". Unionization these days are all about dealing with employers who don't stick to the rules they tell their employees. Most peopel just want to show up and do their job for the wage agreed upon but instead get managers who change the terms and tell employees that complain to pray they don't change them more. HR exists only to protect managers, not enforce the business rules and ethics. Often won't even enforce laws when it's in the employees favor.
Not paid enough? Quit, because you can obviously get a better job. Safety? Same thing, except OSHA is rooting for you, too. Short form, paraphrased from Ann Landers and John Prine: "STFU, You have no complaints, you is what you is, you ain't what you ain't."
Well, let's be realistic. Pay and safety usually aren't the cause for unionization these days. I've seen my and other groups try and unionize. I've known people who have worked in the unions to help people unionize. The number one reason for people trying to unionize is bad management. Like in my group, you just need a time or two of vacations being canceled because the boss wants you to work extra shifts of the person they just fired to have Rush Limbaugh listening retired ex-military guys lead the way to unionization. Flaky managers with god complexes that will tell employees one thing yesterday and something contradictory today are what make people want to fight to be in unions. If it was just a matter of showing up to work for an agreed upon wage under written rules both sides kept to, unions today wouldn't have any people wanting to join.
Aw, come on. /. was made great by discussions of irrelevant side roads.
I thought it was odd the emphasis on physical sciences and engineering versus experience in microbiology or infectious disease. A university biosafety officer is going to understand how to sterilize things better than a physicist.
My guess is that they already have the people who figured out the sterilization process, and this positions is to track the designers work to make sure it will with stand and allow the process. Will those gaskets be attacked by the sterilzation agents? Are there any trapped compartments that can't be sterilized when the outer surface is? If so, how can the plans be altered so that everything gets properly sterilized?
Even an app as craptacular as Facebook doesn't need to be that large.
App? Why are people even bothering to complain about apps taking too much space? have you checked the RAM requirements of things like the webpages of Facebook or Office 365? I've caught both taking up to 3GB of RAM, just for a web page!
Some of the metal alloys in the original specification weren't being manufactured anymore. So newer alloys had to be qualified, tested, and certified,
So, why not just make the specified alloy again instead of coming up with a whole new one?
Pessimistic guess, patents. Optimistic guess, with the advances in metallurgy the cost increase of finalizing a new alloy and starting up production is worth any price increase as the expense of re-starting up production of the old alloy would cost about as much without benefits of the new alloys.
Let's also ban kitchen knives because they have been used in horrifying acts of domestic abuse, and will continue to be used unless we act now!
You must be from the UK.
Let's forget about improving healthcare in the U.S.
Trouble is that there are two conflicting ideas on how to "improve" it. I don't think many people really want what we have now, but it's what we could get. One side wants government single payer, while the other wants free market get as good of heath care as your job can provide through wages or insurance.
I have suggested this plan before.
My plan would be to make an actual certified computer engineer trade, and then require them to look at the code and sign off on it. Wouldn't make them liable for everything, but would dictate they have reviewed at the code for bare minimum of security diligence as dictated by the standards of a central authority.