I suspect that the most likely outcome of visitors from space would be trade with the aliens. Trade is a reliable way of building up a relationship with a people without actually allying with them.
While I agree with you about rubbishing the idea that aliens would come here to either hunt us for sport or food. I don't think you can rule out a whole sale irridication of us as a goal.
If they are coming all this way to trade with us then unless whats being traded for is something exclusively made by us, there is an ecomonic advantage in completely controlling that resource which means that there could be a good reason to get rid of us.
If that was the plan, I think it's likely the attack would be something indirect, environmental pollution or a bioweapon.
For that matter, they have already shown the ability to travel in space easily and therefore have some pretty good engineering, why don't they just place a shield between us and the sun and block out our light, it might take a couple of years for us to finally die off but it would be impossible for us to counter.
Attack method 2 - Ambush Hunting, is what requires good colour perception and 3d mapping to guard against but you seem to be saying that it requires motion detection.
A good ambush hunter is never going to give it's position away by moving, it's waiting for you to come close enough to strike so your only defence is to spot it based on colour and 3d mapping (and once you have enough brain power, indirect evidence such are tracks) before you are within striking range. Against a proper ambush hunter if you a relying on motion detection then chances are you are already dead because then the predator is calling all the shots and you are never going to be able to react fast enough.
What if you built the battery in such so that producing electricity is the dominate strain.
Best solution I could think off would be to divide the surface that the bacteria grow on into discrete areas maybe 1cm squared and monitor the current received from each square.
Once a day, kill off everything on the area which produced the smallest current, maybe by heating the surface somehow.
you would probably end up using more energy destorying bad areas than you would gain but it might extend the useful strains working life - if you are lucky, you might even end up with a more productive strain without any genetic engineering needed.
I don't think that they are planning on burning the spheres.
I read the article as, you pump the sphere into a tank in your car (because they can flow like a liquid), using some heat and a slight vacume, the hydrogen is released from the spheres.
The hydrogen goes off to the fuel cell/IC engine (what ever use you have for the hydrogen) and the sphere's are left behind.
I suppose the best possible solution would be to draw the sphere's out of the main tank, release the hydrogen and move the now emoty sphere's to a second tank where they can be collected next time you fill the main tank. Only problem I can see with that would be the second tank would have to be the same volume as the first because the sphere's volume are not going to change when the hydrogen is released.
For cheapness, I suppose you could use 1 tank, the hydrogen is released into that main tank which would increase the pressure and prevent further hydrogen being release, the faster the engine draws the hydrogen out of the main tank, the faster the hydrogen would be released from the spheres, it would make a nice self regulating system. Downside to that idea would be how do you then seperate empty and charged sphere's to return to the fuel station.
In the eyes of the government, we are all innocent until proven guilty.
I think that the way the government has been behaving lately, it is more the other way around.
It kind of depends on how you interpret the until proven bit doesn't.
I read it as you are innocent until evidence shows you as guilty.
I think governments take it as everyone is guilty, we just don't have the evidence about your guilt yet. The goverenment still have to prove you are guilty as opposed to you proving you are innocent , but that doesn't stop them mining every possible source of information to find that proof that you are guilty.
It's kind of a Judge Dredd perversion of what the phrase was suppose to mean.
The people who got into CS because it's the only thing they could concieve of doing; and would pay for the priviledge if they had to, will, in the long run, remain.
Don't say that, it will give Management some stupid ideas.
Second, it means thousands of people are relying on one person for their gear to work properly, a person the company did not even bother to consult.
Thats not quite true, the routers have a long list of NTP servers, one of which is this guys NTP server, the gear then used some algorithm to choose which NTP server to use.
The article doesn't mention whether it's a global list which gets hit at random or whether it's regional with a preference order or whether that algorithm is called upon everytime the NTP service is used (eg, once a unit choose the NTP server it always uses the same server or whether it has an equal chance of hitting every other NTP server in the list).
