And IMHO, alien hunting is a waste of time, since we still don't really have a clue as to how they would communicate.
But we now know quite a bit about the electromagnetic spectrum so we can make some reasonably intelligent guesses.
I mean, if they are as advanced as we are, then that means that they would be at least hundreds of lightyears away from us (by consensus opinion) and therefore: their radio sigs would also be hundreds of years old and wouldn;t give us enough insight to them anyway.
Wouldn't just "there's something else out there" be a pretty cool first insight?
Besides, how do we know which freqs to check?
SETI gear checks *lots* of frequencies at once.
How do we know that they don't allocate spectrum EXACTLY like we do?
We don't. We assume that they're likely to be using a narrowband signal (rather than UWB-like techniques), but beyond that we don't assume much.
Max Headroom wasn't such a big deal here in Australia (we saw the Coke ads, but I'm not sure that we ever saw the series), and it was 15 years ago (and so people under about 22 won't remember). Hence the need to explain it to some people.
that until there are exploitable economic resources, and permanent residents there, it's not an issue. When people try to economically exploit the moon, it will become an issue then and will be settled by normal political means (ie international treaties, popular movements, shady underhanded deals, wars...).
Item: The cost of putting up a space elevator has been set at $10G; a space elevator would drop launch costs (measured against the Shuttle) about a hundredfold (ie, to roughly $100k/t).
Fact: the materials to build the space elevator don't exist yet. Carbon nanotube composites might, but nobody has yet demonstrated one, let alone demonstrated that the material can be produced in quantity and at a realistic cost. Until they are, and the exact properties of the proposed material are known, estimates of the cost and timeframe of a space elevator is just speculating.
Until those nanotube composites become a lot closer to availability, abandoning conventional exploration on the grounds that a space elevator might at some uncertain future time make space travel much cheaper is silly.
Wrong. Obviously the people who go back are part of the conspiracy and either aren't really going or are going to doctor the data they collect to show fake images of the Apollo landing sites.
The conspiracy theorists are wrong. Apollo really happened. For them to be right requires to many highly intelligent, principled people involved in the missions to be either conned or coerced into lying. Not to mention the fact that the fakery would have had to fool the Russians, who at the time would have just loved to expose America's triumph as a fake and who undoubtedly tracked the position of the radio signals from the Apollo craft precisely.
Subsidise the digital receivers. It's been discussed seriously in Britain, I believe.
Now before you rabbit on about the wonderful United States government couldn't possibly interfere in the free market like that, might I remind you about, oh, the $20,000 dollars per farming worker the US government hands out in subsidies. Or the airline bailout...
Is the U.S. Army's Improvised Explosives manual. Hundreds of tested, proven, bomb mixture recipes you can cook in your own kitchen, simple enough for any idiot.
Not that I recommend you actually *try* anything in it unless you're faced with an occupying army, but it was fascinating stuff.
There has been a lot of discussion about the politics of Star Wars over the past few years, and a common conclusion is that it ain't pretty. In their opinion, the Rebels and Jedi are just another small bunch of elites (particularly the Jedi, who as revealed in Episode I turn out to be primarily the result of winning the genetic lottery rather than their own efforts) who want to rule instead of the current one.
I know how to tell a revolver from an automatic, but that's about it. What's so particularly cool about this gun that you're prepared to shell out what appears to be an outrageous amount of cash for?
Putting email addresses on *that* would be a spammer's paradise. Even if it was restricted to local representatives, that would only induce them to become, in effect, spammers.
As to whether a person is a constituent is important, politicians are supposed to, at least in part, represent the views of their local area whilst keeping in mind the greater good of the country and the world. Therefore, I don't see any problem with them giving greater weight to constitutent contact.
This report came from FOI requests made by the Opposition (the minority party), who are opposing further extensions to wiretapping laws.
These bills are thus likely to fail in the Senate, as the opposition is opposing the bill and the green-left minor parties that hold the balance of power were *never* going to vote in favour of it.
This is (at last) a somewhat politically courageous action by the opposition, because standing up for civil liberties is rarely politically advantagous and will run the risk of the government accusing them of risking Australia's national security or some such nonsense. Kudos to Labor for actually showing a little backbone.
If a ride's g-loading is sufficiently high and sustained to cause patrons to black out and injure themselves surely they'd find themselves getting sued for negligence, making such a regulation unnecessary anyway...
