They aren't facts, troll. I've been using Linux for ten years. Never compiled a program for it, never needed to edit one of its text files (although the fact that I can is a nice feature, another reason Linux is superior to Windows), and only use the command line if I forget the root password and need to reset it. A software patch has nothing to do with the hardware it runs on. Linux does sometimes have issues with drivers for new hardware, but that's a separate issue, and Windows has issues with drivers for older hardware.
As to "RTFM n00b" I never encountered that, either. Every Linux question I ever asked on the internet garnered me at least an attempt to help, including which FM to R and where to find it. But I can see why you and the GP get treated harshly by Linux people, if someone with an attitude like yours asked a question in that tone I wouldn't say "RTFM n00b" I'd say "go fuck yourslef, asshole". Nice begets nice, hostility begets hostility. Only an idiot treats someone he needs help from badly.
Sad that the first response to a very good science article (kudos, slashdot!) is a money-worshiping luddite. Which oil company do you work for, anyway?
Shouldn't you be at Business Week or the Wall Street Journal or FOX rather than slashdot?
How many days of war in Afghanistan will that $80B buy? I not only have no problem with my taxes going to research, I encourage it. As does anyone else with more than a two digit IQ. I sure wish they'd end that damned war, though.
No, a PC Clone is a computer that copied IBM's PC as closely as possible without infringing patent or copyright. No Apple was ever a PC clone. Dell, Compaq, HP, etc are "pc clones". And the moniker was short lived, as well.
Not since I broke it, but it's a Motorola with a good camera/video, qwerty, email, internet, text, voice commans (really annoying feature BTW)... yep, if it wasn't broken, someone would want to steal it.
Wake up Sony, you could be one of the greatest and most profitable companies on earth with a few policies changes.
After rooting my computer there's no way I'll ever be their customer again. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. The first time he hits you you're a victim, the second time you're an accomplice.
Record losses? Gee but I love seeing good news first thing in the morning. Die, Sony DIE!!!
No it stands for Personal Computer as in IBM Personal Computer.
Nope, they were PCs before IBM manufactured them. The IIe was considered a PC, as was the Osbourne and Commodore and even Tandy. And since now that Apple is intel-based, the only difference between a Mac PC, a Windows PC, and a Linux PC is its OS.
Macs don't get ANY viruses. They can, of course, get malware; any OS can be trojaned. But I never heard of anyone but a Windows user getting infected without actually installing a program.
Even trojans are harder to get with Unix-like OSes becuase of the way MS set up how a file is determined to be executable or not. That's not to say that other OSes can't be trojaned; it's that with Windows you can install a trojan without realizing it. Take WMA files, for example. A sound file should be 100% data, and MP3 and Ogg are. But WMA has "active content". You can embed a virus in a WMA file and rename virus.wma to virus.mp3, and WiMP will happily play it and its payload, while any other sound program I know of won't.
MS hides file extensions by default, even though that's how the OS determines whether a file is executable. So you can rename virus.exe to virus.jpg.exe and the user will see virus.jpg, double click it, and be infected just from trying to view a file that by rights should be data-only and incapable of infecting a machine.
And, have you ever heard of a Mac or Linux user being infected simply by visiting a web site? I haven't.
Yes, some frequencies bounce off the atmosphere; the AM and ham radio bands, for example, which is why you can communicate with someone in Australia from Canada. But VHF (TV and FM) don't skip, and there are more TV and radio stations than ever, worldwide.
Plus there's the whole annoying inverse square law.
Yeah, but that's a different subject (you did see the forgnost alien story I wrote about how the aliens are looking for life in the goant planets' moons, right? It's mentioned there).
Of course this falls into the category of "on purpose", but our long-range space probe communications network and ground based transmitters would have the highest chance of being detectable from another star system. Broadcast TV, the next strongest thing sent straight up, will be quite the difficult signal to pick out of the noise much too far away from Earth.
Agreed, that's in the sf story, too (inverse square law and overpowering signals from the star itself).
Mcgrew, I think you know the difference between a citizen paying the taxes that the law demands, and a citizen protesting high taxes-- especially if those taxes are being used for unrighteous purposes.
