On of the central assumptions in SETI is that another civilization is broadcasting strong radio waves at the Earth continuously, something we don't do for anywhere. The assumption is that this other civilization will starting using radio mostly for this purpose of being found.
I would guess that anyone who heads a national laboratory should probably be thought of as more of an administrator than scientist, regardless of background in science. He isn't just an administrator, he is a high ranking administrator for a DOE run lab. He will know who and what he is dealing with far better than some random politician. Bush appointed a NASA insider as an administrator (so a background in science), and most anyone in NASA will say he is far better than any of their previous bosses. This story has proven, if nothing else, how few details people need to know to make bold, outlandish statements.
I could easily be wildly off here, but I am pretty sure I spotted a raid controller in the picture of 7110. It was in the position of the raid controller on other sun 2U boxes, and it looked like a raid controller, so.....
Because it was conducted by researchers in a field where the name is prefixed by "social." Basically, if the name of something starts with social, then it will be bullshit, overinflated bunch of hype over something obvious. Look at social networking. Social Science/Psychology is no different, if not worse. Whenever I see anything from that general area of study, I am always amazed that so many people can make a living doing such basic work so badly.
From the nuclear weapons perspective, the knowledge is distributed, but only slightly; a great deal of the infrastructure for the production and maintenance of nuclear weapons lies in a few towns with DOE-funded national laboratories. There isn't a single point of failure exactly, but a great deal of arcane and classified knowledge rests in each spot on specific subjects, such as the design knowledge in Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore. A great deal of the needed nuclear materials are in just a few spots too, such as Oak Ridge (Y-12 describes itself as the "'Fort Knox' for highly enriched uranium"). Obviously, each of these spots have intense security, but if a few of these spots were really hit hard, the US's nuclear program would be crippled for a long period.
I heard from an emacs developer that the project had to find a bug tracker that could go over e-mail completely, as he only used e-mail. I got the impression that story was recent history, but it had to be at least a few years ago, though it seemed like the sort of thing he wouldn't give up easily....
But I would have just a bit of an easier time hearing what Stallman has to say about anything related to the internet if he actually used the internet, as in with a browser.
That case was obvious censorship. Street view was up less than a year ago in Hyde Park, and then it just disappeared once Obama started to look more serious and once the secret service started to ramp up their efforts. Seems like if they are going to destroy an hour or two of work done by an actual person, they would have no problem blurring the work of a quick satellite passover.
What really doesn't make sense to me is when a recent release or TV show shot in HD isn't released immediately. With older movies or shows, it makes sense to me; many of the shortcomings in quality are in the original film at this point, but if the issue is just assembling the disk, I just don't understand. I wouldn't mind getting Dexter on blu-ray, but only the DVDs are out. The video is in HD, and there have been other showtime series released on blu-ray, so I just don't get why there would be a delay. The same is true with a lot of new releases.
It would be really nice if they made it a meta key. I would love to have a laptop with a full blown meta key. Unfortunately, I am sure it would cost too much to change anything about they keyboards, since Dell has a full production line to worry about.
What the hell are you talking about? It looks like the tons of other government documents that follow almost the exact same layout. I am not trying to argue that the layout is bad or good (it' usually pretty dumb), but the formatting is, if anything, a clue that it is not fake. If you don't believe me, go find some random report off some government site and compare the two.
If you can get something in orbit for about $2k, I don't see why an upper weight limit would matter. Satellites are made as light as possible to keep down the cost of the launch, so I would think the goal would be to make the thing as heavy as possible within that budget. Whole thing seems stupid.
Look into foxmarks (assuming you use firefox). It works decently well, and it has firefox 3 support. I never switched to Google's thing, because foxmarks seemed better.
Really, not at all. Only about 11% of voters think the space program should get more, and 44% think it should get cut (source: general social survey); its not the weight of the voters that will keep it funded. For the most part, NASA is funded as a result of a few bureaucrats. Large aerospace contractors are the major reason for funding. The US likes having people have the jobs that support it in the case we need that infrastructure all of a sudden, say in a massive war. Tom Delay, when in office, was a massive supporter of NASA, as he had the appropriate district in Houston. The result that anything science gets funded is almost a wonder; it is more the result of past policy and agreements. NASA also puts a nice face on 'the space program' so the defense department can more easily get away with their quite large program. NASA will get to the moon; it would have been easier 20-30 years ago then now, but the relative expense to the rest of the budget is hardly something to bring 'an economy to its knees.' NASA's budget (~17B a year) makes up around 0.5% of the federal budget. We won't get to Mars because of cosmic rays, not rockets.
