By "contact" he probably means "irrefutable evidence of life", as in, for example, we find ourselves hearing radio transmissions (not necessarily directed outward, but incidental to technological life). The impact on society would be tremendous even without physical or two-way contact. Just knowing someone else is out there is disruptive.

All the greybeards have these sorts of stories, but not this specific tale. Working at MSU physics lab, about once a week I would take two or three trays of punch cards, with no sequence numbers (that would have taken up 8 precious columns) over to the data center to be read in by a simple 2-4 card JCL code. I would mark the tops of the decks with a big "X" and the date, no worries.

• 
  One day the printout came back with a simple JCL error, so I went to pick up the deck planning to resubmit it. As they brought the boxes forward they dumped them all over the floor, as I stood there watching. Ooops.
  
  Of course, they had actually taken an old set of cards and dumped them, this was my second time being involved in a prank while working with data centers. The first time, I was the pranker, so I had it coming.

Another story involves a pranker feedback loop. Using SimScript back in the day, punch cards with turnarounds measured in hours.

• • 
    
    Student gets his printout back and finds the report includes a printed line "Eat my shorts". He rifles through his card deck, and finds a card that his buddy had slipped in. Running the card through the punch, he adds the words "... you scum sucking pig" and inserts it into the suspected pranker's submitted deck.
    
    Cue lunch. The Sargent from data center window comes to our lunch table to tell the original pranker (now the prankee) that they killed his job after it printed a several foot high stack of "Eat my shorts you scum sucking pig" (oops, forgot to look for programming loops before just dropping the card into the deck). He is to report to the Commander at 2PM to explain himself.
    
    Original prankee falls all over himself apologizing, promises to go with the original pranker to explain, lots of recrimination, etc. Sargent, having stood there silently, finally interrupts to note that they really only printed a few pages, and this abuse of government equipment need not go any higher.
    
    Lessons learned? (1) Do NOT prank carelessly. (2) If you must prank, keep the sysops in the loop.

Seems to me that a good noise-adding printer wrapped around an encrypted message could be a very interesting way to use USPS for secure communications. Or does NSA want to open physical mail AND solve the Captcha problem just to read my notes to my Family?

It's a standard TypeI-TypeII error matrix, just tell me the rates of innocents who die because we failed to execute a criminal vs the rates of innocents we kill because we execute them. My earlier comment points to this, we have people who would kill a gazillion innocent prisoners to get one guilty man, conversely we have people who would let criminals take a gazillion innocent lives to keep from executing one innocent prisoner. The 0-1's of the world cannot event discuss how big a gazillion is, they are pegged to the meter extremes and cannot be part of a rational argument.

Yeah, that worked real well with the Irish (Australia) and the French (Devil's Island). The real argument is whether we think all criminals can be redeemed. The belief in universal redemption sure worked well for the Catholic Church. Like abortion, this is an argument between two 0-1 parties with no middle ground. So take it elsewhere.

The Trajectory Division once suggested an acronym for a project that was called Reverse Azimuth Trajectories For Undetectable China Kills, those were the days.

Ahhh, the nobility of subsistence farming co-existing with industrial productivity. I personally love community supported agriculture (CSAs) and the produce they provide, but I do not think we can count on a 7-9B person planet existing on this track for long. And Game of Thrones level existence is way post-collapse, if we continue to rely on paleofuels to power our farms (fertilizers, planting, reaping, delivery to market), how much of that can be converted to alcohol and nuclear?

And here is the longer version of scarcity+productivity, thanks Immerman!

I was torn whether to mod this up or reply to it. In the end, the point I thought needed making was that the post-scarcity economy we all seem to be celebrating is about to run into the peak-resources problem. Unless an author talks both, they are a blind philosopher describing an elephant.

He was NOT an arm of government, so 5th amendment does not apply. Maybe he should have packed heat into the school and gone all Columbine on them. Fek that.

Sorry to have to tell ya, democracies bigger than a few hundred have to evolve into representative democracies, and if they are really to survive they need to move to representative republics. At best.

All you can hope for is that the oligarchy believes as you do, and if they don't they are hopefully held in check by a Constitution. Of course, they know that, so they work to modify the rules in their favor. Freedom is a transitory state, like childhood, and you should enjoy it while you can.

I'll bet this is why I can re-read a (fiction) book two days after I finish it and still find it interesting and fun. Not surprising (I remember the story), but interesting and fun because I am really reading it for the writing. Am I screwed or what?

Linux is in my future because I am tired of upgrading hardware just so I can run bloatware. But then, I don't use my computer for entertainment, I use it for work (which means I am VPN to a real linux cluster and only use local machine for email and browser, except for those nasty printer drivers and scanner drivers and music and CD burning and (hmmmmm, never mind)). So my hardware can't handle Windoze next upgrade and my bank account can't handle a hardware upgrade. Adios.

Religion provides a sense of community (just like going to a football game does, but not seasonal). A sense of community makes one live longer and happier. So a sense of community is good. The Internet provides a false sense of community. So, IF this virtual-community makes one live longer and happier, then it is a good substitute for religion. I think Slashdot readers get a great deal of community from Slashdot, for example, and I hope (as one) that it results in a longer and happier life (after controlling for lack of exercise, etc. in my models).

I would say that physics is clearly a subset of mathematics, which is to say we can pose even simple questions that are outside of physical reality. And, no, the imaginary number i is not what I have in mind. But the fact that there is absolutely NO object in existence that needs the full value of pi suggests that the universe (and the physics thereof) is a subset of mathematics. And P not equal NP may fall into the same crack, which is to say that the universe is too small (and granular) to contain the NP problems that make P not equal to NP.