Yes, except that 1) federal taxes are lower than any time since Truman and 2) there is nothing more unrighteous than war. The federal defecit is a direct result of Afghanistan and Iraq. Bush took office inheriting a balanced budget, and left the biggest deficit in history until that time. Yet the conservatives want the poor and elderly to pay for those wars we squandered all that money on. How righteous is that?
I can understand not wanting to fund abortion clinics, but it isn't me who funds them when I pay taxes any more than I fund the Ronald McDonald house when I buy a hamburger.
There are also many Christian outreach groups who offer support for homosexuals who may want to VOLUNTARILY change their behavior, but as you know these are vilified as "hate" organizations-- JUST FOR EXISTING.
True, and sad. I didn't say liberals are tolerant, though, just that conservative ideals are mostly against what Jesus taught.
To many Slashdotters, you would be a conservative because you are Christian and believe in personal responsibility.
Many of my views are indeed conservative. I try to act responsibly, and wish others would, but I wouldn't force anything on them. I'm not perfect myself, that's for sure, so I have no right to judge how anyone else lives.
I think copyright law goes way beyond constitutional authority, as do the drug laws (SCOTUS disagrees with me). I agree with conservatives that many present laws are illegal laws.
No. Conservatives are againt profligate government spending, and then seeing taxes raised rather than spending less in the first place.
And what does "tea" in "tea party" stand for? Yep, "taxed Enough Already" despite the fact that Federal taxes are lower than any time since Truman.
I didn't notice any famous scripture that mentions taking money from other people in order to be generous with it.
And when they were come, they say unto him, Master, we know that thou art true, and carest for no man: for thou regardest not the person of men, but teachest the way of God in truth: Is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar, or not? 15Shall we give, or shall we not give? But he, knowing their hypocrisy, said unto them, Why tempt ye me? bring me a penny, that I may see it. 16And they brought it. And he saith unto them, Whose is this image and superscription? And they said unto him, Caesar's. 17And Jesus answering said unto them, Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's. And they marvelled at him.
How can a Christian be for being generous to the hangman and the General, but not to the poor?
No. But liberals are certainly intolerant of conservatives, as you're demonstrating.
You have a strange definition of "intolerance". Many things offend me, including conservative hypocrites who claim to be Christian, but I tolerate them. I wish I had Aaron Chambers' Eats With Sinners in front of me so I could quote some of it. He lists people God loves, including crooked politicians, gangsters, gays, whores, pimps, etc. Hate the sin, love the sinner.
Jesus ate with sinners. "He who is well has no need of a physician," He said. Tolerate sinners, try to help them to find God.
You're confusing religious crazies with conservatives.
Then why did so many conservative state legislators pass laws outlawing homosexuality? And by the way, I'm a religious crazy. Here's another book for you (look in your local public library), Wierd: Because Normal Isn't Working.
No, it was religious people - and mostly women
You might want to read a history book that was required reading in an undergrad general studies history class I took in the late '70s, historian Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday(full text here). The book was about the roaring twenties, written in the early thirties. Allen's book contradicts what you believe. Please educate yourself, you've been fed incorrect data. Oh, you were correct about the "mostly women" part, though.
My grandparents were young adults in the twenties, and what they told me about that decade meshed with what the historian wrote.
They are against forcing you to spend part of each day working for the poor.
Stingy bastards.
Liberals are the least charitable with their own money.
Matthew 6:1 -
Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven. 2Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. 3But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth: 4That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.
Nobody knows how much or how little I give, because I try to follow Christ's teachings. I'm not always sucessful, but I try. I won't even deduct my alms from taxes, and I expect my fellow Christians to do teh same. The conservatives you speak of are exactly the people Jesus spoke against in the above passage.
WAY too many people saying what you're saying for this to still be a nerd site.
Macs ARE PCs; PC stands for "personal computer".
Macs don't get viruses. They do, however, get trojans like any other OS.
Virus == malware, but malware !=virus. I don't expect muggles to understand this, but it saddens me that anybody posting at slashdot would be ignorant about it.
My 2002 Concorde that I bought in 2007 is rated at 35 mpg highway. I got 36 on a trip back from St Louis, according to its built-in mileage calculator, when I had a blowout and had to drive back on its donut spare at 50mph.
So it is possible to do better than even the old ratings.
