When he goes to make his purchase of BBY stock, will he do what BBY customers do and look up the item before buying?
He's offering $26 a share. I bet Amazon has it for $12, Newegg for $13 and Monoprice for $1.87 in five colors.
Ah the sweet irony if this could happen. Not only is BBY cornered by arguably better competitors, the competitors even sell the company itself for less.
Yeah this works best as a joke on a late-night TV monologue.
With sufficient runway, they didn't need the afterburners at all except to break through Mach 1.
Then a controlled dive could eliminate the need for afterburners completely.
Because a controlled dive works so well on takeoff. If you do it JUST right, you can achieve Mach about the time the controlled dive passes the six-feet-under mark.
Pity is, you only get to do this once, there is no go-around, and there's not even an in flight meal. On the other hand, you can get by with a one-way pass and the sniveling brat in 5A is going to die nanoseconds before you do. Small justices matter.
Most surely? How do we know they'll use radio at all? We have exactly one example of intelligent radio communication. Us.
The Earth -the only place we know for sure has life- has somewhere around a few hundred million other forms of life, none of which use radio. Just us.
So it's pretty ballsy to extrapolate the entire universe's radio habits from a sample of one. We really have no business assuming aliens would communicate anything like we do or would use some signal that we could detect and understand as communication.
A Sybian is possibly the best thing a person can own. Either they get to enjoy it themselves, or their friends will drop by to enjoy it. It's a win either way. No downside.
8 hasn't yet shipped and hasn't proven itself capable of running "real business stuff" and they already want to cram it down the throats of corporate buyers?
Where I work, our IT team is still slowly migrating to Windows 7, having only recently halted Vista installs. New PCs are all Windows 7. Because we're more interested in having employees get billable work done instead of calling for IT support because some app is broken. Where it's been deployed, 7 is working fine. Our workers know how to use it. No issues.
I've played with 8. It seems geared for people who have never learned how to use Windows -except all of us worker bees have, in fact, done that. Our jobs depend on doing work. Not doing work differently, with tiles. Just because someone decided that was the way to go. I am sure it's a fine OS and there are valid reasons for every change. But we don't want change. At all. 7 works. Why change?
Frankly, a lot of people are still unhappy with the whimsical way Office 2007 and 2010 moved things around. They're trying to compose a document and can't find the control they used to be able to find. They are wasting time sorting it out and getting upset. The user impression -correct or not- is that stuff changed in Office just for kicks. And if they got their hands on 8, where stuff is "just changed" we would expect the same complaints.
With that in mind, and once again because Windows 7 is just pretty darn good, we're not looking seriously at 8. Maybe 9. We think we can hold on for that long, barring some sort of 8 miracle feature we've yet to hear about.
In my personal home network is four PCs running 7 and one Mac. Outside of a VM to play with, 8 doesn't fit with what I need or want to do. Shrug.
Yeah, they need to try working in a warehouse or digging ditches or landscaping or hauling trash out of foreclosed homes or roofing or road paving or concrete work, or any of a hundred other jobs paying 7-12 an hour in the heat, on your feet all day, in the sun.
And then complain about your $11.91/hr to sit in air conditioning in a clean, safe mall environment stocked with the very latest gadgets and lots of people to talk to, all day.
Think about the guys up on a roof spreading tar all day long in 130 degree heat trying not to get badly burned by molten tar or piss off the hair trigger boss. Or the poor sap tasked with cleaning crap out of a house, with no HVAC and god only knows what in the trash. Needles, nails, excrement, bugs, who knows.
To workers like that, the Apple store environment is as close to heaven in white as they can possibly imagine.
Where did the idea EVER come from that you were supposed to get a job/situation like the one you describe and stay that way your entire life?
The plan should be, get a job. Keep that job until you can get a better one. When you can, get a better job and move up. Repeat as needed. It won't take most people more than a few years, a decade tops, to climb the job ladder into something that pays well and provides the base needed to raise a family and eventually retire. They can climb the ladder as high as ambition will take them.
