The good thing is that if you spend your entire day on economy and stock exchange sites, you might trick the system into promoting you to CEO position, of course, you need avoid/. and revert back to unpatched IE6 too.
If managemenet was really about optimizing resources, it would have been outsourced a long time ago.
As a non-manager, I can tell you the most important job of management is to deal with the unquantifiable: engineers need to feel unique and usefull and they need opportunities to work on new things (and/or be promoted) from time to time. A good manager knows his guys are much more than their previous experiences (and somtimes slightly less too).
"(A) we're either the first, or basically it takes ~X amount of time (X being the age of the universe) for intellegent life to evolve and we can't see ET sending us signals because he hasn't evolved yet or he's sending them from 200k light years away as we speak and wont see them for a very long time."
it's very unlikely that intelligent life evolve in two (or more) distinct point of the univerve within 0.0016% of current universe age. The problem might also be far worse: imagine a million civilizations existed in our galaxy before us and lasted an average 10000years, even when forgetting point B, that would still make a very little chance that the age and distance of at least one of those civilizations match enough to allow us to receive a signal.
"(B) Signal loss is so huge in the vastness of space"
Human radio emmisions are masked by thermal background noise before they reach Saturn orbit, so don't worry about Omicronians. To reach interstellar distances, you either need to aim at a particular target and shoot a very focussed signal or blow up supernovaes in a kind of ultimate morse code.
Moreover, in the same way that carbon-base biology is far more energy efficient than silocon-based one is the most likely reason all life on earth is carbon-based despite overabundance of silicon on the Earth surface, it has been demonstrated that RNA/DNA is superior on a physico-chemical ground to any other potential data storing chemicals studied.
There may be somewhere life very different from what we could imagine, but the water/carbon/proteins combination is by far the most efficient one scientists could imagine, so it's logic to bet on that base, at least for planets like Mars that are not that different from Earth.
Moreover, I see a big difference between optimizing your preparation by chosing the right equipments, training methods and paying special attention to one's body, to me, all that is totally part of the game, but when people start taking dangerous performance enhancing drugs, it means that everyone who wants to seriously compete has to jeoparadize his health and life expectancy, and in the end, everyone loses.
That was exactly the idea of the IT team of a place where I worked a few years ago, no external connection = no risk. Then one day, someone brought an infected floppy (it turned out later it was for perfectly work-related reasons) and the virus infected the 1000+ unpatched PC of the site in a couple of minutes.
And for the USB, yes, they now are considered by Windows as valid autorun devices under the presure of the stick makers who wanted to "add value" to their products (yet, I haven't seen any of these applications being more usefull than a virus). I've seen of those virus, but since it has a USB only propagation technique, it wasn't very widespread (only half of the team PC and a couple of sticks).
In french urban areas, the standard ADSL is 24Mb/s ATM (8 to 18Mb/s real TCP BW) for 29 to 39E/Mo (with unlimited phone and taxes included), but in a few major cities, 100Mb/s cable is being deployed and sold for the same price.
There would be just one (slightly off topic) problem: a 10 years trip to Alpha Centauri would consumes so much resources that no country could afford it (it would be at the very least in the billion ton of propelant per gram of workload range). Now, a 200 to 500 years one could be considered without the need to refresh the ship population during the trip.
Don't worry, it won't happen soon, as in Europe too, most of the toys, cheap clothes or fireworks (to name a few examples) are imported from china and no one in position of power is willing to ask what are the working conditions that come with such low prices.
The only chance that MS Windows is banned from Europe would come from an IBM/SUN/Oracle/Adobe heavily sponsored campaign.
So, if I understood, your compagny was trying to sell somethng that had a null marginal cost and give away what costed it an arm and leg, knowing that it was given to people who didn't and probably wouldn't pay a cent to your compagny.
Usualy, smart open source contributing compagnies work the other way and if the SW the givey away finds a market, make a good living on support.
The ISS being only about 350km above the ground, and orbiting the earth more than ten times a day, it's likely that during a week on the ISS, that toursit would be within 2000km of any arbitrary place within a latitude range around the equator (sorry, I don't remember how large that range is).
However, Pluto's orbit is highly elliptical, over 30 tilted from the "other" planets orbital plan, and it turns in the wrong direction. Because of that, I'm perfectly fine with the idea that this chunk of mostly ice is not a planet.
To me, "plutoid" is the politically correct term for "large commet".
The problem that Pluto had that led to its demotion is that it has nothing special, it one in many bodies that exists beyond the gas giants, and the only thing that makes it particular is that it was found long before the others because it gave away its position by interfering with the orbit of a planet.
On a strictly technical point of view, it is mostly a large chunk of ice that has a non-circular orbit outside of the planets orbital plan, so calling it a dwarf planet is a polite way of not calling it a large comet.