My Linux computer uses the TV as a monitor, so I mostly use it for video and audio. About the only time I use a keyboard with it is to sudo or to Samba into the Windows notebook (which will be Linux whenever I get off my lazy ass and istall it). Its keyboard just quit over the weekend, I'm sure that since its batteries are two years old, that's probably the problem.
A four legged animal isn't necessarily a horse. Windows is the only platform that can get a virus, but any platform can get a trojan. Both are malware, just different kinds of malware.
It won't chew up your slippers and you don't have to take it for a walk. You don't have to take it outside to piss when it's raining. And it doesn't eat much. And it doesn't keep your neighbors up all night with its goddamned barking.
Are you kidding me?? When I was a kid there were 3 TV stations in St Louis. There are over a dozen now, same with radio. Plus we now have, in addition, damned near everyone with a radio transmitter in their pocket communicating with cell towers. Then cell towers weren't there, nor were the radio transmitters in our pockets. Hell, when I was 14 and Star Trek came out, those cell phones (communicators) were as much fantasy as the self-opening doors and Uhura's bluetooth headset. Oh yeah -- bluetooth is radio. WiFi is radio. Both are very new.
When there were 3 stations in St Louis there were no satellites. None, until the Russians launched Sputnik when I was six, and all it did was go "beep beep beep". Now we have dozens of communications satellites. There was no such thing as GPS -- and it uses radio waves, too.
You apparently didn't think about that very much. There is far more radio wave activity than ever in history. Radio waves aren't going away in any infant alive's lifetime, and never will unless we discover something better.
Considering the fact that a civilization would have to be so advanced that we'd be chimps by comparison for them to figure out a way around the lightspeed barrier (not to mention other relativistic effects), it's doubtful we'll ever visit or be visited by extraterrestrials.
I wonder what an extraterrestrial 100 light years away about as advanced as we were 100 years ago would think if he picked up radio signals from us? Would he even realize that they were communication?
Here are a couple of science fiction stories that are germaine to the discussion:
They're indefensible. I haven't set foot in one for ten years, and here's a post I made after my last encounter that explains WHY. They begged to be benkrupt. I don't know how they stayed open so long.
I'll say something nice about Best Buy too- it's not crowded any more.
My wife Becky decided (after we got a big tax refund this year) that she needed a laptop PC for school. Actually, I suspect that now that she needs a computer she doesn't want to go down to the cold basement to use it like I and the kids do. But any way, we went shoppping for a laptop. I hit a few web sites (not eBay), and we decided to look locally ( JDR seems to only carry Toshiba and I don't like Japanese design). First stop was Best Buy. It had been a while since i had been in there. Well, actually we went in for some compressed air but since we were shopping for a laptop... she fell in love with a Hewlett Packard model, really nice one with a big hard drive, nice big clear screen, lots of memory, DVD CD burner, modem, network card... and most importantly to her, pretty blue lights above the keyboard.
Best Buy staff were puttering around doing... actually I'm clueless, they didn't look to me like they were doing more than trying to look busy and avoid customers. We grabbed a salesman, who told us he'd be right back... this happened three times. We finally got some pimple faced kid who informed us that he had a Gateway and it was crap. "Just a minute and I'll get this ready"... this a half hour after deciding on what to buy.
They were offering free internet access through MSN. Now, if I didn't already have an ISP (and likely DSL) would I be buying a computer with a LAN card and modem? They were also offering zero percent financing, which I also didn't want; I had cash in the bank.
Never mind that I didn't want it, it "will take about five minutes to set up the computer, he can do it while we're filling out paperwork." WTF, was I buying a house, or an antiaircraft missle? Paperwork???
We stood there in line a full half hour before the girl was ready to check us out. As we waited, Becky whipped out her phone and called the bank to make sure we had enough cash to pay for all the crap, over $2000.00 worth. The computer sat there, unopened and un-checked out.
Best Buy wouldn't take our check. After a two and a half hour ordeal of mostly waiting, we walked away from over two thousand dollars in merchandise and won't be back. The sales girl tried to blame some other company!
I guess business are all taking lessons from Microsoft. Here's a clue for all of them - you can't stay in business like that without a monopoly.
My guess is Best Buy treats everybody like this. If so, I'll give them two more years, maybe with Enron accounting they can survive three or four. I'll give H&R Block five to ten (and they should be glad I'm not a judge!)