Nobody is supposed to try to have a family and kids, and/or work their entire lives and try to retire off a job paying $11 an hour. THAT idea is repulsive. This country rewards people who get off their tails and think outside their self-imposed boxes (mental prison cells) and try to achieve something better. You have got to try.
Easy? No. Nobody promised easy. Just that it can be done if someone is willing to try.
Settling for less than that is the problem. Too many people peak at those low plateau jobs and never reach higher.
They won't be satisfied until every human born is required to have a content usage license their entire lives. After all, ears and eyes and a mouth are all copyright infringing devices. Somebody owns everything you see or hear, and anything you say has probably been copyrighted.
Yep, space shuttles were the only way for the US to bring something intact from orbit back down to earth (they had other ways to get stuff up).
That's not technically correct. We have long had return capability from spy satellites sending down film canisters and some of them are still operational, and there were a few sample return missions -Genesis in 2004 and Startdust in 2006. To be sure, Genesis didn't make it back entirely intact.
Clearly, you do not live in Canada, maybe you did a while back or know someone who did..... Watch out for RIM, they're really sharp cats with equity to ride out the storm. Mark my words, they don't want to be bought out. Now that Apple has given up their crown as user-oriented developers in favour of content delivery, RIM stands alone. They're entrenching as opposed to making waves. They'll be my entire stock portfolio when I get word to buy.
Nope, not Canadian. But I work for Canadians. This does disconnect me from the exact reality, point taken.
But have you not heard of Enron? The disaster there was because many employees or investors had bet everything on Enron stock and were wiped out when the company collapsed. Putting all of one's investments in one place is not usually a sound investment practice.
As for the entrenching you describe, that's nice. But RIM is building more of a Maginot line than a real defense -much less an offense. The response from competitors has already been the same as it was with the original Maginot line, and the marketplace has embraced this end-run which has delivered a different way of doing things.
"Canada Inc. is not going to allow that" There IS no "Canada Inc." Canada has not functioned as anything other than a branch plant of the USA for decades perhaps centuries, and the curent government knows absolutely NOTHING about anything other than OIL.
Wait until there's a threat to take RIM south of the border. There'll be rallies and protests and speeches and politicians demanding this or that and some sort of laughable attempt to do something desperate. None of it will matter. But that never stops politicians.
Why do you refer to one company by its stock ticker but not the others?
Because I don't own stock in any of them and don't really give a shit about ticker names, quite honestly. I use whichever one is easier to type at the moment I type it.
RIM is practically a national asset of Canada. In its glory days, it would have been inconceivable to consider selling RIM to a foreign interest -much less an uncouth and arrogant American one. Now that RIM is crippled and tumbling down the stairs of doom, it is no longer inconceivable, but there still would be extensive conditions on the sale, such as retaining so many employees in Waterloo, or having the Canadian government own a big share of the company, etc.
There is virtually no scenario under which MSFT could buy the whole thing outright and do with it whatever they want. Which is exactly what MSFT would want. They don't need or want the handsets or the fab lines or warehouses full of handsets. They want the IP. Canada Inc. is not going to allow that stripmining sale and MSFT knows it, or else they would have bought the place years ago.
The only way for a clean IP sale would be if RIM collapses completely, and the government stays out of it (unlikely; they will probably prop it up and meddle) and the bits and parts go up for public sale to highest bidder. In that case, MSFT can come rolling in with a pile of cash and just outbid everybody -of course everybody else will know that's going on and drive the bids higher. But it could be done. MSFT knows this and they don't want to get caught in the bidding mess.
I expect to be wrong but I just don't see a way for MSFT to do the acquisition they way they theoretically would want to do. Who could? Some sort of white knight Canadian company or a group of companies with cash could buy RIM and that would bypass all the nationalism problems. No idea who that could be or if their investors would scream. Buying RIM is an invitation to lose a lot of money AND the buyer still has to gut the company. Nobody is going to buy RIM and still want to make the products. They have no value and buying the company is not in any way going to change the fact that BlackBerry is dying.
