Personnally I find LaTeX much simpler than any word processor including Word of OpenOffice. The fact is that even full professors or IT managers can't master word well enough to produce consistent fonts and reasonable tables across a whole document.
For example the way apples fall from trees or the way planets revolve around the Sun are all facts. They happen, they can be observed. In fact these two facts are part of the more general phenomenon called gravitation. We observe that massive body attract each other.
On the other hand General Relativity (GRT) is the best theory of gravitation we have today. We already know that it is not a perfect theory, in particular that it is not compatible with other theories we have such as quantum theory (QT).
It is a fairly safe bet that at some point in the future either GRT or QT or both will be replaced with something more accurate.
Science is a process by which an explanation can be given for facts, more exactly *how* they proceed (and certainly not *why*, this is where religion and metaphysics come in). These explanations are called hypotheses in the beginning when they are born and then theories when they begin to get accepted, in particular when they happen to match observation up to a certain precision, and are useful to make predictions, i.e. predict future observations.
Under X (e.g. KDE) right button-left button copy and paste only works for text. Try it.
Under KDE to copy and paste something else (e.g. a picture) you have to use Control-C/Control-V.
Under MacOS/X, if you have more than one button on your mouse, right-button-left button copy and paste *works* in the Terminal application. Try it. handy with vi, emacs, etc.
Finally the extra buttons are useful under MacOS/X. Scroll wheel work, etc. Right click brings up a menu in all apps. What are you complaining about exactly?
It is true that you can be sent to court for "incitation to racial hatred" in France. However shouting anything from the mountaintop will not get you charged under this. You would have to be a high-level politician or in charge of a newspaper, and even then that would not be enough to send you to jail, you only get fined.
Maybe you've heard of Jean-Marie Le Pen? He is an openly racist politician to the extreme far right of the French political spectrum. He's been around for decades and in spite of proferring racist insults on TV an in various far right newspaper he has yet to see a single day in jail. He may have been fined a few times though.
Perhaps you are thinking of Maurice Papon, the famous revisionist? Indeed he was sent to jail, but not for his written opinions, instead because of his responsibilities during WWII. He sent a lot of Jewish people to their death.
Furthermore I don't find this self-evident that proferring a racist discourse should be protected under free speech laws. It could be argued that speech is by itself non-violent but this is demonstrably a fallacy. In the US not all speech is protected, such as shouting "fire!" in a theatre. Where do you draw the line?
1- At the time of the Marquis anyone could get imprisoned for life on a whim from the King. There are no kings in France now; no one can get imprisoned there on an whim from anybody. Things have progressed a little.
On the other hand, does Guantanamo Bay ring any bell to you?
2- The US and France grant their citizens very similar rights, they are just not guaranteed in the same way. Do you have anything in mind ?
Having lived in both the US and France (and other countries as well) it seems to me that the freedom of the press is greater in France, or at least it gets exercised a lot more. It is hard or uncommon to read anything even remotely subversive in the American press, which seems to hold the US presidency in way too much regard. In contrast in the widely popular French press or on TV no holds are barred.
After WWII, the great physicist Werner Heisenberg who had been the head of the German effort to build the Bomb pretented that he had torpedoed the effort so that his country and the Nazis would never get it.
In spite of this justification he got shunned by his peers until his death. Many of his peers were Jewish and could never belive him.
Heisenberg made a famous trip to Copenhagen during the war to meet with Niels Bohr. No one knows what the two men talked about, but Bohr (who was anti-Nazi) was reputedly furious after Heisenberg left.
The excellent play Copenhagen was written by Michael Frayn about this event. If it plays in your city do yourself a favour, go and see it.
However I doubt the opinion of your dormmates represent those of all Nigerians. I've had to deal with the Nigeria High Consulate on one occasion while organizing a conference. A bunch of people were posing as government members and trying to get a visa to come to the conference.
