We are looking for intelligent life broadcasting to us using a method we are currently able to detect.
There are a lot of factors reducing our chances:
If you look back before we discovered electricity, we would have no way of receiving the signals we are currently broadcasting at any distance! The luck involved locating a civilisation of appropriate age to receive this signal would be tremendous. Presumably, soon we will discover a new technology with which to communicate, and again the clock will be reset on how advanced the recipients of any message would have to be.
Our thirst for knowledge is pretty unique on Earth, as is our egotism. Aliens would need to be advanced enough to pick up our signal and care enough to broadcast one back.
Knowing what to look for is difficult. We see pulsars broadcasting quickly across the universe and presume they are a natural phenomenon, as we do with meteorites. Maybe they are communicating and we are missing it. For example, once we invented the light bulb, we might have thought to look for light to detect intelligent life. In truth, we have made our lights more efficient, broadcasting a narrower spectrum and reflecting the light going in unuseful directions, making them harder to detect.
The number of alien races. If there are a lot of alien races, advanced enough to communicate, why would they bother contacting us if we are technologically inferior? What if one of these races goes around destroying all the other advanced races it discovers (Look at human history!)
We have enough threats on earth already. Maybe any intelligent beings are content enough with what they have or wise enough to predict how hostile we are to each other and therefore go as far as to hide their presence from us until we reach an appropriate stage of development.
There still exist tribes living in isolation in the Amazon, who throw spears at planes. We have decided to leave them to it, maybe aliens have decided the same with us?
Maybe the natural formation of the universe is such that at a specific distance there is a block of some kind. Imagine yourself as a cave man. Trying to communicate to the outside world might consist of riding a horse to the furthest corner of the land you were born on. After that point you give up. The same once you work out you can traverse the sea and map the planet. Then you work out there is an atmosphere which changes as you go up with stars beyond. Maybe there is a barrier preventing communication.
Maybe at some point in the past, our planet was seeded and they are observing us as an experiment which they don't want to influence by interacting with.
To summarise, there are loads of reasons why we might not be receiving alien signals. My opinion is that it is ridiculously egotistical to assume that we are advanced enough to detect them because any intelligent life will be similar to us. I can only hope they are smarter than us and aren't bothering. Sorry for the formatting
I was an economics student. We are taught that one of the essential points of government is to address market failure. Everything has a cost. If I drive a car very loudly past your house every hour, and you try to sell it, your house is going to fetch you less money. Naturally, there is no way I directly pay you for the noise I'm creating. The payment of a fine to the government for noise pollution might reduce the noise I make and increase the value of your house. Alternatively, it might reimburse you for the inconvenience of living close to me. Some of the cost is obvious and borne by the producer. Others are to third parties who deserve to be compensated. Elon Musk is advancing technology, reducing global warming, reducing the need for infrastructure investment in the grid, reducing house prices (directly by providing cheaper roofing materials and by increasing land available to include that on mars potentially). All of these are valid uses of subsidy. The jobs created are also important so the welfare payments are reduced for the unemployment that would otherwise occur. Other motor companies benefit from a subsidy to gas prices, so electric vehicles need equivalent subsidies to level the playing field. These are some of the reasons you and I should subsidise Elon Musk's companies. I'm from the UK and I will also subsidise his company despite not benefiting as much from taxation of his company. I do still benefit from the positive externalities compared to the next best alternative (petrol/gas)
Is it just me who wonders if such a thing already exists in a less draconian form? If our communications are being monitored, surely the first thing you'd do is categorise them so you can filter later? Using this system, it would be possible to track Christians, racists and vegetarians, without the explicit aim of tracking muslims.
Secondly, the way the question is phrased, unless the BSD licence has a "not for muslim-tracking use" clause I've missed, several high profile open source companies would technically not be able to answer no. They don't ask how their tools are going to be used.
Another example of badly thought through journalism to create sensationalist headlines. Not slashdot worthy.
Hell, it's not even cost effective to switch to another SQL database like PostgreSQL.