Nokia has similar problems in Finland, but they haven't made a lot or friends lately. The nationalism is probably a lot lower now. The layoffs have been bitter and unpleasant. MSFT might have a better shot at either a joint venture or outright buy . But there is a LOT of Nokia that has nothing to do with the things MSFT wants. What would happen to all those other parts of the company? Does MSFT gobble up the IP and close the doors? It's not going to be easy.
Meanwhile, MSFT is in danger of spending too much time and money on these companies. It will distract them from their key mission and it could be argued that they have enough problems already staying on mission. A botched RIM or Nokia buy could infect MSFT itself similar to how AOL and Time Warner looked good on paper and was a disaster in action. Sprint and Nextel. Compaq and HP. SBC and ATT and all the others that got gobbled up by the "new" ATT.
Most life on this planet is bacteria and viruses. They don't use radio. Most of the remaining life is a higher order of some sort, but still does not use radio. You have to go very far up the tree of life to find the one little branch where we alone are the single species using radio.
To put it another way, in the 4.5 billion year history of Earth, every other form of life that has every existed or still exists hasn't had radio. None of them had it. We do, but only for the last 120 years or so and less than that for advanced forms of radio. Averaged out, not only has essentially no life form on Earth ever had radio, it has also essentially never happened. 1 species, 120 years, out of billions of species and billions of years.
It did. But by no means is this something that just happens in the course of life.
This is true. Nearly all of what we have ever broadcast has been trashed into junk RF by the time it passes through our own heliopause. Voyager 1 and 2 are helping us learn that it is a fantastic filter aggressively scrubbing and sterilizing radio. Perhaps only a few terrifically strong military radar signals or intentional interplanetary signals (i.e. the powerful Arecibo transmissions) might have made it through. Decades of TV and radio have not. For practical purposes, our Sol system is silent. We are not emitting potent enough repeating signals of the sort we ourselves are seeking.
It is logical to expect a similar result for other planetary systems where something like a heliopause exists. RF would be trashed and never make it into interplanetary space.
For even more discouragement, remember that most of life on Earth does not use radio. A planet teeming with life might yet have nobody emitting even weak signals. Radio derives from the human need to communicate, constantly. Especially while driving. It is entirely possible that another similarly advanced species might not have that need to talk talk talk and entertain at a distance.
Anyway, the universe is a very big place. It's a long way down the road to the pharmacy, but that's nothing compared to the universe. Most of it is empty. On average, we don't actually exist at all. Sigh.
Well, that's good to hear. I'm in my early 40s with no degree. Up to now, I've always gotten ahead by showing I could do things. Get foot in door, impress them, move up. And now I am manager for a department that is being eliminated. It's been a very long time since I had to interview cold and starting over is going to be starting back where I was 10 years ago. So perhaps there is hope.
Not just oil and water but also food. China already has over a billion mouths to feed and spends a tremendous amount of effort trying to feed most of them. But the rural agriculture towns are increasingly looking at the modernizing cities with envy and looking at farm fields with scorn. Besides everybody knows Foxconn is hiring.
The population will soar, paired up with an increasing social divide. Farmers won't want to farm and food shortages will get worse. Water shortages will get worse. Nobody is protecting the resources from getting fouled. Eventually it will hurt them.
To solve all of these problems, China will look to where there is plenty of food, a decent supply of water and a lot of land. Of course other countries want these things too, but we don't owe them a lot of money as we do with China. Suppose China uses that debt to buy most of the Dakotahs or Montana. Or Idaho. They don't need the state outright. Just town after town. Become the biggest landholders, run the elections, run the local politics, run the regionals, become the biggest local employers, then you own the state level without having to own it. Bring in your own people to ensure you pack the population with loyal votes.
Eventually you expand this to the nation. If needed. Grand plans? Sure. But if there's one thing history has taught us is that you need to HAVE grand plans in order to achieve the small plans. Hit enough small steps and you make the big ones. North American politics is bogged down with people who can't see past the next election much less come up with a 10-year/50-year/100-year plan. It doesn't matter anyway when somebody new comes along every election and spends the first third of their term wrecking whatever plan was going on, and the remaining two thirds trying to launch their agenda and get reelected.