How the algorithm chooses the NTP server is relevent, the long and short of it is that D-Link are not relying on 1 guy, so for them this is not an issue unless he find someway to poison the results he sends back and D-Link customers start getting bad times.
Earth's population is currently held at artificially high levels because the availibility of cheap energy and chemical supplies in the form of Fossil Fuels.
When the Fossil Fuels run out, we are going to find we can't feed everyone properly and the human population is going to crash, we can either choose to limit population now and decrease it slowly over time or we let Mother Nature choose the appropriate population over a decade or so. I know which I would prefer
Of course, we might find a cheap plentiful supply of energy and chemical feed stock which would avert that situation, but it's unlikely.
If it's November for Japan, and they don't do the same launch date worldwide, could the Revolution be out before it? Isn't it supposed to be a worldwide release around that time?
If it is a purely licensing issue which isn't likely to require any hardware changes, Sony might be able to use the delay to build up a large stock of the PS3 and do a worldwide launch
Under a draft law expected to be voted in parliament on Thursday, consumers would be able to legally use software that converts digital content into any format.
Apple can still sell songs with Fairplay encryption present.
It's just that the end user would now have a legal right to break the DRM and convert the file into what ever format he needs which of course renders the DRM pointless but Apple would not be breaking their contract if this law was enacted.
So instead of being able to be more thorough and spend more time with a project thanks to the free time the technology enables, instead in leads to us getting rushed through it more and more.
I found that at my previous job. I work as a Software Tester, sometimes there would be a little slack in the test schedule so I would use that time to expand the testing beyond what the test script asked for while other testers in my group would just run tests at the same speed and would have some free time at the end of a project which would often get filled with silly little manager assigned tasks.
Come end of year evaluation, it was the testers who got the silly little tasks that got the best payrises because they were seen to be taking on extra tasks which shows them to be more productive.
My arguement was always that because I was expanding the tests and finding more bugs (which at the end of the day is the job of a tester) I was more productive than anyone else but because it was a hidden metric, the managers never listened. So glad I got out of that job.
I think the point here is that if the article is longer, it could
a) go into the main topic in more detail b) cover more related topics
Since these sorts of reference sources tend to be used as a first point of contact for a new topic, surely having more infomation (especially information that can lead to more background reading) in one place is useful and the benefit of that could potentially offset 1 extra factual inaccuracy.
...Everyone I talk to says it takes more than 250 applications and 6 months to 3 years to find something else to do. The companies I talked to says that they get about 50,000 applications per month. So, even if one is perfectly qualified for a job, the odds are worse than getting hit by lightning...
You expect to be hit by lightning in the next 6 months-3 years ?
I guess the odds aren't really worse than getting hit by lightning.
Slashdot Mirror
If they are coming all this way to trade with us then unless whats being traded for is something exclusively made by us, there is an ecomonic advantage in completely controlling that resource which means that there could be a good reason to get rid of us.
If that was the plan, I think it's likely the attack would be something indirect, environmental pollution or a bioweapon.
For that matter, they have already shown the ability to travel in space easily and therefore have some pretty good engineering, why don't they just place a shield between us and the sun and block out our light, it might take a couple of years for us to finally die off but it would be impossible for us to counter.
Attack method 2 - Ambush Hunting, is what requires good colour perception and 3d mapping to guard against but you seem to be saying that it requires motion detection. A good ambush hunter is never going to give it's position away by moving, it's waiting for you to come close enough to strike so your only defence is to spot it based on colour and 3d mapping (and once you have enough brain power, indirect evidence such are tracks) before you are within striking range. Against a proper ambush hunter if you a relying on motion detection then chances are you are already dead because then the predator is calling all the shots and you are never going to be able to react fast enough.
What if you built the battery in such so that producing electricity is the dominate strain.
Best solution I could think off would be to divide the surface that the bacteria grow on into discrete areas maybe 1cm squared and monitor the current received from each square.