"How does anti-hydrogen work on life thingies?" On contact with organic tissues (or pretty much anything else), it will disapear in a burst of highly energetic photons (think gamma rays). So, depending on the dose (approx. ng to kg), it can range from totally harmess to skin burn to radiation poisonning to strategic-grade nuclear explosion.
"Does it have the potential for a destructive chain reaction?" No, the reaction does not create new antimatter, and the potential energy of the created antimatter is only a very small proportion of the lab electricity bill, at worst, it will probably only blow up their building.
Normal hydrogen is attracted to the groung by the gravitation, but pushed upward by the Archiede force (that basically is the mass of air that cannot be in the volume occupied by the hydrogen).
IF anti-hydrogen has a negative mass, it will simply go upward slightly faster in the presence of normal athmosphere, or to be more precise, during the small fraction of second before it anihilates with normal matter.
Now, (IF anti-matter has a negative mass), anti-hydrogen in a volume filled with anti-air will be pushed to the ground as the anti-air falls up.
We are pretty sure of the first part, as we can create antiparticules and see them obliterate with their counterparts.
What actually seems contradictory is that: -The universe looks homogenous. -Big bang theory implies that there would have been an equal amount of matter and anti-matter created since the creation of the universe (everything was initialy photons). -Anti-matter indeed seems to be extremely rare.
Standard explanation is that the second point was not exactly right, but it is not airtight proved and leaves a lot of room for alternative explanations in which the first and third points could be wrong, and a lot of possible experiments.
Since we are supposed to put everything in airless plastic bag when we are not actually watching them, it would strongly delay the degradation. Anyway, I am reminded that true geeks only buy collector editions anyway.
Wrong. gazeous oxygen will not react spontaneously, but high energy radiation will very rapidly ionize it anyway. On the other hand, ionized oxygen is so reactive it will oxydize the first non-oxydizer atom or molecule it touches, including hydrogen.
In the universe, the only gazeous oxygen we have found yet was created by plants. Without life, it only exists as water, CO2 and various oxydes.
Slashdot Mirror
The good thing is that if you spend your entire day on economy and stock exchange sites, you might trick the system into promoting you to CEO position, of course, you need avoid /. and revert back to unpatched IE6 too.
If managemenet was really about optimizing resources, it would have been outsourced a long time ago.
As a non-manager, I can tell you the most important job of management is to deal with the unquantifiable: engineers need to feel unique and usefull and they need opportunities to work on new things (and/or be promoted) from time to time. A good manager knows his guys are much more than their previous experiences (and somtimes slightly less too).
"(A) we're either the first, or basically it takes ~X amount of time (X being the age of the universe) for intellegent life to evolve and we can't see ET sending us signals because he hasn't evolved yet or he's sending them from 200k light years away as we speak and wont see them for a very long time."
it's very unlikely that intelligent life evolve in two (or more) distinct point of the univerve within 0.0016% of current universe age. The problem might also be far worse: imagine a million civilizations existed in our galaxy before us and lasted an average 10000years, even when forgetting point B, that would still make a very little chance that the age and distance of at least one of those civilizations match enough to allow us to receive a signal.
"(B) Signal loss is so huge in the vastness of space"
Human radio emmisions are masked by thermal background noise before they reach Saturn orbit, so don't worry about Omicronians. To reach interstellar distances, you either need to aim at a particular target and shoot a very focussed signal or blow up supernovaes in a kind of ultimate morse code.
Moreover, in the same way that carbon-base biology is far more energy efficient than silocon-based one is the most likely reason all life on earth is carbon-based despite overabundance of silicon on the Earth surface, it has been demonstrated that RNA/DNA is superior on a physico-chemical ground to any other potential data storing chemicals studied.
There may be somewhere life very different from what we could imagine, but the water/carbon/proteins combination is by far the most efficient one scientists could imagine, so it's logic to bet on that base, at least for planets like Mars that are not that different from Earth.
Moreover, I see a big difference between optimizing your preparation by chosing the right equipments, training methods and paying special attention to one's body, to me, all that is totally part of the game, but when people start taking dangerous performance enhancing drugs, it means that everyone who wants to seriously compete has to jeoparadize his health and life expectancy, and in the end, everyone loses.
That was exactly the idea of the IT team of a place where I worked a few years ago, no external connection = no risk. Then one day, someone brought an infected floppy (it turned out later it was for perfectly work-related reasons) and the virus infected the 1000+ unpatched PC of the site in a couple of minutes.
And for the USB, yes, they now are considered by Windows as valid autorun devices under the presure of the stick makers who wanted to "add value" to their products (yet, I haven't seen any of these applications being more usefull than a virus). I've seen of those virus, but since it has a USB only propagation technique, it wasn't very widespread (only half of the team PC and a couple of sticks).