I emailed the consulate and got an immediate phone reply: "these people are known crooks, do not send them any letter that would enable them to get visas", from a person with a distinctive accent. I conclude perhaps optimistically that not everyone in Nigeria appreciates scammers.
Possibly next time diplomatically let your dormmate know that Nigerian scammers are severely unappreciated in the West and in fact give their whole country a bad name.
On Earth mountains are caused by plate tectonics, i.e. disconnected area of crust floating on magma that run into each other, but such mechanism are impossible on small bodies because they cool too fast, i.e their crust quickly become too thick and form a single fused objet.
Of course mountains can also be volcanoes, but similarly this implies magma that can rise to the surface, i.e a crust that is not too thick.
The exception are moons close enough to their parent body so that internal heat can be sustained by tidal effects. This is the case on Io, for example.
However there can only be tidal effects if the moon is rotating around itself at a different rate as it revolves around its parent body. For Iapetus, just like our moon, the two rates are the same and they always present the same face to their parent. This implies only minimal tidal effects due to the eccentricity of the orbit.
Of course the mountain/volcano may have been formed a very long time ago when the moon wasn't as cool as it is now, probably this is the case for mount Olympus on Mars, however there is erosion on most planetary bodies even without atmosphere or low gravity, caused by the myriad of asteroid impact they sustain.
One remaining option is impact by a large asteroid. We now have to come up with a reasonable impact scenario that can produce a feature similar to the one seen on Iapetus, which is indeed very strange.
Well it has been 2 weeks for me. No news. I did receive the modem in the mail 2 days after asking for the service to be switched on, but so far nothing else, and I'm still on dialup.
One colleague living in Paris didn't get his line enabled for 5 weeks. That was with free.fr mind you.
I can tell you with a large degree of confidence that the vast, vast majority of people won't care about the enhanced quality of HD-DVD. DVD quality is more than enough for most people. Indeed VHS quality is enough for most purposes.
What separates DVD from VHS is the convenience. A single small disk vs a large cassette, the ability to navigate the streams & the extras. People won't appreciate having to buy their entire movie collection all over again.
This will be as successful as the various standards for "better" CDs.
This is true about the French offering, but 8Mbits/s and above is not available everywhere, only close enough to the exchange.
I'm only 30 minutes from downtown Paris and the best I can have is 2MBits/s, and the prices don't come down accordingly, it's still 30 Euros a months. In other words extra bandwidth comes for free if you are lucky or willing to pay much more for rent.
Finally getting ADSL enabled on your line takes forever, up to 6 weeks, because it still has to be done by the old ex-state owned France Telecom, who leases the lines to the ISPs, and they have a huge backlog of people trying to get broadband.
Since I use both OS/X and KDE, so maybe I can answer. To give a bit of background I have been using Linux since the kernel 1.2.x days, various kinds of Unices for years before that. Like many others I went through the pains of finding a suitable windows manager from twm to WindowMaker via Gnome finally settling on KDE since 3.0 came out.
I've also been using Windows since version 1.0 (!) and MacOS since version 6.0 or so. I was also lucky to have my own NeXT machine about 12-13 years ago. Old hand if you want.
Without a doubt KDE is currently the best offering on Linux. Its integration is pretty good, comparable to Windows on many fronts, with a much better file manager/browser and a broader choice of applications.
However under Linux there is the issue of consistency between apps. KDE does not provide the answer to every problem (although the KDE folks have done a tremendous effort on every front) so you have to use various apps like OpenOffice, Mozilla/Firefox (way ahead of konqueror now) etc. It's all very useable but some little details are annoying, like for example the font issue. They are all different between Konsole, Mozilla, OpenOffice, etc. It still kills me that the best drawing program under Linux is still the old XFig, which I've been using for more than 10 years, and it has its own font system!
Eventually I found myself coming back to the only app that can do almost everything under Linux/Unix: emacs. Over the years I've gotten used to its quirks, and at least there isn't this horrible feeling of inconsistent look and feel, different shortcuts, etc when switching between a browser, an editor, a mail app, etc. Everything is the same.