The real tragedy is that the alderman in high crime areas latch onto the cameras and want them everywhere, despite the fact it reduces the funding to put cops on patrol there, which unlike the cameras, actually reduces crime. In this case, it sounds like they are at least reducing the cost of a rather pointless venture. As far as I am aware, the cameras have led to no arrests.
Scheme was the first language in my CS program. I hated it when I was taking it, but I ended up appreciating what I learned in the class, mainly in relation to my approach to problems, quite a bit. C (and a mix of scripting languages) followed. I don't think there is an undergraduate class that teaches Java. Graduates might have a harder time becoming Java monkeys after graduation, but everyone is capable of tackling a far greater set of tasks and approaches.
I used to think SETI was a pretty interesting, until I heard some top SETI scientist talk about some of the specifics....
In answer to your title, the answer is no. Essentially, SETI relies on whatever artificial intelligence broadcasting something directed at Earth at the exact moment SETI researchers are pointing at it. To put this in perspective, we have done that once. We can barely get a signal from probes like pioneer. It would have to be something very deliberate at just the right time. The assumption is that most intelligent civilizations would have gotten far beyond radios long ago. So really, the number of conditions that would have to be met would make the chances of SETI finding anything extremely low. If the possibility of ETI wasn't so exciting, SETI would have never gotten a dollar.
This issue seems similar to many of the problems with cameras in cities; the problem comes down to how the system is implemented and less about what is actually being observed. I don't know exactly what the Ohio ACLU's objection is, as I could not find it on their website quickly and very little was said in the article about what the ACLU was taking issue with, but it seems like a similar situation to the problem with the cameras in Chicago. Daily and the police department set up a bunch of cameras around town without setting up any system of oversight or review. The argument is that it can stop/prevent crime, so, to them, other issues are moot (as far as I know, it hasn't stopped any crimes, just cost money). I am guessing that this police department just set up this system without consulting much of anyone else, as it can stop crime, which in this case, it does. It seems the question of a right to privacy in public areas with public information is a harder question to answer, but such programs should not be implemented blindly, as the power abuse can be great. I am guessing this was more of the objection was about.
Look at the first picture in the pics section in the first article listed. Tux sits proud in the top left corner of the boot up screen. So I believe the answer is in fact yes. I suppose the BSOD is even worse when you can actually die as a result....
Really, this competition comes down the amount a team practices for the competition itself. Software development has really very little to do with the competition. There are three people on a team, and only one person sits at the computer at a time (at least in the regional competition, but I think the global is similar). It is a competition to see who can find a solution to a particular problem the fastest. As long as you are decent CS student who has studied algorithms, you will have the basics to do this competition. The differences between teams at the global level really come down to how much a team has practiced at solving the types of problems in the competition as fast as possible. The global level is made up of the top two teams from each regional event (several in the US, not as many around the world). I would guess that there would be around 6 Indian teams at the competition. I would think that Indian teams might have practiced more than in other regions, but it really doesn't make a significant difference since the top of the top will probably be about equal. What this all comes down to is that you clearly know nothing about this competition.
I just read over the policy, and I think they are getting people on a clause that says something about interfering with the operation of their network, not that they silently specify a cap. So when Comcast says "we don't have a limit, you are just downloading too much," they mean it is a matter of the system strain, at least that's what can be interpreted from the Acceptable User Policy. Perhaps that's legitimate; users that they shut down really are using a large bit more than everyone else. Comcast would have to upgrade in order to maintain. If truly only a handful of users cause the majority of a problem, it would be fair to the rest of the customers to shut them down IF it would really mean that Comcast would have to raise the price. On the other hand, if bandwidth use in general went up from all customers, than Comcast would be obligated to upgrade. Perhaps Comcast really is trying to good business, even though they are evil. If there are general caps, it might just be away to alert them to the problem. I don't think this process is completely automatic.
It seems if the matter were to be brought to court, it wouldn't get far I imagine. I think the cop got as far as he did just because he is a cop. If it were someone else, nothing would have happened. I am guessing someone told the cop he was being an idiot, which is probably what any cop would tell anyone else trying to press charges.