By the way, 5.6 G's is pretty damned high anyway, isn't it? I dunno whether I'd particularly like to ride a coaster much above that for any length of time. I'd hasten to add I wouldn't want to stop consenting adults doing so if they knew what they were in for, though.
However hard you try, though, you're not going to convince the parent poster. You are trying to debate with a fundamentalist libertarian whose thought processes go "government==bad". It's not worth your breath trying to convince them, any more than it's worth trying to argue with commies whose corresponding thought process is "business==bad".
According to what I've read, the vulnerabilities this exploits are covered in stable by the updates discussed in this offical Debian security advisory.
Unstable, is at 0.9.6g and thus shouldn't be vulnerable.
My point was that a human's vision system is dynamic and can focus its attention on only a small fraction of an image, so even if the total image pixel count exceeds the eye's sensor count, it doesn't necessarily mean that pixellation will be undetectable.
The eye's actual resolution can't be easily squished down into a useful number, because the density of sensors (rods and cones) varies quite a lot throughout the eye, and it's constantly in motion.
Particularly with a large print, you're going to give your full attention to only a portion of the print at any one time. So, even if the eye can only see 800x600 or whatever (though calculations like this are pretty misleading because the eye does all sorts of image processing tricks and has non-uniform sensor density, IIRC), that doesn't mean a higher-resolution image is a waste.
One of the secret levels in Id's classic Wolf3D (the full commercial version) was a recreation of the classic pacman map and featured four indestructible ghosts. No power pills or magic tunnel, unfortunately:(
More like 2025, even being crazily optimistic. Even assuming we invent the magic technology to make affordable spaceflight possible tomorrow - for instance, bulk quantities of nanotube composites for the space elevator - to build the infrastructure to a point where it'd be available for passengers would take that long, I'd think. My guess is more likely 2040 (by which time I'll be about to retire, probably... woohoo, blow the retirement savings on a moon trip:)).
However, I'd be very surprised if suborbital flights didn't become available to paying customers at semi-realistic prices (~100,000 USD) before 2008.
As to the speed issue, Do a complete dump once a month, and incremental ones daily. That should help reduce the speed problems. Even so, you're right in that we'd probably need a faster network for this monster. 802.11g, perhaps?
Whilst there is some political control over the electoral system, the judiciary is not politicised over here to anywhere near the same extent as it is in the US. Political interference in the electoral commission is also not really an issue, because:
Neither party wants to be seen to politicise a system which is perceived by the public to work well.
The parties themselves are sensible enough to recognise that pushing electoral laws to the limit is not good for the country.
Australia's system of government, with fewer institutional checks and balances than the US, places far more responsibility in the hands of politicians to act with some degree of responsibility (with the threat of electoral punishment if they do not) rather than the US system which seems to rely on judges cleaning up after political grandstanding.
Australia's electoral system is not perfect (we have a ludicrously unrepresentative senate where a Tasmanian Senate vote is worth about ten times that of one from New South Wales, and we are not immune to electoral fraud) but it has survived extremely close elections without the convulsions of the US system.
What proportion of EU members speak English, either as a first or second language?
60 million British (are there any people left who only speak Welsh?), 4 million Irish (again, maybe a small proportion who only speak Gaelic?). What fraction of the population in other EU countries speak English to a sufficient standard to write a comprehensible post on Slashdot? (yes, I know that rules out half the/. posters whose native language *is* English).
Slashdot Mirror
But we now know quite a bit about the electromagnetic spectrum so we can make some reasonably intelligent guesses.
Wouldn't just "there's something else out there" be a pretty cool first insight?
SETI gear checks *lots* of frequencies at once.
We don't. We assume that they're likely to be using a narrowband signal (rather than UWB-like techniques), but beyond that we don't assume much.
Max Headroom wasn't such a big deal here in Australia (we saw the Coke ads, but I'm not sure that we ever saw the series), and it was 15 years ago (and so people under about 22 won't remember). Hence the need to explain it to some people.
that until there are exploitable economic resources, and permanent residents there, it's not an issue. When people try to economically exploit the moon, it will become an issue then and will be settled by normal political means (ie international treaties, popular movements, shady underhanded deals, wars...).
Fact: the materials to build the space elevator don't exist yet. Carbon nanotube composites might, but nobody has yet demonstrated one, let alone demonstrated that the material can be produced in quantity and at a realistic cost. Until they are, and the exact properties of the proposed material are known, estimates of the cost and timeframe of a space elevator is just speculating.