Once a day, kill off everything on the area which produced the smallest current, maybe by heating the surface somehow.
you would probably end up using more energy destorying bad areas than you would gain but it might extend the useful strains working life - if you are lucky, you might even end up with a more productive strain without any genetic engineering needed.
I don't think that they are planning on burning the spheres. I read the article as, you pump the sphere into a tank in your car (because they can flow like a liquid), using some heat and a slight vacume, the hydrogen is released from the spheres.
The hydrogen goes off to the fuel cell/IC engine (what ever use you have for the hydrogen) and the sphere's are left behind.
I suppose the best possible solution would be to draw the sphere's out of the main tank, release the hydrogen and move the now emoty sphere's to a second tank where they can be collected next time you fill the main tank. Only problem I can see with that would be the second tank would have to be the same volume as the first because the sphere's volume are not going to change when the hydrogen is released.
For cheapness, I suppose you could use 1 tank, the hydrogen is released into that main tank which would increase the pressure and prevent further hydrogen being release, the faster the engine draws the hydrogen out of the main tank, the faster the hydrogen would be released from the spheres, it would make a nice self regulating system. Downside to that idea would be how do you then seperate empty and charged sphere's to return to the fuel station.
I read it as you are innocent until evidence shows you as guilty.
I think governments take it as everyone is guilty, we just don't have the evidence about your guilt yet. The goverenment still have to prove you are guilty as opposed to you proving you are innocent , but that doesn't stop them mining every possible source of information to find that proof that you are guilty.
It's kind of a Judge Dredd perversion of what the phrase was suppose to mean.
It's a sublte difference, but an important one.
I'm a Mac user, but I was thinking about going for a PC when my Mac dies because I'm fed up with the lack of games.
That said, I would miss using Mac OSX a great deal, I prefer it for coding, internet and general everyday use.
Boot Camp may just be the excuse I need to stay with Mac, so long as decent video card support can be included.
The article doesn't mention whether it's a global list which gets hit at random or whether it's regional with a preference order or whether that algorithm is called upon everytime the NTP service is used (eg, once a unit choose the NTP server it always uses the same server or whether it has an equal chance of hitting every other NTP server in the list).
How the algorithm chooses the NTP server is relevent, the long and short of it is that D-Link are not relying on 1 guy, so for them this is not an issue unless he find someway to poison the results he sends back and D-Link customers start getting bad times.
Earth's population is currently held at artificially high levels because the availibility of cheap energy and chemical supplies in the form of Fossil Fuels.
When the Fossil Fuels run out, we are going to find we can't feed everyone properly and the human population is going to crash, we can either choose to limit population now and decrease it slowly over time or we let Mother Nature choose the appropriate population over a decade or so. I know which I would prefer
Of course, we might find a cheap plentiful supply of energy and chemical feed stock which would avert that situation, but it's unlikely.
Damn, I ran out of mod points, that was funny.
If it is a purely licensing issue which isn't likely to require any hardware changes, Sony might be able to use the delay to build up a large stock of the PS3 and do a worldwide launch
It's just that the end user would now have a legal right to break the DRM and convert the file into what ever format he needs which of course renders the DRM pointless but Apple would not be breaking their contract if this law was enacted.
Given your user name, I find your comment patronising and ironic at the same time.
Come end of year evaluation, it was the testers who got the silly little tasks that got the best payrises because they were seen to be taking on extra tasks which shows them to be more productive.
My arguement was always that because I was expanding the tests and finding more bugs (which at the end of the day is the job of a tester) I was more productive than anyone else but because it was a hidden metric, the managers never listened. So glad I got out of that job.
a) go into the main topic in more detail
b) cover more related topics
Since these sorts of reference sources tend to be used as a first point of contact for a new topic, surely having more infomation (especially information that can lead to more background reading) in one place is useful and the benefit of that could potentially offset 1 extra factual inaccuracy.
But based on 6,500,000,000 people in the world, that means that there are still 6,500,000 people after me.