Becky bought her HP laptop the next day at Circut City, where they had pleasant salespeople (unlike Best Buy), it took fifteen minutes to buy, and they gratefully took her check without any bullshit.
I never could understand how a Christian (not other religions, obviously) can be a conservative. Conservatives are against taxes, Christ said "pay your taxes". Conservatives are gun-toting self defensers, Christ said "he who lives by the weapon, dies by the weapon". Conservative means stingy, liberal means generous. Christ was for generosity. Conservatives are intolerant, Christians hate the sin but love the sinner. A Christian may try to talk a gay man out of committing homosexual acts, a conservative would like to see him in jail or dead. When prohibition was instituted it was the conservatives who fought for that change (oh, the hypocricy!) while liberals fought for prohibition's overthrow. Christ said to the church officials "John the Baptists came neither eating or drinking and you say it means he had a devil, the son of man comes eating and drinking and you call him a glutton and winebibber." Conservatives are against aid to the poor (but seem to have no problem with aid to the rich) while Christians hate to see people go hungry. Conservatives hate homeless people, Jesus WAS a homeless person.
I don't think conservatives even read the bibles they thump.
How long did it take the Jews to get over being enslaved by the Egyptians? Thousands of years later the Jews still hold a grudge.
By the 30s when AFDC started, it was unheard of for a black person to have more than the most menial of jobs. When I grew up in the '50s and '60s most white people referred to blacks as "niggers" without a second thought.
And yes, 50 years of the AFDC did screw the black communities, which is why Congress stopped it in 1996.
The "gangsta" culture is a direct result not of AFDC (which has been gone for over 15 years) but the fact that so many black men wind up in prison. A racist would believe that there are so many blacks in prison because blacks are violent thieves, but the truth is that a cop will arrest a black man (or even shoot him) at the drop of a hat, while the white guy will get his baggie confiscated and let go with a warning.
If Martin had been white and Zimmerman black, Zimmerman would have gone straight to jail and might not even have survived the trip to jail. Stop arresting every black person you find with a roach and the jailhouse culture will end.
If you're with one of the 4 carriers you're going to be on a contract, so they will know who you are. It won't work with my company, BOOST, even though Sprint owns BOOST. Any phone you get a card at the convinience store for will keep working after it gets ripped off.
Lets be honest folks...how many here think that the average white person, just minding their own business, would walk through say Harlem or Watts or any other major big city all black neighborhood unscathed?
The bar I go to most often is a redneck bar smack in the middle of the blackest ghetto in town, I stagger home from there often. The worst that happens walking home is some black guy trying to sell me dope, or a bum begging for spare hope and change. Almost every shooting in the last year has been within six blocks of the place, but it's always either black on black or white on white.
Now what if it were the other way? in most places the worst that would happen to the black man would be a cop asking him what he was doing
Tell that to Travon Martin's mother. And had it been Martin who was a neighborhood watch guy and shot Zimmerman while Zimmerman was unarmed, you can bet your ass he'd have been in jail that very night, probably held without bail.
And it isn't just blacks who fear the police. All poor people fear the police.
What kind of spoiled your joke for me was the fact that those shows are less than ten years old, and the signals would have only reached a few stars, none of which are likely to be like our own daystar. Better would have been "one of these days, Alice... POW!"
Or even better yet, War of the Worlds would be pretty far out by now, eighty or so light years out. Think that would freak the aliens out much?
Slashdot Mirror
SKA? They should have a leg in the Carribean. When is the REGGAE telescope going to be built?
They aren't facts, troll. I've been using Linux for ten years. Never compiled a program for it, never needed to edit one of its text files (although the fact that I can is a nice feature, another reason Linux is superior to Windows), and only use the command line if I forget the root password and need to reset it. A software patch has nothing to do with the hardware it runs on. Linux does sometimes have issues with drivers for new hardware, but that's a separate issue, and Windows has issues with drivers for older hardware.
As to "RTFM n00b" I never encountered that, either. Every Linux question I ever asked on the internet garnered me at least an attempt to help, including which FM to R and where to find it. But I can see why you and the GP get treated harshly by Linux people, if someone with an attitude like yours asked a question in that tone I wouldn't say "RTFM n00b" I'd say "go fuck yourslef, asshole". Nice begets nice, hostility begets hostility. Only an idiot treats someone he needs help from badly.