This country is not capable of fielding people who can think and act and followthrough on the century plans it will take to solve some of our biggest problems.
After a year of having to endure "Your old Mac Core2 Solo 32bit can't RUN 64bit-only Lion! Loser!" comments, now, NOW I can say, there is a darn good benefit to staying behind the times! This security issue does not affect me!
This totally refills my Apple User Smugness supply.
For THAT price, you could have bought a Technet license and gotten multiple Win7 licenses not to mention licenses for Office and nearly everything else Microsoft makes.
Aliens would not need to come here for water. This keeps popping up in scifi and fantasy but the fact is, there is plenty of water frozen up in our Oort cloud on the fringes of nowhere to make it much easier and more convenient place to get water than bothering to come all the way to the inner planets, worry about stealing it or shooting it out with a bunch of trigger-happy people.
How much frozen water is out there? More than all the water on the Earth, probably by several times over. And that's just our Oort cloud. It's likely that many planetary systems would have similar resources.
If they want water, they would not even need to leave their home system to just grab a few comets and melt them down. Done. It is similar if minerals and other raw materials are needed, as noted in this week's asteroid mining news. You do not need to bother with Earth to get everything you need.
BTW, using resources like this is entirely excluded from discussion about what makes a place habitable. We humans are so focused on flowing water, just the right temperatures, just the right this or that, we forget that a reasonably space-faring species would have the ability to use non-planetary resources like comets and asteroids and perhaps live in or on a constructed environment (a ship) rather than needing the so-called Goldilocks planet. We look so narrowly for this one way that life can exist as if we know all about life. It's sad. Look around the Earth: a billion species many of which live their own way. We have an example right here of the diversity of life and yet we ignore it.
What makes you think C4 would cost any more to get onto a plane?
Nothing. The cost is not really important. The important part is that the TSA is supposed to be tasked with protecting the safety of the transportation system and its users. In the current era, that means protecting it from bombs, threats, etc. that can injure or kill, or damage the airplanes and make them crash, etc. Their job is not general law enforcement.
Unless you manage to hurl a brick of cocaine or pot through a cockpit window, they are simply not that kind of threat. Illegal, no doubt. Prohibited, sure. But not the same threat as a brick of C4 with a detonator or some grenades or whatever. The drugs by themselves in their bundles pose as much actual and direct threat as a stack of Skymall catalogs. Possibly less since the Skymall paper could actually cut you or just make you buy something awful.
They can therefore crow all they want about stopping the drugs and busting their own agents. He or she may have allowed worse things through. Without evidence of that, they are basically saying they saved us all from Godzilla. Proof? Do you see Godzilla? Done.
This reminds me of the time my company decided that the annual bonus plan wasn't going to be given out that year, for some goofball reasons. Most teams were carefully maginalized to keep them from qualifying for bonus anyway, but there were some people left who had been counting on it.
And they knew about the open whole_company email distribution list address. It had no filters and nothing to block external emails.
So naturally, as soon as the bonus was cancelled, disposable email accounts popped up across the web and began firing a bitch barrage broadside into the open whole_company email distro list. Gripe after gripe went on for several hours in the middle of the night. Much fun was had by all who ready that stuff. Even the IT people enjoyed it even as they had to reluctantly block the address from further use.
We did get a new bonus plan after that, so perhaps the complaints worked. Shrug.
Management loves announcing bonus plans and performance incentives but hates hates hates paying them. It ends up not being much of an incentive if you know they're handing you five bucks they'd openly rather spend on a rope to wring your neck because the company didn't outdo Apple this year.
A Kroger near me featured extensive IBM hardware until recently. They just did a semi-refresh of the store and tossed all the IBM hardware. They have another brand now. It's flashier and newer and quieter.
I miss the distinctive IBM printer noises. That clattering is unmistakable. The sound of commerce.
Slashdot Mirror
When he goes to make his purchase of BBY stock, will he do what BBY customers do and look up the item before buying?