It is very important that it be so because otherwise you find yourself typing the wrong shortcuts, and saving a file instead of looking for a word, etc. Quickly it becomes infuriating and counter-productive.
However under MacOS/X things are different (I absolutely hated all the MacOS version before X, mainly because of the incredibly annoying persistent crashes and lockups. To me even 9 is unusable, particularly for a developer).
All the apps, even the non-Apple ones use the same shortcuts, the same fonts (nice anti-aliased ones everywhere, finally, whereas under Linux some apps use antialiased fonts and some still don't), and most things feel natural and simple. Under Linux drag-and-drop doesn't always work, etc.
I have Emacs installed under MacOS. This is the first app I looked up and installed after booting my new MacOS/X machine but I don't find myself using it at all, to my utter surprise. Instead I use the various editors provided by the various environments (TeXShop for TeX documents, XCode for development, Mail editor for mails, etc). They are all consistent, syntax aware, etc.
So in short, if you only use KDE apps under Linux you get an experience almost similar to MacOS: things are consistent and nice, but you restrict yourself to a subset of applications available under Linux. No OpenOffice.org, no Mozilla/Firefox, no Sodipodi or Xfig, etc. This is too bad because these applications really work fine too. However as soon as you do use these other applications, consistency goes out the window in a manner far more dramatic than under MacOS/X or even Windows.
And with lack of consistency comes seriously decreased productivity.
It is very strange. I really love Linux and all the open-source movement (I've even contributed quite a bit). I wouldn't switch to Windows for the world as I find myself unproductive under this O/S (mainly because of the very constraining dev tools), but now in my office I have both a fast Linux machine running KDE and my little slow white iBook, but I find myself using the iBook almost exclusively.
You raise valid points, however I do think there is something to gain from knowing others are out there. Even if we can't communicate meaningfully this will put our little daily endeavours in a new light, I think. They might also be broadcasting something more interesting than just "hello world", who knows?
Most of the objections you raised are based on the physics we do know. There is an awful lot we do not know.
It is not the same thing. In the vertical wind tunnel you don't have this impression of constantly falling, because you are not experiencing micro-gravity, you are static in the 1.0g Earth gravity field.
The few initial seconds of freefall before reaching terminal velocity in true skydiving are more like it, but we are talking seconds, not minutes.
On the other hand freefall is reputedly not particularly pleasant to newcomers.
Obviously the civilization sending out the beam couldn't be very far away, probably a couple of hundred light years away, but this is still a sizeable number of systems.
The laser beam spreads naturally, so you wouldn't need to be all that accurate, from a few light-years away the beam is already as wide as entire solar system.
It is not hard to estimate where to send a beam given the known distance to the target system (which from less than 200 ly away can be easily measured with accuracy by triangulation), and the yearly travel of the target system against the background of stars. In fact our civilisation can solve that problem already for system less than a few tens of ly away. A slightly more advanced civilization would have zero problem with this.
A life-seaking civilization would put automated orbital stations to that task, they would be facing the right way all the time, and would probably send beams to many systems at once. They would be willing to do that for as long as the station lasted, drawing power from the Sun itself. How much would each beam require? I don't know, a few gigawats maybe. This is where science-fiction comes in. How long would such a station maintain itself? With current imaginable technology, only a few years. Who knows what more advanced civilizations can come up with? They would need to be willing to wait for an answer for at least twice as long as the distance to the target system. Hundreds of years!
It's very far fetched, but not unthinkable. If the listening technology is available now to us, why not take a look?
Because computing something so subtle as a SETI event is something that shouldn't be done only once. People cheat (sending back fake results), computer miscompute (overclocking anyone?), data gets lost in transmission and whatnot.
Maybe 50 times is too many but once is not enough.
Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th
on
New and Improved SETI
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· Score: 1
It is a very easily provable fact that Microsoft hasn't contributed to the field of IT nearly enough in relation to its size and wealth. A lot of what you speak of: Microsoft Research, fighting AIDS etc are recent endeavours. They date from a few years after Gates got married. I.e if you want to thank someone thank Melinda.
Microsoft got extremely rich by building upon the work of others and exploiting what they had to the hilt. This makes excellent business sense for them and does require large amounts of smarts but I wouldn't go to the extent of thanking them for anything, much less for the enormous amount of time and expertise wasted down the drain learning the use of their tools during the course of various jobs. What a PITA most of their products are !
In relation to its wealth, resources and experience, Microsoft should be making the very best software on the planet. Instead they have perfected the art of doing "just enough" and relying on their existing marketing power, user and developer base to crush, buy out and eventually outsell innovative competitors. The history of Microsoft is littered with the corpses of litteraly hundreds of companies who had developed useful and innovative pieces of software but who were crushed on their way to success.
The only thing saving current innovative software developers is the sheer size of Microsoft. Microsoft will not bother with them unless their market become suddently potentially huge. See Google for the next story.
Now Microsoft has become an established huge giant that cannot grow so much anymore. They have started to innovate on their own because they have run out of companies and products to exploit, but this will not save them in the end. They were the top of the food chain in their heyday but now they have to contribute, and they are not good at it.
Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th
on
New and Improved SETI
·
· Score: 1
It seems that we are going over and over the same stuff.
The whole point of the Microsoft-abusing-its-monopoly saga is that *yes* almost everyone is *forced* to buy Microsoft wares. That is if you want to hold a job in most Western countries. What is the ratio of workplaces not using proprietary Microsoft format for almost any data exchange?
I don't know. Currently Google is doing very well on a revenue model designed by a very small and very smart team. They've managed to grow well but their hiring binge hasn't really gone on for very long.
Now they have a veritable army of smart, hardworking people. They ought to conquer the world, but we haven't seen them at work just yet. It will be interesting to see what they can come up with.
Personally I'm not that optimistic. I've seen (admitedly not as smart and not as numerous) armies fall on their own sword, unable to avoid very smart and very fierce infighting. Microsoft also has a huge army of smart, hardworking people, lead by a very charismatic person. They have changed the world but perhaps not as much and not in as a dramatic fashion as might have been hoped. Why is Windows still so insecure and buggy and yet not as revolutionary as MacOS/X or BeOS?
Google is stuck between a rock and a hard place growthwise. I don't think their current revenue model scales, yet if they start gouging people for more money, the next search engine company will eat into their revenues.
Modern democracy doesn't require every action to be veted by the whole voting population. The assumption is only that the "million men" are wise enough to select the best leader (wisest?) in a given short list. You'll hear a lot of opinions around the idea that even that weaker assumption is wrong.
Re:A year ago it was horrible
on
Defining Google
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· Score: 2, Funny
Very good, this suggests an algorithm to get hired by Google: do not memorize man pages, assert your opinion when asked (do not try to guess what you think the Google people will like), be truthful about what you know, and play hard to get!
Re:Discarding too many people
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 1
Well, a PhD is just another diploma. Normally it does prove you can contribute to research in a significant way. However I've seen very poor PhDs awarded nonetheless, indeed from very good schools, the kind that didn't come with any significant papers or patent or even potential for any publication. It seems that if you are patient enough, go through your qualifier exams, manage to write a dissertation and that your supervisor thinks you have done enough in the lab (maybe as the very useful local Unix admin) you can be awarded a PhD too. In some places (even excellent schools) the jury consists only of local profs.
Interestingly in many smaller universities the jury must have two international reviewers, and sometimes require a minimum number of accepted publications in journals of sufficient repute, so a PhD from a not-so-well-known school might actually hold more value.
To eliminate these differences, in general, for positions that require a PhD people will look at your publication record as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Personnally I find LaTeX much simpler than any word processor including Word of OpenOffice. The fact is that even full professors or IT managers can't master word well enough to produce consistent fonts and reasonable tables across a whole document.