Sad that the first response to a very good science article (kudos, slashdot!) is a money-worshiping luddite. Which oil company do you work for, anyway?
Shouldn't you be at Business Week or the Wall Street Journal or FOX rather than slashdot?
How many days of war in Afghanistan will that $80B buy? I not only have no problem with my taxes going to research, I encourage it. As does anyone else with more than a two digit IQ. I sure wish they'd end that damned war, though.
No, a PC Clone is a computer that copied IBM's PC as closely as possible without infringing patent or copyright. No Apple was ever a PC clone. Dell, Compaq, HP, etc are "pc clones". And the moniker was short lived, as well.
Not since I broke it, but it's a Motorola with a good camera/video, qwerty, email, internet, text, voice commans (really annoying feature BTW)... yep, if it wasn't broken, someone would want to steal it.
Wake up Sony, you could be one of the greatest and most profitable companies on earth with a few policies changes.
After rooting my computer there's no way I'll ever be their customer again. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. The first time he hits you you're a victim, the second time you're an accomplice.
Record losses? Gee but I love seeing good news first thing in the morning. Die, Sony DIE!!!
No it stands for Personal Computer as in IBM Personal Computer.
Nope, they were PCs before IBM manufactured them. The IIe was considered a PC, as was the Osbourne and Commodore and even Tandy. And since now that Apple is intel-based, the only difference between a Mac PC, a Windows PC, and a Linux PC is its OS.
Macs don't get ANY viruses. They can, of course, get malware; any OS can be trojaned. But I never heard of anyone but a Windows user getting infected without actually installing a program.
Even trojans are harder to get with Unix-like OSes becuase of the way MS set up how a file is determined to be executable or not. That's not to say that other OSes can't be trojaned; it's that with Windows you can install a trojan without realizing it. Take WMA files, for example. A sound file should be 100% data, and MP3 and Ogg are. But WMA has "active content". You can embed a virus in a WMA file and rename virus.wma to virus.mp3, and WiMP will happily play it and its payload, while any other sound program I know of won't.
MS hides file extensions by default, even though that's how the OS determines whether a file is executable. So you can rename virus.exe to virus.jpg.exe and the user will see virus.jpg, double click it, and be infected just from trying to view a file that by rights should be data-only and incapable of infecting a machine.
And, have you ever heard of a Mac or Linux user being infected simply by visiting a web site? I haven't.
Yes, some frequencies bounce off the atmosphere; the AM and ham radio bands, for example, which is why you can communicate with someone in Australia from Canada. But VHF (TV and FM) don't skip, and there are more TV and radio stations than ever, worldwide.
Plus there's the whole annoying inverse square law.
Yeah, but that's a different subject (you did see the forgnost alien story I wrote about how the aliens are looking for life in the goant planets' moons, right? It's mentioned there).
Of course this falls into the category of "on purpose", but our long-range space probe communications network and ground based transmitters would have the highest chance of being detectable from another star system.
Broadcast TV, the next strongest thing sent straight up, will be quite the difficult signal to pick out of the noise much too far away from Earth.
Agreed, that's in the sf story, too (inverse square law and overpowering signals from the star itself).
Mcgrew, I think you know the difference between a citizen paying the taxes that the law demands, and a citizen protesting high taxes-- especially if those taxes are being used for unrighteous purposes.
Yes, except that 1) federal taxes are lower than any time since Truman and 2) there is nothing more unrighteous than war. The federal defecit is a direct result of Afghanistan and Iraq. Bush took office inheriting a balanced budget, and left the biggest deficit in history until that time. Yet the conservatives want the poor and elderly to pay for those wars we squandered all that money on. How righteous is that?
I can understand not wanting to fund abortion clinics, but it isn't me who funds them when I pay taxes any more than I fund the Ronald McDonald house when I buy a hamburger.
There are also many Christian outreach groups who offer support for homosexuals who may want to VOLUNTARILY change their behavior, but as you know these are vilified as "hate" organizations-- JUST FOR EXISTING.