There is certainly a bias in both Nature and Science towards novel, groundbreaking research, along with an emphasis on sexy (nanotechnology and stem cells are very hot right now, so the threshold to publish these papers has dropped). This does not have anything to do with the quality of science in the papers that are published - I challenge you to find an article in either Nature or Science that has "clear problems" in the science presented.
Challenge accepted.
No. Nature and Science and not sold on newsstands. Both journals cost a fair amount and are usually only purchased by libraries and members of the scientific community. I called them popular, because they are read by members of all scientific disciplines and are widely known. Anyways, the majority of papers that these journals publish are some of the best works in science. If a scientist has only a few papers published in either journal in their career, they will have done well. I am not denying that. The problem comes from the fact that, as you said, these journals want to publish sexy results. From this point on, I will be quoting a paper published in Nature on this subject found at http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v419/n6909/fu ll/419772a.html (you might not be able to see it unless you have access to Nature's archives, sorry).
an article in The Wall Street Journal alleged that Science and Nature "are locked in such fierce competition for prestige and publicity that they may be cutting corners to get 'hot' papers". Hmmm... maybe I am not just "talking out of [my] ass," as you claim. I will not go through every example of bad peer review in journals, but I will quote the example I was thinking of when I wrote my original post:
Accusations began to fly in March, when Science published a report from scientists led by Rusi Taleyarkhan at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee who claimed to have triggered nuclear fusion in a beaker of organic solvent. The paper appeared to howls of protest, both from leading physicists who were sure that the authors were mistaken and from other researchers at Oak Ridge who had examined the work and claimed to have uncovered serious flaws.
That doesn't sound like good peer review, does it? Now, there is no conclusive evidence to say that Nature and Science fudge the refereeing process, but it is an opinion shared by many. Enough people believed it to warrant Nature to write an article on the subject.
Do your research next time you try to blast someone and have enough courage to not post anonymously. Eat it.
It's kind of obvious, but popular science journals such as Nature (where this paper was published) and Science will publish what will sell issues. Its not always about the quality of the science. If a paper has shock value but has clear problems, these journals will publish it anyway in many cases. Peer review doesn't enter into the process as much as one would think when a topic is hot. It is just like crazy extremists who get all sorts of publicity for saying something outrageous.
NASA always does. Whenever NASA makes a change to the suit, they have former or current astronauts (I think former) test them out. Almost every modification they have made to the suit has been made because of some insight gained from past missions. It is not always clear what would cause trouble in the suits. In other words, its a given.
Slashdot Mirror
On of the central assumptions in SETI is that another civilization is broadcasting strong radio waves at the Earth continuously, something we don't do for anywhere. The assumption is that this other civilization will starting using radio mostly for this purpose of being found.
I would guess that anyone who heads a national laboratory should probably be thought of as more of an administrator than scientist, regardless of background in science. He isn't just an administrator, he is a high ranking administrator for a DOE run lab. He will know who and what he is dealing with far better than some random politician. Bush appointed a NASA insider as an administrator (so a background in science), and most anyone in NASA will say he is far better than any of their previous bosses. This story has proven, if nothing else, how few details people need to know to make bold, outlandish statements.
I could easily be wildly off here, but I am pretty sure I spotted a raid controller in the picture of 7110. It was in the position of the raid controller on other sun 2U boxes, and it looked like a raid controller, so.....
Because it was conducted by researchers in a field where the name is prefixed by "social." Basically, if the name of something starts with social, then it will be bullshit, overinflated bunch of hype over something obvious. Look at social networking. Social Science/Psychology is no different, if not worse. Whenever I see anything from that general area of study, I am always amazed that so many people can make a living doing such basic work so badly.
From the nuclear weapons perspective, the knowledge is distributed, but only slightly; a great deal of the infrastructure for the production and maintenance of nuclear weapons lies in a few towns with DOE-funded national laboratories. There isn't a single point of failure exactly, but a great deal of arcane and classified knowledge rests in each spot on specific subjects, such as the design knowledge in Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore. A great deal of the needed nuclear materials are in just a few spots too, such as Oak Ridge (Y-12 describes itself as the "'Fort Knox' for highly enriched uranium"). Obviously, each of these spots have intense security, but if a few of these spots were really hit hard, the US's nuclear program would be crippled for a long period.