He's offering $26 a share. I bet Amazon has it for $12, Newegg for $13 and Monoprice for $1.87 in five colors.
Ah the sweet irony if this could happen. Not only is BBY cornered by arguably better competitors, the competitors even sell the company itself for less.
Yeah this works best as a joke on a late-night TV monologue.
Then a controlled dive could eliminate the need for afterburners completely.
Because a controlled dive works so well on takeoff. If you do it JUST right, you can achieve Mach about the time the controlled dive passes the six-feet-under mark.
Pity is, you only get to do this once, there is no go-around, and there's not even an in flight meal. On the other hand, you can get by with a one-way pass and the sniveling brat in 5A is going to die nanoseconds before you do. Small justices matter.
Most surely? How do we know they'll use radio at all? We have exactly one example of intelligent radio communication. Us.
The Earth -the only place we know for sure has life- has somewhere around a few hundred million other forms of life, none of which use radio. Just us.
So it's pretty ballsy to extrapolate the entire universe's radio habits from a sample of one. We really have no business assuming aliens would communicate anything like we do or would use some signal that we could detect and understand as communication.
A Sybian is possibly the best thing a person can own. Either they get to enjoy it themselves, or their friends will drop by to enjoy it. It's a win either way. No downside.
8 hasn't yet shipped and hasn't proven itself capable of running "real business stuff" and they already want to cram it down the throats of corporate buyers?
Where I work, our IT team is still slowly migrating to Windows 7, having only recently halted Vista installs. New PCs are all Windows 7. Because we're more interested in having employees get billable work done instead of calling for IT support because some app is broken. Where it's been deployed, 7 is working fine. Our workers know how to use it. No issues.
I've played with 8. It seems geared for people who have never learned how to use Windows -except all of us worker bees have, in fact, done that. Our jobs depend on doing work. Not doing work differently, with tiles. Just because someone decided that was the way to go. I am sure it's a fine OS and there are valid reasons for every change. But we don't want change. At all. 7 works. Why change?
Frankly, a lot of people are still unhappy with the whimsical way Office 2007 and 2010 moved things around. They're trying to compose a document and can't find the control they used to be able to find. They are wasting time sorting it out and getting upset. The user impression -correct or not- is that stuff changed in Office just for kicks. And if they got their hands on 8, where stuff is "just changed" we would expect the same complaints.
With that in mind, and once again because Windows 7 is just pretty darn good, we're not looking seriously at 8. Maybe 9. We think we can hold on for that long, barring some sort of 8 miracle feature we've yet to hear about.
In my personal home network is four PCs running 7 and one Mac. Outside of a VM to play with, 8 doesn't fit with what I need or want to do. Shrug.
Yeah, they need to try working in a warehouse or digging ditches or landscaping or hauling trash out of foreclosed homes or roofing or road paving or concrete work, or any of a hundred other jobs paying 7-12 an hour in the heat, on your feet all day, in the sun.
And then complain about your $11.91/hr to sit in air conditioning in a clean, safe mall environment stocked with the very latest gadgets and lots of people to talk to, all day.
Think about the guys up on a roof spreading tar all day long in 130 degree heat trying not to get badly burned by molten tar or piss off the hair trigger boss. Or the poor sap tasked with cleaning crap out of a house, with no HVAC and god only knows what in the trash. Needles, nails, excrement, bugs, who knows.
To workers like that, the Apple store environment is as close to heaven in white as they can possibly imagine.
Where did the idea EVER come from that you were supposed to get a job/situation like the one you describe and stay that way your entire life?
The plan should be, get a job. Keep that job until you can get a better one. When you can, get a better job and move up. Repeat as needed. It won't take most people more than a few years, a decade tops, to climb the job ladder into something that pays well and provides the base needed to raise a family and eventually retire. They can climb the ladder as high as ambition will take them.
Nobody is supposed to try to have a family and kids, and/or work their entire lives and try to retire off a job paying $11 an hour. THAT idea is repulsive. This country rewards people who get off their tails and think outside their self-imposed boxes (mental prison cells) and try to achieve something better. You have got to try.