Of course there are facts in science.
For example the way apples fall from trees or the way planets revolve around the Sun are all facts. They happen, they can be observed. In fact these two facts are part of the more general phenomenon called gravitation. We observe that massive body attract each other.
On the other hand General Relativity (GRT) is the best theory of gravitation we have today. We already know that it is not a perfect theory, in particular that it is not compatible with other theories we have such as quantum theory (QT).
It is a fairly safe bet that at some point in the future either GRT or QT or both will be replaced with something more accurate.
Science is a process by which an explanation can be given for facts, more exactly *how* they proceed (and certainly not *why*, this is where religion and metaphysics come in). These explanations are called hypotheses in the beginning when they are born and then theories when they begin to get accepted, in particular when they happen to match observation up to a certain precision, and are useful to make predictions, i.e. predict future observations.
Under X (e.g. KDE) right button-left button copy and paste only works for text. Try it.
Under KDE to copy and paste something else (e.g. a picture) you have to use Control-C/Control-V.
Under MacOS/X, if you have more than one button on your mouse, right-button-left button copy and paste *works* in the Terminal application. Try it. handy with vi, emacs, etc.
Finally the extra buttons are useful under MacOS/X. Scroll wheel work, etc. Right click brings up a menu in all apps. What are you complaining about exactly?
You have a spreadsheet with AppleWorks that does ship with every mac.
It is true that you can be sent to court for "incitation to racial hatred" in France. However shouting anything from the mountaintop will not get you charged under this. You would have to be a high-level politician or in charge of a newspaper, and even then that would not be enough to send you to jail, you only get fined.
Maybe you've heard of Jean-Marie Le Pen? He is an openly racist politician to the extreme far right of the French political spectrum. He's been around for decades and in spite of proferring racist insults on TV an in various far right newspaper he has yet to see a single day in jail. He may have been fined a few times though.
Perhaps you are thinking of Maurice Papon, the famous revisionist? Indeed he was sent to jail, but not for his written opinions, instead because of his responsibilities during WWII. He sent a lot of Jewish people to their death.
Furthermore I don't find this self-evident that proferring a racist discourse should be protected under free speech laws. It could be argued that speech is by itself non-violent but this is demonstrably a fallacy. In the US not all speech is protected, such as shouting "fire!" in a theatre. Where do you draw the line?
1- At the time of the Marquis anyone could get imprisoned for life on a whim from the King. There are no kings in France now; no one can get imprisoned there on an whim from anybody. Things have progressed a little.
On the other hand, does Guantanamo Bay ring any bell to you?
2- The US and France grant their citizens very similar rights, they are just not guaranteed in the same way. Do you have anything in mind ?
Having lived in both the US and France (and other countries as well) it seems to me that the freedom of the press is greater in France, or at least it gets exercised a lot more. It is hard or uncommon to read anything even remotely subversive in the American press, which seems to hold the US presidency in way too much regard. In contrast in the widely popular French press or on TV no holds are barred.
After WWII, the great physicist Werner Heisenberg who had been the head of the German effort to build the Bomb pretented that he had torpedoed the effort so that his country and the Nazis would never get it.
In spite of this justification he got shunned by his peers until his death. Many of his peers were Jewish and could never belive him.
Heisenberg made a famous trip to Copenhagen during the war to meet with Niels Bohr. No one knows what the two men talked about, but Bohr (who was anti-Nazi) was reputedly furious after Heisenberg left.
The excellent play Copenhagen was written by Michael Frayn about this event. If it plays in your city do yourself a favour, go and see it.
Well, that's a sample of a few.
However I doubt the opinion of your dormmates represent those of all Nigerians. I've had to deal with the Nigeria High Consulate on one occasion while organizing a conference. A bunch of people were posing as government members and trying to get a visa to come to the conference.