True, and sad. I didn't say liberals are tolerant, though, just that conservative ideals are mostly against what Jesus taught.
To many Slashdotters, you would be a conservative because you are Christian and believe in personal responsibility.
Many of my views are indeed conservative. I try to act responsibly, and wish others would, but I wouldn't force anything on them. I'm not perfect myself, that's for sure, so I have no right to judge how anyone else lives.
I think copyright law goes way beyond constitutional authority, as do the drug laws (SCOTUS disagrees with me). I agree with conservatives that many present laws are illegal laws.
No. Conservatives are againt profligate government spending, and then seeing taxes raised rather than spending less in the first place.
And what does "tea" in "tea party" stand for? Yep, "taxed Enough Already" despite the fact that Federal taxes are lower than any time since Truman.
I didn't notice any famous scripture that mentions taking money from other people in order to be generous with it.
How can a Christian be for being generous to the hangman and the General, but not to the poor?
No. But liberals are certainly intolerant of conservatives, as you're demonstrating.
You have a strange definition of "intolerance". Many things offend me, including conservative hypocrites who claim to be Christian, but I tolerate them. I wish I had Aaron Chambers' Eats With Sinners in front of me so I could quote some of it. He lists people God loves, including crooked politicians, gangsters, gays, whores, pimps, etc. Hate the sin, love the sinner.
Jesus ate with sinners. "He who is well has no need of a physician," He said. Tolerate sinners, try to help them to find God.
You're confusing religious crazies with conservatives.
Then why did so many conservative state legislators pass laws outlawing homosexuality? And by the way, I'm a religious crazy. Here's another book for you (look in your local public library), Wierd: Because Normal Isn't Working.
No, it was religious people - and mostly women
You might want to read a history book that was required reading in an undergrad general studies history class I took in the late '70s, historian Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday (full text here). The book was about the roaring twenties, written in the early thirties. Allen's book contradicts what you believe. Please educate yourself, you've been fed incorrect data. Oh, you were correct about the "mostly women" part, though.
My grandparents were young adults in the twenties, and what they told me about that decade meshed with what the historian wrote.
They are against forcing you to spend part of each day working for the poor.
Stingy bastards.
Liberals are the least charitable with their own money.
Matthew 6:1 -
Nobody knows how much or how little I give, because I try to follow Christ's teachings. I'm not always sucessful, but I try. I won't even deduct my alms from taxes, and I expect my fellow Christians to do teh same. The conservatives you speak of are exactly the people Jesus spoke against in the above passage.
WAY too many people saying what you're saying for this to still be a nerd site.
Virus == malware, but malware !=virus. I don't expect muggles to understand this, but it saddens me that anybody posting at slashdot would be ignorant about it.
My 2002 Concorde that I bought in 2007 is rated at 35 mpg highway. I got 36 on a trip back from St Louis, according to its built-in mileage calculator, when I had a blowout and had to drive back on its donut spare at 50mph.
So it is possible to do better than even the old ratings.
My Linux computer uses the TV as a monitor, so I mostly use it for video and audio. About the only time I use a keyboard with it is to sudo or to Samba into the Windows notebook (which will be Linux whenever I get off my lazy ass and istall it). Its keyboard just quit over the weekend, I'm sure that since its batteries are two years old, that's probably the problem.
A four legged animal isn't necessarily a horse. Windows is the only platform that can get a virus, but any platform can get a trojan. Both are malware, just different kinds of malware.
How is this better than a dog?
It won't chew up your slippers and you don't have to take it for a walk. You don't have to take it outside to piss when it's raining. And it doesn't eat much. And it doesn't keep your neighbors up all night with its goddamned barking.
We broadcast much less now
Are you kidding me?? When I was a kid there were 3 TV stations in St Louis. There are over a dozen now, same with radio. Plus we now have, in addition, damned near everyone with a radio transmitter in their pocket communicating with cell towers. Then cell towers weren't there, nor were the radio transmitters in our pockets. Hell, when I was 14 and Star Trek came out, those cell phones (communicators) were as much fantasy as the self-opening doors and Uhura's bluetooth headset. Oh yeah -- bluetooth is radio. WiFi is radio. Both are very new.
When there were 3 stations in St Louis there were no satellites. None, until the Russians launched Sputnik when I was six, and all it did was go "beep beep beep". Now we have dozens of communications satellites.