Easy? No. Nobody promised easy. Just that it can be done if someone is willing to try.
Settling for less than that is the problem. Too many people peak at those low plateau jobs and never reach higher.
They won't be satisfied until every human born is required to have a content usage license their entire lives. After all, ears and eyes and a mouth are all copyright infringing devices. Somebody owns everything you see or hear, and anything you say has probably been copyrighted.
Pay up!
1) CRTL+A
2) CRTL+C
3) ?
4) CRTL+V
5) Profit!
Yep, space shuttles were the only way for the US to bring something intact from orbit back down to earth (they had other ways to get stuff up).
That's not technically correct. We have long had return capability from spy satellites sending down film canisters and some of them are still operational, and there were a few sample return missions -Genesis in 2004 and Startdust in 2006. To be sure, Genesis didn't make it back entirely intact.
Clearly, you do not live in Canada, maybe you did a while back or know someone who did. .... Watch out for RIM, they're really sharp cats with equity to ride out the storm. Mark my words, they don't want to be bought out. Now that Apple has given up their crown as user-oriented developers in favour of content delivery, RIM stands alone. They're entrenching as opposed to making waves. They'll be my entire stock portfolio when I get word to buy.
Nope, not Canadian. But I work for Canadians. This does disconnect me from the exact reality, point taken.
But have you not heard of Enron? The disaster there was because many employees or investors had bet everything on Enron stock and were wiped out when the company collapsed. Putting all of one's investments in one place is not usually a sound investment practice.
As for the entrenching you describe, that's nice. But RIM is building more of a Maginot line than a real defense -much less an offense. The response from competitors has already been the same as it was with the original Maginot line, and the marketplace has embraced this end-run which has delivered a different way of doing things.
"Canada Inc. is not going to allow that" There IS no "Canada Inc." Canada has not functioned as anything other than a branch plant of the USA for decades perhaps centuries, and the curent government knows absolutely NOTHING about anything other than OIL.
Wait until there's a threat to take RIM south of the border. There'll be rallies and protests and speeches and politicians demanding this or that and some sort of laughable attempt to do something desperate. None of it will matter. But that never stops politicians.
Why do you refer to one company by its stock ticker but not the others?
Because I don't own stock in any of them and don't really give a shit about ticker names, quite honestly. I use whichever one is easier to type at the moment I type it.
RIM is practically a national asset of Canada. In its glory days, it would have been inconceivable to consider selling RIM to a foreign interest -much less an uncouth and arrogant American one. Now that RIM is crippled and tumbling down the stairs of doom, it is no longer inconceivable, but there still would be extensive conditions on the sale, such as retaining so many employees in Waterloo, or having the Canadian government own a big share of the company, etc.
There is virtually no scenario under which MSFT could buy the whole thing outright and do with it whatever they want. Which is exactly what MSFT would want. They don't need or want the handsets or the fab lines or warehouses full of handsets. They want the IP. Canada Inc. is not going to allow that stripmining sale and MSFT knows it, or else they would have bought the place years ago.
The only way for a clean IP sale would be if RIM collapses completely, and the government stays out of it (unlikely; they will probably prop it up and meddle) and the bits and parts go up for public sale to highest bidder. In that case, MSFT can come rolling in with a pile of cash and just outbid everybody -of course everybody else will know that's going on and drive the bids higher. But it could be done. MSFT knows this and they don't want to get caught in the bidding mess.
I expect to be wrong but I just don't see a way for MSFT to do the acquisition they way they theoretically would want to do. Who could? Some sort of white knight Canadian company or a group of companies with cash could buy RIM and that would bypass all the nationalism problems. No idea who that could be or if their investors would scream. Buying RIM is an invitation to lose a lot of money AND the buyer still has to gut the company. Nobody is going to buy RIM and still want to make the products. They have no value and buying the company is not in any way going to change the fact that BlackBerry is dying.