Until those nanotube composites become a lot closer to availability, abandoning conventional exploration on the grounds that a space elevator might at some uncertain future time make space travel much cheaper is silly.
The conspiracy theorists are wrong. Apollo really happened. For them to be right requires to many highly intelligent, principled people involved in the missions to be either conned or coerced into lying. Not to mention the fact that the fakery would have had to fool the Russians, who at the time would have just loved to expose America's triumph as a fake and who undoubtedly tracked the position of the radio signals from the Apollo craft precisely.
Now before you rabbit on about the wonderful United States government couldn't possibly interfere in the free market like that, might I remind you about, oh, the $20,000 dollars per farming worker the US government hands out in subsidies. Or the airline bailout...
I still hasten to add, *don't try this at home, kids*.
I was hoping for a "surfing habits of the blowfly" version, or maybe "Mambo Theology"....
Not that I recommend you actually *try* anything in it unless you're faced with an occupying army, but it was fascinating stuff.
There has been a lot of discussion about the politics of Star Wars over the past few years, and a common conclusion is that it ain't pretty. In their opinion, the Rebels and Jedi are just another small bunch of elites (particularly the Jedi, who as revealed in Episode I turn out to be primarily the result of winning the genetic lottery rather than their own efforts) who want to rule instead of the current one.
I know how to tell a revolver from an automatic, but that's about it. What's so particularly cool about this gun that you're prepared to shell out what appears to be an outrageous amount of cash for?
As to whether a person is a constituent is important, politicians are supposed to, at least in part, represent the views of their local area whilst keeping in mind the greater good of the country and the world. Therefore, I don't see any problem with them giving greater weight to constitutent contact.
These bills are thus likely to fail in the Senate, as the opposition is opposing the bill and the green-left minor parties that hold the balance of power were *never* going to vote in favour of it.
This is (at last) a somewhat politically courageous action by the opposition, because standing up for civil liberties is rarely politically advantagous and will run the risk of the government accusing them of risking Australia's national security or some such nonsense. Kudos to Labor for actually showing a little backbone.
U
nauthorised wiretapping by intelligence agencies is kinda nasty, but they can't use it to convict you (directly).
By the way, 5.6 G's is pretty damned high anyway, isn't it? I dunno whether I'd particularly like to ride a coaster much above that for any length of time. I'd hasten to add I wouldn't want to stop consenting adults doing so if they knew what they were in for, though.
However hard you try, though, you're not going to convince the parent poster. You are trying to debate with a fundamentalist libertarian whose thought processes go "government==bad". It's not worth your breath trying to convince them, any more than it's worth trying to argue with commies whose corresponding thought process is "business==bad".
Unstable, is at 0.9.6g and thus shouldn't be vulnerable.
The eye's actual resolution can't be easily squished down into a useful number, because the density of sensors (rods and cones) varies quite a lot throughout the eye, and it's constantly in motion.
Particularly with a large print, you're going to give your full attention to only a portion of the print at any one time. So, even if the eye can only see 800x600 or whatever (though calculations like this are pretty misleading because the eye does all sorts of image processing tricks and has non-uniform sensor density, IIRC), that doesn't mean a higher-resolution image is a waste.
Not many Aussies run gnutella AFAIK :)
One of the secret levels in Id's classic Wolf3D (the full commercial version) was a recreation of the classic pacman map and featured four indestructible ghosts. No power pills or magic tunnel, unfortunately :(
However, I'd be very surprised if suborbital flights didn't become available to paying customers at semi-realistic prices (~100,000 USD) before 2008.
As to the speed issue, Do a complete dump once a month, and incremental ones daily. That should help reduce the speed problems. Even so, you're right in that we'd probably need a faster network for this monster. 802.11g, perhaps?
Australia's electoral system is not perfect (we have a ludicrously unrepresentative senate where a Tasmanian Senate vote is worth about ten times that of one from New South Wales, and we are not immune to electoral fraud) but it has survived extremely close elections without the convulsions of the US system.
60 million British (are there any people left who only speak Welsh?), 4 million Irish (again, maybe a small proportion who only speak Gaelic?). What fraction of the population in other EU countries speak English to a sufficient standard to write a comprehensible post on Slashdot? (yes, I know that rules out half the /. posters whose native language *is* English).