There was no such thing as GPS -- and it uses radio waves, too.
You apparently didn't think about that very much. There is far more radio wave activity than ever in history. Radio waves aren't going away in any infant alive's lifetime, and never will unless we discover something better.
Considering the fact that a civilization would have to be so advanced that we'd be chimps by comparison for them to figure out a way around the lightspeed barrier (not to mention other relativistic effects), it's doubtful we'll ever visit or be visited by extraterrestrials.
I wonder what an extraterrestrial 100 light years away about as advanced as we were 100 years ago would think if he picked up radio signals from us? Would he even realize that they were communication?
Here are a couple of science fiction stories that are germaine to the discussion:
A strange discovery
We still haven't found extraforgostnic life
Not to defend Best Buy here
They're indefensible. I haven't set foot in one for ten years, and here's a post I made after my last encounter that explains WHY. They begged to be benkrupt. I don't know how they stayed open so long.
I never could understand how a Christian (not other religions, obviously) can be a conservative. Conservatives are against taxes, Christ said "pay your taxes". Conservatives are gun-toting self defensers, Christ said "he who lives by the weapon, dies by the weapon". Conservative means stingy, liberal means generous. Christ was for generosity. Conservatives are intolerant, Christians hate the sin but love the sinner. A Christian may try to talk a gay man out of committing homosexual acts, a conservative would like to see him in jail or dead. When prohibition was instituted it was the conservatives who fought for that change (oh, the hypocricy!) while liberals fought for prohibition's overthrow. Christ said to the church officials "John the Baptists came neither eating or drinking and you say it means he had a devil, the son of man comes eating and drinking and you call him a glutton and winebibber." Conservatives are against aid to the poor (but seem to have no problem with aid to the rich) while Christians hate to see people go hungry. Conservatives hate homeless people, Jesus WAS a homeless person.
I don't think conservatives even read the bibles they thump.
How long did it take the Jews to get over being enslaved by the Egyptians? Thousands of years later the Jews still hold a grudge.
By the 30s when AFDC started, it was unheard of for a black person to have more than the most menial of jobs. When I grew up in the '50s and '60s most white people referred to blacks as "niggers" without a second thought.
And yes, 50 years of the AFDC did screw the black communities, which is why Congress stopped it in 1996.
The "gangsta" culture is a direct result not of AFDC (which has been gone for over 15 years) but the fact that so many black men wind up in prison. A racist would believe that there are so many blacks in prison because blacks are violent thieves, but the truth is that a cop will arrest a black man (or even shoot him) at the drop of a hat, while the white guy will get his baggie confiscated and let go with a warning.
If Martin had been white and Zimmerman black, Zimmerman would have gone straight to jail and might not even have survived the trip to jail. Stop arresting every black person you find with a roach and the jailhouse culture will end.
If you're with one of the 4 carriers you're going to be on a contract, so they will know who you are. It won't work with my company, BOOST, even though Sprint owns BOOST. Any phone you get a card at the convinience store for will keep working after it gets ripped off.
Lets be honest folks...how many here think that the average white person, just minding their own business, would walk through say Harlem or Watts or any other major big city all black neighborhood unscathed?
The bar I go to most often is a redneck bar smack in the middle of the blackest ghetto in town, I stagger home from there often. The worst that happens walking home is some black guy trying to sell me dope, or a bum begging for spare hope and change. Almost every shooting in the last year has been within six blocks of the place, but it's always either black on black or white on white.
Now what if it were the other way? in most places the worst that would happen to the black man would be a cop asking him what he was doing
Tell that to Travon Martin's mother. And had it been Martin who was a neighborhood watch guy and shot Zimmerman while Zimmerman was unarmed, you can bet your ass he'd have been in jail that very night, probably held without bail.
And it isn't just blacks who fear the police. All poor people fear the police.
What kind of spoiled your joke for me was the fact that those shows are less than ten years old, and the signals would have only reached a few stars, none of which are likely to be like our own daystar. Better would have been "one of these days, Alice... POW!"
Or even better yet, War of the Worlds would be pretty far out by now, eighty or so light years out. Think that would freak the aliens out much?
Even moreso the customers.
It sounds like a good church.