Nokia has similar problems in Finland, but they haven't made a lot or friends lately. The nationalism is probably a lot lower now. The layoffs have been bitter and unpleasant. MSFT might have a better shot at either a joint venture or outright buy . But there is a LOT of Nokia that has nothing to do with the things MSFT wants. What would happen to all those other parts of the company? Does MSFT gobble up the IP and close the doors? It's not going to be easy.
Meanwhile, MSFT is in danger of spending too much time and money on these companies. It will distract them from their key mission and it could be argued that they have enough problems already staying on mission. A botched RIM or Nokia buy could infect MSFT itself similar to how AOL and Time Warner looked good on paper and was a disaster in action. Sprint and Nextel. Compaq and HP. SBC and ATT and all the others that got gobbled up by the "new" ATT.
Sometimes the sum of parts is a negative number.
Most life on this planet is bacteria and viruses. They don't use radio. Most of the remaining life is a higher order of some sort, but still does not use radio. You have to go very far up the tree of life to find the one little branch where we alone are the single species using radio.
To put it another way, in the 4.5 billion year history of Earth, every other form of life that has every existed or still exists hasn't had radio. None of them had it. We do, but only for the last 120 years or so and less than that for advanced forms of radio. Averaged out, not only has essentially no life form on Earth ever had radio, it has also essentially never happened. 1 species, 120 years, out of billions of species and billions of years.
It did. But by no means is this something that just happens in the course of life.
This is true. Nearly all of what we have ever broadcast has been trashed into junk RF by the time it passes through our own heliopause. Voyager 1 and 2 are helping us learn that it is a fantastic filter aggressively scrubbing and sterilizing radio. Perhaps only a few terrifically strong military radar signals or intentional interplanetary signals (i.e. the powerful Arecibo transmissions) might have made it through. Decades of TV and radio have not. For practical purposes, our Sol system is silent. We are not emitting potent enough repeating signals of the sort we ourselves are seeking.
It is logical to expect a similar result for other planetary systems where something like a heliopause exists. RF would be trashed and never make it into interplanetary space.
For even more discouragement, remember that most of life on Earth does not use radio. A planet teeming with life might yet have nobody emitting even weak signals. Radio derives from the human need to communicate, constantly. Especially while driving. It is entirely possible that another similarly advanced species might not have that need to talk talk talk and entertain at a distance.
Anyway, the universe is a very big place. It's a long way down the road to the pharmacy, but that's nothing compared to the universe. Most of it is empty. On average, we don't actually exist at all. Sigh.
Well, that's good to hear. I'm in my early 40s with no degree. Up to now, I've always gotten ahead by showing I could do things. Get foot in door, impress them, move up. And now I am manager for a department that is being eliminated. It's been a very long time since I had to interview cold and starting over is going to be starting back where I was 10 years ago. So perhaps there is hope.
Not just oil and water but also food. China already has over a billion mouths to feed and spends a tremendous amount of effort trying to feed most of them. But the rural agriculture towns are increasingly looking at the modernizing cities with envy and looking at farm fields with scorn. Besides everybody knows Foxconn is hiring.
The population will soar, paired up with an increasing social divide. Farmers won't want to farm and food shortages will get worse. Water shortages will get worse. Nobody is protecting the resources from getting fouled. Eventually it will hurt them.
To solve all of these problems, China will look to where there is plenty of food, a decent supply of water and a lot of land. Of course other countries want these things too, but we don't owe them a lot of money as we do with China. Suppose China uses that debt to buy most of the Dakotahs or Montana. Or Idaho. They don't need the state outright. Just town after town. Become the biggest landholders, run the elections, run the local politics, run the regionals, become the biggest local employers, then you own the state level without having to own it. Bring in your own people to ensure you pack the population with loyal votes.
Eventually you expand this to the nation. If needed. Grand plans? Sure. But if there's one thing history has taught us is that you need to HAVE grand plans in order to achieve the small plans. Hit enough small steps and you make the big ones. North American politics is bogged down with people who can't see past the next election much less come up with a 10-year/50-year/100-year plan. It doesn't matter anyway when somebody new comes along every election and spends the first third of their term wrecking whatever plan was going on, and the remaining two thirds trying to launch their agenda and get reelected.