I emailed the consulate and got an immediate phone reply: "these people are known crooks, do not send them any letter that would enable them to get visas", from a person with a distinctive accent. I conclude perhaps optimistically that not everyone in Nigeria appreciates scammers.
Possibly next time diplomatically let your dormmate know that Nigerian scammers are severely unappreciated in the West and in fact give their whole country a bad name.
For several reasons:
On Earth mountains are caused by plate tectonics, i.e. disconnected area of crust floating on magma that run into each other, but such mechanism are impossible on small bodies because they cool too fast, i.e their crust quickly become too thick and form a single fused objet.
Of course mountains can also be volcanoes, but similarly this implies magma that can rise to the surface, i.e a crust that is not too thick.
The exception are moons close enough to their parent body so that internal heat can be sustained by tidal effects. This is the case on Io, for example.
However there can only be tidal effects if the moon is rotating around itself at a different rate as it revolves around its parent body. For Iapetus, just like our moon, the two rates are the same and they always present the same face to their parent. This implies only minimal tidal effects due to the eccentricity of the orbit.
Of course the mountain/volcano may have been formed a very long time ago when the moon wasn't as cool as it is now, probably this is the case for mount Olympus on Mars, however there is erosion on most planetary bodies even without atmosphere or low gravity, caused by the myriad of asteroid impact they sustain.
One remaining option is impact by a large asteroid. We now have to come up with a reasonable impact scenario that can produce a feature similar to the one seen on Iapetus, which is indeed very strange.
Well it has been 2 weeks for me. No news. I did receive the modem in the mail 2 days after asking for the service to be switched on, but so far nothing else, and I'm still on dialup.
One colleague living in Paris didn't get his line enabled for 5 weeks. That was with free.fr mind you.
I can tell you with a large degree of confidence that the vast, vast majority of people won't care about the enhanced quality of HD-DVD. DVD quality is more than enough for most people. Indeed VHS quality is enough for most purposes.
What separates DVD from VHS is the convenience. A single small disk vs a large cassette, the ability to navigate the streams & the extras. People won't appreciate having to buy their entire movie collection all over again.
This will be as successful as the various standards for "better" CDs.
> So while it's sad that he didn't live to enjoy it
> at least his family is well cared for thanks to
> the merits of his work.
And why exactly would that be fair? PKD's children have contributed very little AFAIK.
To me this is further proof that the whole copyright business is not designed to benefit the true creators.
This is true about the French offering, but 8Mbits/s and above is not available everywhere, only close enough to the exchange.
I'm only 30 minutes from downtown Paris and the best I can have is 2MBits/s, and the prices don't come down accordingly, it's still 30 Euros a months. In other words extra bandwidth comes for free if you are lucky or willing to pay much more for rent.
Finally getting ADSL enabled on your line takes forever, up to 6 weeks, because it still has to be done by the old ex-state owned France Telecom, who leases the lines to the ISPs, and they have a huge backlog of people trying to get broadband.
Hi,
Since I use both OS/X and KDE, so maybe I can answer. To give a bit of background I have been using Linux since the kernel 1.2.x days, various kinds of Unices for years before that. Like many others I went through the pains of finding a suitable windows manager from twm to WindowMaker via Gnome finally settling on KDE since 3.0 came out.
I've also been using Windows since version 1.0 (!) and MacOS since version 6.0 or so. I was also lucky to have my own NeXT machine about 12-13 years ago. Old hand if you want.
Without a doubt KDE is currently the best offering on Linux. Its integration is pretty good, comparable to Windows on many fronts, with a much better file manager/browser and a broader choice of applications.
However under Linux there is the issue of consistency between apps. KDE does not provide the answer to every problem (although the KDE folks have done a tremendous effort on every front) so you have to use various apps like OpenOffice, Mozilla/Firefox (way ahead of konqueror now) etc. It's all very useable but some little details are annoying, like for example the font issue. They are all different between Konsole, Mozilla, OpenOffice, etc. It still kills me that the best drawing program under Linux is still the old XFig, which I've been using for more than 10 years, and it has its own font system!