Can you imagine the downtime required to export Facebook from MySQL and to re-import it to another database? The users would go ballistic!
I don't expect any "earth shattering" movement by any of the big users in the near future.
I'm involved in a project that involves moving databases.
We write each transaction to both the old and new structure using our data access layer, then export historic data and eventually, once we've verified the new system is working as expected, remove the old structure from the data access layer.
This is the main reason data access layers are used.
Sounds like what intel have been doing to processors for years. If its cheaper to make millions of 1 better processor than more models but less volume of each, you need to differentiate on price to keep profit high and allow the people who would use the cheaper models still able to afford it. So they cripple some of the processors and sell them at reduced price. Its just the company taking advantage of economies of scale. If they couldn't, theyd have to increase the price of the lowest models to design them from scratch with reduced performance or reduce profits!
I'm an electronic engineer and I could have told you that the relationship between blade length and efficiency is non-linear. We learnt that at uni. People really need to get over their attitudes against the sight of large wind turbines. It is the only efficient way of doing this. Being a brit, large wind farms over here are a more difficult sell as we are quite limited for space, however several projects are being undertaken. In the states, you have the desert which seems a perfect area to locate your wind farms, dependant on wind levels. Get your hands off the oil:p
I'm writing a book on social provocation amongst other things. I personally use the word god a lot like UFO. By definition if I cannot identify a flying object, it is a UFO. Once it is identified, it is not a UFO any more. Using the definition of god as a system beyond our scientific grasp of reality, then I believe in god. A discussion of god providing further clarity and definition can then begin and change with the advancement of science. As a scientist and engineer, a common basic understanding between parties is necessary to prevent non-constructive argument. I believe this has led to a lot of the difficulties in the past, creating contradictory views. Stop it please.
A Windows 7 beta comparison would be interesting. I bet windows is caching the file. As an extension to the experiment, I suggest plotting size of files would be nice to see, or alternatively, turn off the pc and see which you can recover the most data from.
Over the lifetime of the printer, the transistors will have to switch much more often, causing them to fail sooner and to use more power. Think of the children!!!
Depends on the frequency of the broadcast along with the power. Also depends on the shielding. I recommend using optical communications and Faraday cages around equipment. Prevents all electrical interference. That would make me happy.
If it was me writing the timebomb, i'd have one "clean" return the data to the owners password and one "dirty" return the data slightly malformed or delete the data password, thus allowing me to wipe the machine without direct access or even from a jail cell! Then I'd want a presidential pardon, 24 style. I'd also have set up an extra account, in case they closed mine off. Maybe, just for kicks, I'd have a cron job checking that my account still worked, and if it got disabled, begin cleaning the machine!
GSM already performs some pretty nifty compression involving regenerating missing packets. By enhancing this, it should be possible to just send the encrypted message text and a voice profile and have the receiving phone talk in your voice. I'll get right on it... Actually, part of the problem with the encryption could be the GSM (or other codec) compression itself. It looks for similar packets and tells the receiver to use a previous packet instead of sending the new one. This would obviously be a much shorter transmission. Complex syllables are more likely to be more different than simpler ones, so that the codec decides to encode and send the new data. Thus another solution would be to improve the codec to recognise and reuse previously sent data better for longer syllables, or maybe to resend old data more often than neccesary and at random. Before doing this, I'd like to see just how much of the data can be deciphered using this technique. I bet its not much.
If fewer people like a type of music, the cost of that music will go up. This is because the cost of producing one extra download is approximately zero after artists costs have been covered. Before this point however, income needs to be sufficient to supply the artist with enough money to decide to carry on making music rather than go to their next best alternative (painter + decorator, plumber, soldier, publicity milker, reality tv show contestant, etc.). To raise this money, a higher price must be charged for their music. This is why specialist software is so much more expensive than generic stuff, because the market is so much smaller.