In french urban areas, the standard ADSL is 24Mb/s ATM (8 to 18Mb/s real TCP BW) for 29 to 39E/Mo (with unlimited phone and taxes included), but in a few major cities, 100Mb/s cable is being deployed and sold for the same price.
There would be just one (slightly off topic) problem: a 10 years trip to Alpha Centauri would consumes so much resources that no country could afford it (it would be at the very least in the billion ton of propelant per gram of workload range). Now, a 200 to 500 years one could be considered without the need to refresh the ship population during the trip.
Actually, it was in "Bowling for Columbia"
Absolutely.
The correct /. bad analogy would be if Capone was put in jail for using better cars than the ones policemen used.
Don't worry, it won't happen soon, as in Europe too, most of the toys, cheap clothes or fireworks (to name a few examples) are imported from china and no one in position of power is willing to ask what are the working conditions that come with such low prices.
The only chance that MS Windows is banned from Europe would come from an IBM/SUN/Oracle/Adobe heavily sponsored campaign.
So, if I understood, your compagny was trying to sell somethng that had a null marginal cost and give away what costed it an arm and leg, knowing that it was given to people who didn't and probably wouldn't pay a cent to your compagny.
Usualy, smart open source contributing compagnies work the other way and if the SW the givey away finds a market, make a good living on support.
I don't think he has to worry, that program does not seem to be any better that GWB when it comes to determine the right country to attack.
The ISS being only about 350km above the ground, and orbiting the earth more than ten times a day, it's likely that during a week on the ISS, that toursit would be within 2000km of any arbitrary place within a latitude range around the equator (sorry, I don't remember how large that range is).
Yes, that would be a silly reason.
However, Pluto's orbit is highly elliptical, over 30 tilted from the "other" planets orbital plan, and it turns in the wrong direction. Because of that, I'm perfectly fine with the idea that this chunk of mostly ice is not a planet.
To me, "plutoid" is the politically correct term for "large commet".
Yes, but as everyone knows: "you can't be fired for choosing MS (over cheaper and better alternatives)"
The problem that Pluto had that led to its demotion is that it has nothing special, it one in many bodies that exists beyond the gas giants, and the only thing that makes it particular is that it was found long before the others because it gave away its position by interfering with the orbit of a planet.
On a strictly technical point of view, it is mostly a large chunk of ice that has a non-circular orbit outside of the planets orbital plan, so calling it a dwarf planet is a polite way of not calling it a large comet.
"How does anti-hydrogen work on life thingies?"
On contact with organic tissues (or pretty much anything else), it will disapear in a burst of highly energetic photons (think gamma rays). So, depending on the dose (approx. ng to kg), it can range from totally harmess to skin burn to radiation poisonning to strategic-grade nuclear explosion.
"Does it have the potential for a destructive chain reaction?"
No, the reaction does not create new antimatter, and the potential energy of the created antimatter is only a very small proportion of the lab electricity bill, at worst, it will probably only blow up their building.
No.
Normal hydrogen is attracted to the groung by the gravitation, but pushed upward by the Archiede force (that basically is the mass of air that cannot be in the volume occupied by the hydrogen).
IF anti-hydrogen has a negative mass, it will simply go upward slightly faster in the presence of normal athmosphere, or to be more precise, during the small fraction of second before it anihilates with normal matter.
Now, (IF anti-matter has a negative mass), anti-hydrogen in a volume filled with anti-air will be pushed to the ground as the anti-air falls up.
We are pretty sure of the first part, as we can create antiparticules and see them obliterate with their counterparts.
What actually seems contradictory is that:
-The universe looks homogenous.
-Big bang theory implies that there would have been an equal amount of matter and anti-matter created since the creation of the universe (everything was initialy photons).
-Anti-matter indeed seems to be extremely rare.
Standard explanation is that the second point was not exactly right, but it is not airtight proved and leaves a lot of room for alternative explanations in which the first and third points could be wrong, and a lot of possible experiments.
Since we are supposed to put everything in airless plastic bag when we are not actually watching them, it would strongly delay the degradation. Anyway, I am reminded that true geeks only buy collector editions anyway.
It's Roland we're talking about, he only understands numbers if you add the words "clicks" or "visitors".
Even leaving aside the practical issues, the best theorical result you could have this way would be tens of billions years outdated.
It looks mostly full of emptiness.
"Short answer: no."
Wrong. gazeous oxygen will not react spontaneously, but high energy radiation will very rapidly ionize it anyway. On the other hand, ionized oxygen is so reactive it will oxydize the first non-oxydizer atom or molecule it touches, including hydrogen.
In the universe, the only gazeous oxygen we have found yet was created by plants. Without life, it only exists as water, CO2 and various oxydes.