I heard from an emacs developer that the project had to find a bug tracker that could go over e-mail completely, as he only used e-mail. I got the impression that story was recent history, but it had to be at least a few years ago, though it seemed like the sort of thing he wouldn't give up easily....
But I would have just a bit of an easier time hearing what Stallman has to say about anything related to the internet if he actually used the internet, as in with a browser.
That case was obvious censorship. Street view was up less than a year ago in Hyde Park, and then it just disappeared once Obama started to look more serious and once the secret service started to ramp up their efforts. Seems like if they are going to destroy an hour or two of work done by an actual person, they would have no problem blurring the work of a quick satellite passover.
What really doesn't make sense to me is when a recent release or TV show shot in HD isn't released immediately. With older movies or shows, it makes sense to me; many of the shortcomings in quality are in the original film at this point, but if the issue is just assembling the disk, I just don't understand. I wouldn't mind getting Dexter on blu-ray, but only the DVDs are out. The video is in HD, and there have been other showtime series released on blu-ray, so I just don't get why there would be a delay. The same is true with a lot of new releases.
It would be really nice if they made it a meta key. I would love to have a laptop with a full blown meta key. Unfortunately, I am sure it would cost too much to change anything about they keyboards, since Dell has a full production line to worry about.
What the hell are you talking about? It looks like the tons of other government documents that follow almost the exact same layout. I am not trying to argue that the layout is bad or good (it' usually pretty dumb), but the formatting is, if anything, a clue that it is not fake. If you don't believe me, go find some random report off some government site and compare the two.
If you can get something in orbit for about $2k, I don't see why an upper weight limit would matter. Satellites are made as light as possible to keep down the cost of the launch, so I would think the goal would be to make the thing as heavy as possible within that budget. Whole thing seems stupid.
Look into foxmarks (assuming you use firefox). It works decently well, and it has firefox 3 support. I never switched to Google's thing, because foxmarks seemed better.
Really, not at all. Only about 11% of voters think the space program should get more, and 44% think it should get cut (source: general social survey); its not the weight of the voters that will keep it funded. For the most part, NASA is funded as a result of a few bureaucrats. Large aerospace contractors are the major reason for funding. The US likes having people have the jobs that support it in the case we need that infrastructure all of a sudden, say in a massive war. Tom Delay, when in office, was a massive supporter of NASA, as he had the appropriate district in Houston. The result that anything science gets funded is almost a wonder; it is more the result of past policy and agreements. NASA also puts a nice face on 'the space program' so the defense department can more easily get away with their quite large program. NASA will get to the moon; it would have been easier 20-30 years ago then now, but the relative expense to the rest of the budget is hardly something to bring 'an economy to its knees.' NASA's budget (~17B a year) makes up around 0.5% of the federal budget. We won't get to Mars because of cosmic rays, not rockets.
The real tragedy is that the alderman in high crime areas latch onto the cameras and want them everywhere, despite the fact it reduces the funding to put cops on patrol there, which unlike the cameras, actually reduces crime. In this case, it sounds like they are at least reducing the cost of a rather pointless venture. As far as I am aware, the cameras have led to no arrests.
Scheme was the first language in my CS program. I hated it when I was taking it, but I ended up appreciating what I learned in the class, mainly in relation to my approach to problems, quite a bit. C (and a mix of scripting languages) followed. I don't think there is an undergraduate class that teaches Java. Graduates might have a harder time becoming Java monkeys after graduation, but everyone is capable of tackling a far greater set of tasks and approaches.
I used to think SETI was a pretty interesting, until I heard some top SETI scientist talk about some of the specifics.... In answer to your title, the answer is no. Essentially, SETI relies on whatever artificial intelligence broadcasting something directed at Earth at the exact moment SETI researchers are pointing at it. To put this in perspective, we have done that once. We can barely get a signal from probes like pioneer. It would have to be something very deliberate at just the right time. The assumption is that most intelligent civilizations would have gotten far beyond radios long ago. So really, the number of conditions that would have to be met would make the chances of SETI finding anything extremely low. If the possibility of ETI wasn't so exciting, SETI would have never gotten a dollar.