Slashdot Mirror
They tend to be able to convince themselves out of most problematic observations
We are looking for intelligent life broadcasting to us using a method we are currently able to detect. There are a lot of factors reducing our chances: If you look back before we discovered electricity, we would have no way of receiving the signals we are currently broadcasting at any distance! The luck involved locating a civilisation of appropriate age to receive this signal would be tremendous. Presumably, soon we will discover a new technology with which to communicate, and again the clock will be reset on how advanced the recipients of any message would have to be. Our thirst for knowledge is pretty unique on Earth, as is our egotism. Aliens would need to be advanced enough to pick up our signal and care enough to broadcast one back. Knowing what to look for is difficult. We see pulsars broadcasting quickly across the universe and presume they are a natural phenomenon, as we do with meteorites. Maybe they are communicating and we are missing it. For example, once we invented the light bulb, we might have thought to look for light to detect intelligent life. In truth, we have made our lights more efficient, broadcasting a narrower spectrum and reflecting the light going in unuseful directions, making them harder to detect. The number of alien races. If there are a lot of alien races, advanced enough to communicate, why would they bother contacting us if we are technologically inferior? What if one of these races goes around destroying all the other advanced races it discovers (Look at human history!) We have enough threats on earth already. Maybe any intelligent beings are content enough with what they have or wise enough to predict how hostile we are to each other and therefore go as far as to hide their presence from us until we reach an appropriate stage of development. There still exist tribes living in isolation in the Amazon, who throw spears at planes. We have decided to leave them to it, maybe aliens have decided the same with us? Maybe the natural formation of the universe is such that at a specific distance there is a block of some kind. Imagine yourself as a cave man. Trying to communicate to the outside world might consist of riding a horse to the furthest corner of the land you were born on. After that point you give up. The same once you work out you can traverse the sea and map the planet. Then you work out there is an atmosphere which changes as you go up with stars beyond. Maybe there is a barrier preventing communication. Maybe at some point in the past, our planet was seeded and they are observing us as an experiment which they don't want to influence by interacting with. To summarise, there are loads of reasons why we might not be receiving alien signals. My opinion is that it is ridiculously egotistical to assume that we are advanced enough to detect them because any intelligent life will be similar to us. I can only hope they are smarter than us and aren't bothering. Sorry for the formatting
I was an economics student. We are taught that one of the essential points of government is to address market failure. Everything has a cost. If I drive a car very loudly past your house every hour, and you try to sell it, your house is going to fetch you less money. Naturally, there is no way I directly pay you for the noise I'm creating. The payment of a fine to the government for noise pollution might reduce the noise I make and increase the value of your house. Alternatively, it might reimburse you for the inconvenience of living close to me. Some of the cost is obvious and borne by the producer. Others are to third parties who deserve to be compensated. Elon Musk is advancing technology, reducing global warming, reducing the need for infrastructure investment in the grid, reducing house prices (directly by providing cheaper roofing materials and by increasing land available to include that on mars potentially). All of these are valid uses of subsidy. The jobs created are also important so the welfare payments are reduced for the unemployment that would otherwise occur. Other motor companies benefit from a subsidy to gas prices, so electric vehicles need equivalent subsidies to level the playing field. These are some of the reasons you and I should subsidise Elon Musk's companies. I'm from the UK and I will also subsidise his company despite not benefiting as much from taxation of his company. I do still benefit from the positive externalities compared to the next best alternative (petrol/gas)
Or as the old adage goes, you get what you pay for?
Is it just me who wonders if such a thing already exists in a less draconian form? If our communications are being monitored, surely the first thing you'd do is categorise them so you can filter later? Using this system, it would be possible to track Christians, racists and vegetarians, without the explicit aim of tracking muslims. Secondly, the way the question is phrased, unless the BSD licence has a "not for muslim-tracking use" clause I've missed, several high profile open source companies would technically not be able to answer no. They don't ask how their tools are going to be used. Another example of badly thought through journalism to create sensationalist headlines. Not slashdot worthy.
Hell, it's not even cost effective to switch to another SQL database like PostgreSQL.