Eventually I found myself coming back to the only app that can do almost everything under Linux/Unix: emacs. Over the years I've gotten used to its quirks, and at least there isn't this horrible feeling of inconsistent look and feel, different shortcuts, etc when switching between a browser, an editor, a mail app, etc. Everything is the same.
It is very important that it be so because otherwise you find yourself typing the wrong shortcuts, and saving a file instead of looking for a word, etc. Quickly it becomes infuriating and counter-productive.
However under MacOS/X things are different (I absolutely hated all the MacOS version before X, mainly because of the incredibly annoying persistent crashes and lockups. To me even 9 is unusable, particularly for a developer).
All the apps, even the non-Apple ones use the same shortcuts, the same fonts (nice anti-aliased ones everywhere, finally, whereas under Linux some apps use antialiased fonts and some still don't), and most things feel natural and simple. Under Linux drag-and-drop doesn't always work, etc.
I have Emacs installed under MacOS. This is the first app I looked up and installed after booting my new MacOS/X machine but I don't find myself using it at all, to my utter surprise. Instead I use the various editors provided by the various environments (TeXShop for TeX documents, XCode for development, Mail editor for mails, etc). They are all consistent, syntax aware, etc.
So in short, if you only use KDE apps under Linux you get an experience almost similar to MacOS: things are consistent and nice, but you restrict yourself to a subset of applications available under Linux. No OpenOffice.org, no Mozilla/Firefox, no Sodipodi or Xfig, etc. This is too bad because these applications really work fine too. However as soon as you do use these other applications, consistency goes out the window in a manner far more dramatic than under MacOS/X or even Windows.
And with lack of consistency comes seriously decreased productivity.
It is very strange. I really love Linux and all the open-source movement (I've even contributed quite a bit). I wouldn't switch to Windows for the world as I find myself unproductive under this O/S (mainly because of the very constraining dev tools), but now in my office I have both a fast Linux machine running KDE and my little slow white iBook, but I find myself using the iBook almost exclusively.
You raise valid points, however I do think there is something to gain from knowing others are out there. Even if we can't communicate meaningfully this will put our little daily endeavours in a new light, I think. They might also be broadcasting something more interesting than just "hello world", who knows?
Most of the objections you raised are based on the physics we do know. There is an awful lot we do not know.
It is not the same thing. In the vertical wind tunnel you don't have this impression of constantly falling, because you are not experiencing micro-gravity, you are static in the 1.0g Earth gravity field.
The few initial seconds of freefall before reaching terminal velocity in true skydiving are more like it, but we are talking seconds, not minutes.
On the other hand freefall is reputedly not particularly pleasant to newcomers.
Obviously the civilization sending out the beam couldn't be very far away, probably a couple of hundred light years away, but this is still a sizeable number of systems.
The laser beam spreads naturally, so you wouldn't need to be all that accurate, from a few light-years away the beam is already as wide as entire solar system.
It is not hard to estimate where to send a beam given the known distance to the target system (which from less than 200 ly away can be easily measured with accuracy by triangulation), and the yearly travel of the target system against the background of stars. In fact our civilisation can solve that problem already for system less than a few tens of ly away. A slightly more advanced civilization would have zero problem with this.
A life-seaking civilization would put automated orbital stations to that task, they would be facing the right way all the time, and would probably send beams to many systems at once. They would be willing to do that for as long as the station lasted, drawing power from the Sun itself. How much would each beam require? I don't know, a few gigawats maybe. This is where science-fiction comes in. How long would such a station maintain itself? With current imaginable technology, only a few years. Who knows what more advanced civilizations can come up with? They would need to be willing to wait for an answer for at least twice as long as the distance to the target system. Hundreds of years!
It's very far fetched, but not unthinkable. If the listening technology is available now to us, why not take a look?
Because computing something so subtle as a SETI event is something that shouldn't be done only once. People cheat (sending back fake results), computer miscompute (overclocking anyone?), data gets lost in transmission and whatnot.