This issue seems similar to many of the problems with cameras in cities; the problem comes down to how the system is implemented and less about what is actually being observed. I don't know exactly what the Ohio ACLU's objection is, as I could not find it on their website quickly and very little was said in the article about what the ACLU was taking issue with, but it seems like a similar situation to the problem with the cameras in Chicago. Daily and the police department set up a bunch of cameras around town without setting up any system of oversight or review. The argument is that it can stop/prevent crime, so, to them, other issues are moot (as far as I know, it hasn't stopped any crimes, just cost money). I am guessing that this police department just set up this system without consulting much of anyone else, as it can stop crime, which in this case, it does. It seems the question of a right to privacy in public areas with public information is a harder question to answer, but such programs should not be implemented blindly, as the power abuse can be great. I am guessing this was more of the objection was about.
Look at the first picture in the pics section in the first article listed. Tux sits proud in the top left corner of the boot up screen. So I believe the answer is in fact yes. I suppose the BSOD is even worse when you can actually die as a result....
Really, this competition comes down the amount a team practices for the competition itself. Software development has really very little to do with the competition. There are three people on a team, and only one person sits at the computer at a time (at least in the regional competition, but I think the global is similar). It is a competition to see who can find a solution to a particular problem the fastest. As long as you are decent CS student who has studied algorithms, you will have the basics to do this competition. The differences between teams at the global level really come down to how much a team has practiced at solving the types of problems in the competition as fast as possible. The global level is made up of the top two teams from each regional event (several in the US, not as many around the world). I would guess that there would be around 6 Indian teams at the competition. I would think that Indian teams might have practiced more than in other regions, but it really doesn't make a significant difference since the top of the top will probably be about equal. What this all comes down to is that you clearly know nothing about this competition.
I just read over the policy, and I think they are getting people on a clause that says something about interfering with the operation of their network, not that they silently specify a cap. So when Comcast says "we don't have a limit, you are just downloading too much," they mean it is a matter of the system strain, at least that's what can be interpreted from the Acceptable User Policy. Perhaps that's legitimate; users that they shut down really are using a large bit more than everyone else. Comcast would have to upgrade in order to maintain. If truly only a handful of users cause the majority of a problem, it would be fair to the rest of the customers to shut them down IF it would really mean that Comcast would have to raise the price. On the other hand, if bandwidth use in general went up from all customers, than Comcast would be obligated to upgrade. Perhaps Comcast really is trying to good business, even though they are evil. If there are general caps, it might just be away to alert them to the problem. I don't think this process is completely automatic.
It seems if the matter were to be brought to court, it wouldn't get far I imagine. I think the cop got as far as he did just because he is a cop. If it were someone else, nothing would have happened. I am guessing someone told the cop he was being an idiot, which is probably what any cop would tell anyone else trying to press charges.
Challenge accepted.
No. Nature and Science and not sold on newsstands. Both journals cost a fair amount and are usually only purchased by libraries and members of the scientific community. I called them popular, because they are read by members of all scientific disciplines and are widely known. Anyways, the majority of papers that these journals publish are some of the best works in science. If a scientist has only a few papers published in either journal in their career, they will have done well. I am not denying that. The problem comes from the fact that, as you said, these journals want to publish sexy results. From this point on, I will be quoting a paper published in Nature on this subject found at http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v419/n6909/f
an article in The Wall Street Journal alleged that Science and Nature "are locked in such fierce competition for prestige and publicity that they may be cutting corners to get 'hot' papers". Hmmm... maybe I am not just "talking out of [my] ass," as you claim. I will not go through every example of bad peer review in journals, but I will quote the example I was thinking of when I wrote my original post:
That doesn't sound like good peer review, does it? Now, there is no conclusive evidence to say that Nature and Science fudge the refereeing process, but it is an opinion shared by many. Enough people believed it to warrant Nature to write an article on the subject.
Do your research next time you try to blast someone and have enough courage to not post anonymously. Eat it.
It's kind of obvious, but popular science journals such as Nature (where this paper was published) and Science will publish what will sell issues. Its not always about the quality of the science. If a paper has shock value but has clear problems, these journals will publish it anyway in many cases. Peer review doesn't enter into the process as much as one would think when a topic is hot. It is just like crazy extremists who get all sorts of publicity for saying something outrageous.
NASA always does. Whenever NASA makes a change to the suit, they have former or current astronauts (I think former) test them out. Almost every modification they have made to the suit has been made because of some insight gained from past missions. It is not always clear what would cause trouble in the suits. In other words, its a given.