This country is not capable of fielding people who can think and act and followthrough on the century plans it will take to solve some of our biggest problems.
After a year of having to endure "Your old Mac Core2 Solo 32bit can't RUN 64bit-only Lion! Loser!" comments, now, NOW I can say, there is a darn good benefit to staying behind the times! This security issue does not affect me!
This totally refills my Apple User Smugness supply.
For THAT price, you could have bought a Technet license and gotten multiple Win7 licenses not to mention licenses for Office and nearly everything else Microsoft makes.
Aliens would not need to come here for water. This keeps popping up in scifi and fantasy but the fact is, there is plenty of water frozen up in our Oort cloud on the fringes of nowhere to make it much easier and more convenient place to get water than bothering to come all the way to the inner planets, worry about stealing it or shooting it out with a bunch of trigger-happy people.
How much frozen water is out there? More than all the water on the Earth, probably by several times over. And that's just our Oort cloud. It's likely that many planetary systems would have similar resources.
If they want water, they would not even need to leave their home system to just grab a few comets and melt them down. Done. It is similar if minerals and other raw materials are needed, as noted in this week's asteroid mining news. You do not need to bother with Earth to get everything you need.
BTW, using resources like this is entirely excluded from discussion about what makes a place habitable. We humans are so focused on flowing water, just the right temperatures, just the right this or that, we forget that a reasonably space-faring species would have the ability to use non-planetary resources like comets and asteroids and perhaps live in or on a constructed environment (a ship) rather than needing the so-called Goldilocks planet. We look so narrowly for this one way that life can exist as if we know all about life. It's sad. Look around the Earth: a billion species many of which live their own way. We have an example right here of the diversity of life and yet we ignore it.
True. But...
What makes you think C4 would cost any more to get onto a plane?
Nothing. The cost is not really important. The important part is that the TSA is supposed to be tasked with protecting the safety of the transportation system and its users. In the current era, that means protecting it from bombs, threats, etc. that can injure or kill, or damage the airplanes and make them crash, etc. Their job is not general law enforcement.
Unless you manage to hurl a brick of cocaine or pot through a cockpit window, they are simply not that kind of threat. Illegal, no doubt. Prohibited, sure. But not the same threat as a brick of C4 with a detonator or some grenades or whatever. The drugs by themselves in their bundles pose as much actual and direct threat as a stack of Skymall catalogs. Possibly less since the Skymall paper could actually cut you or just make you buy something awful.
They can therefore crow all they want about stopping the drugs and busting their own agents. He or she may have allowed worse things through. Without evidence of that, they are basically saying they saved us all from Godzilla. Proof? Do you see Godzilla? Done.
Cocaine won't bring down an airplane. It won't explode in the TSA queues. It won't leap out of the bag and stab anyone.
This reminds me of the time my company decided that the annual bonus plan wasn't going to be given out that year, for some goofball reasons. Most teams were carefully maginalized to keep them from qualifying for bonus anyway, but there were some people left who had been counting on it.
And they knew about the open whole_company email distribution list address. It had no filters and nothing to block external emails.
So naturally, as soon as the bonus was cancelled, disposable email accounts popped up across the web and began firing a bitch barrage broadside into the open whole_company email distro list. Gripe after gripe went on for several hours in the middle of the night. Much fun was had by all who ready that stuff. Even the IT people enjoyed it even as they had to reluctantly block the address from further use.
We did get a new bonus plan after that, so perhaps the complaints worked. Shrug.
Management loves announcing bonus plans and performance incentives but hates hates hates paying them. It ends up not being much of an incentive if you know they're handing you five bucks they'd openly rather spend on a rope to wring your neck because the company didn't outdo Apple this year.
A Kroger near me featured extensive IBM hardware until recently. They just did a semi-refresh of the store and tossed all the IBM hardware. They have another brand now. It's flashier and newer and quieter.
I miss the distinctive IBM printer noises. That clattering is unmistakable. The sound of commerce.