Maybe 50 times is too many but once is not enough.
It is a very easily provable fact that Microsoft hasn't contributed to the field of IT nearly enough in relation to its size and wealth. A lot of what you speak of: Microsoft Research, fighting AIDS etc are recent endeavours. They date from a few years after Gates got married. I.e if you want to thank someone thank Melinda.
Microsoft got extremely rich by building upon the work of others and exploiting what they had to the hilt. This makes excellent business sense for them and does require large amounts of smarts but I wouldn't go to the extent of thanking them for anything, much less for the enormous amount of time and expertise wasted down the drain learning the use of their tools during the course of various jobs. What a PITA most of their products are !
In relation to its wealth, resources and experience, Microsoft should be making the very best software on the planet. Instead they have perfected the art of doing "just enough" and relying on their existing marketing power, user and developer base to crush, buy out and eventually outsell innovative competitors. The history of Microsoft is littered with the corpses of litteraly hundreds of companies who had developed useful and innovative pieces of software but who were crushed on their way to success.
The only thing saving current innovative software developers is the sheer size of Microsoft. Microsoft will not bother with them unless their market become suddently potentially huge. See Google for the next story.
Now Microsoft has become an established huge giant that cannot grow so much anymore. They have started to innovate on their own because they have run out of companies and products to exploit, but this will not save them in the end. They were the top of the food chain in their heyday but now they have to contribute, and they are not good at it.
It seems that we are going over and over the same stuff.
The whole point of the Microsoft-abusing-its-monopoly saga is that *yes* almost everyone is *forced* to buy Microsoft wares. That is if you want to hold a job in most Western countries. What is the ratio of workplaces not using proprietary Microsoft format for almost any data exchange?
If you've ever used captive you'd know it is very very slow for some reason. This might explain why this approach is not suitable for games.
I don't know. Currently Google is doing very well on a revenue model designed by a very small and very smart team. They've managed to grow well but their hiring binge hasn't really gone on for very long.
Now they have a veritable army of smart, hardworking people. They ought to conquer the world, but we haven't seen them at work just yet. It will be interesting to see what they can come up with.
Personally I'm not that optimistic. I've seen (admitedly not as smart and not as numerous) armies fall on their own sword, unable to avoid very smart and very fierce infighting. Microsoft also has a huge army of smart, hardworking people, lead by a very charismatic person. They have changed the world but perhaps not as much and not in as a dramatic fashion as might have been hoped. Why is Windows still so insecure and buggy and yet not as revolutionary as MacOS/X or BeOS?
Google is stuck between a rock and a hard place growthwise. I don't think their current revenue model scales, yet if they start gouging people for more money, the next search engine company will eat into their revenues.
Modern democracy doesn't require every action to be veted by the whole voting population. The assumption is only that the "million men" are wise enough to select the best leader (wisest?) in a given short list. You'll hear a lot of opinions around the idea that even that weaker assumption is wrong.
Very good, this suggests an algorithm to get hired by Google: do not memorize man pages, assert your opinion when asked (do not try to guess what you think the Google people will like), be truthful about what you know, and play hard to get!
Well, a PhD is just another diploma. Normally it does prove you can contribute to research in a significant way. However I've seen very poor PhDs awarded nonetheless, indeed from very good schools, the kind that didn't come with any significant papers or patent or even potential for any publication. It seems that if you are patient enough, go through your qualifier exams, manage to write a dissertation and that your supervisor thinks you have done enough in the lab (maybe as the very useful local Unix admin) you can be awarded a PhD too. In some places (even excellent schools) the jury consists only of local profs.
Interestingly in many smaller universities the jury must have two international reviewers, and sometimes require a minimum number of accepted publications in journals of sufficient repute, so a PhD from a not-so-well-known school might actually hold more value.
To eliminate these differences, in general, for positions that require a PhD people will look at your publication record as well.