Can you imagine the downtime required to export Facebook from MySQL and to re-import it to another database? The users would go ballistic!
I don't expect any "earth shattering" movement by any of the big users in the near future.
I'm involved in a project that involves moving databases. We write each transaction to both the old and new structure using our data access layer, then export historic data and eventually, once we've verified the new system is working as expected, remove the old structure from the data access layer. This is the main reason data access layers are used.
Sounds like what intel have been doing to processors for years. If its cheaper to make millions of 1 better processor than more models but less volume of each, you need to differentiate on price to keep profit high and allow the people who would use the cheaper models still able to afford it. So they cripple some of the processors and sell them at reduced price. Its just the company taking advantage of economies of scale. If they couldn't, theyd have to increase the price of the lowest models to design them from scratch with reduced performance or reduce profits!
I'm an electronic engineer and I could have told you that the relationship between blade length and efficiency is non-linear. We learnt that at uni. People really need to get over their attitudes against the sight of large wind turbines. It is the only efficient way of doing this. Being a brit, large wind farms over here are a more difficult sell as we are quite limited for space, however several projects are being undertaken. In the states, you have the desert which seems a perfect area to locate your wind farms, dependant on wind levels. Get your hands off the oil :p
I'm writing a book on social provocation amongst other things. I personally use the word god a lot like UFO. By definition if I cannot identify a flying object, it is a UFO. Once it is identified, it is not a UFO any more. Using the definition of god as a system beyond our scientific grasp of reality, then I believe in god. A discussion of god providing further clarity and definition can then begin and change with the advancement of science. As a scientist and engineer, a common basic understanding between parties is necessary to prevent non-constructive argument. I believe this has led to a lot of the difficulties in the past, creating contradictory views. Stop it please.
A Windows 7 beta comparison would be interesting. I bet windows is caching the file. As an extension to the experiment, I suggest plotting size of files would be nice to see, or alternatively, turn off the pc and see which you can recover the most data from.
Over the lifetime of the printer, the transistors will have to switch much more often, causing them to fail sooner and to use more power. Think of the children!!!
Depends on the frequency of the broadcast along with the power. Also depends on the shielding. I recommend using optical communications and Faraday cages around equipment. Prevents all electrical interference. That would make me happy.
You can get a similar deal here for around 10/15 pounds a month from most operators. The difference here is you are paying for a single day's usage.
If it was me writing the timebomb, i'd have one "clean" return the data to the owners password and one "dirty" return the data slightly malformed or delete the data password, thus allowing me to wipe the machine without direct access or even from a jail cell! Then I'd want a presidential pardon, 24 style. I'd also have set up an extra account, in case they closed mine off. Maybe, just for kicks, I'd have a cron job checking that my account still worked, and if it got disabled, begin cleaning the machine!
GSM already performs some pretty nifty compression involving regenerating missing packets. By enhancing this, it should be possible to just send the encrypted message text and a voice profile and have the receiving phone talk in your voice. I'll get right on it... Actually, part of the problem with the encryption could be the GSM (or other codec) compression itself. It looks for similar packets and tells the receiver to use a previous packet instead of sending the new one. This would obviously be a much shorter transmission. Complex syllables are more likely to be more different than simpler ones, so that the codec decides to encode and send the new data. Thus another solution would be to improve the codec to recognise and reuse previously sent data better for longer syllables, or maybe to resend old data more often than neccesary and at random. Before doing this, I'd like to see just how much of the data can be deciphered using this technique. I bet its not much.
I believe this has already been done: http://www.atcsd.com/site/content/view/13/29/
If fewer people like a type of music, the cost of that music will go up. This is because the cost of producing one extra download is approximately zero after artists costs have been covered. Before this point however, income needs to be sufficient to supply the artist with enough money to decide to carry on making music rather than go to their next best alternative (painter + decorator, plumber, soldier, publicity milker, reality tv show contestant, etc.). To raise this money, a higher price must be charged for their music. This is why specialist software is so much more expensive than generic stuff, because the market is so much smaller.