Alright, but if one uses a time line on Earth, then let's say they go mad in the year 2020 and send a signal, we would then receive the signal in 2024, about 4 years later.
The point of that part of my comment was really just the idea that being that far away would be difficult for humans, not to suggest the precise amount of time it would take for observers on Earth to realize relativistic astronauts had gone mad.

What? Are you suggesting that astronauts on an interstellar mission would wait until they are asked before they send a mission update?
I'm pretty sure they would send out status reports every day or so, regardless of whether anyone asking them.

I have no idea what you are proposing, and either way, it doesn't really change the gist of what I was saying.

I don't mean to sound like an asshole, but it's not that interesting.
Sure, it would be nice to send a probe there, because it is another star, but interesting is more like, Eridani, which is about 10ly away, but has a planet.
I'm not saying that Alpha Centauri isn't interesting, I'm just saying you're missing the point of the OP. The idea is that even if we were to be able to travel at the speed of light, we aren't going to be able to travel more than 70ly away. While there is plenty of stuff in a 70ly radius, compared to the entire universe, that's a tiny, tiny fraction of the space.
So, we either need to survive in space for a long time, or travel significantly faster than the speed of light.

As a side note, I suspect that trying to send humans out even 4.2 light years away would cause massive problems. Even if they traveled at the speed of light, being completely unable to communicate with anyone on Earth would probably drive them all mad, and if it did, no one would ever know until 4 years later.

Of course, this doesn't apply to probes, but ideally we would send humans out to other planets at some point.

I hate to hijack the first comment like this, but I just want to point out, for anyone interested there is a pretty large community here dedicated to providing information on building UAVs.

While it certainly isn't the easiest thing in the world to do, with processing speed and efficiency increasing, as well as things like modern GPS and other sensors, UAVs really are easy enough for your average electronics/computer geek to build, given around $1000 and some free time.

I don't think that is how it works (although IANAP)

If you check to see if a block you have is collapsed, then suddenly it becomes collapsed, even if it wasn't before. That means you can't tell what it was supposed to look like before.

The other option is to only look at the entangled matter after you are sure it has collapsed, and see how the collapsing happened. However, this is also impossible. The way the qbits collapse is completely random, so you can't get any useful information out of reading them.

The best way to think about it is you have two coins taped to each other head to tail or something.
Then the coins are flipped, and separated without looking at them. Then take these coins to opposite ends of the universe.
Now, as soon as one coin is observed, the value of the other coin is known as well. However, looking at either coin does not help to relay information. The only way to do that would be to know how the coin was going to land before looking at it. Or to be able to somehow observe the coin and know if the other has been observed.

I don't know, my DataDestroyer has been pretty reliable over the years.

Wow? Really? You know the reason for this problem? You might want to tell Microsoft, I'm sure they'd want to know which one of their new features caused the Zunes to stop working, especially since they haven't even recognized there is a problem yet.

I was considering buying a Zune before this, but if the cost of having an FM radio or wifi sharing is having my PMP bricked, I think I'll stick with my iPod.

My cell phone was one of the first to have AIM built in (I still have it it's a piece of crap), and I was so excited when I first got it, as I am always on AIM. That is, until the first bill came.
I received a multi-hundred paged bill for some 8000 instant messages, when I had sent and received far less than 1000. The problem was, they treated IMs just as texts, $0.10 a pop.
I called up my phone company and asked them what was going on, and they gave me some stupid response about I must have signed up to be mailed by advertisers on my cell phone, even though those messages weren't delivered to my phone.
Needless to say, I was pretty pissed off, and within a few days I just called them up, and asked them to block all text messages to and from my phone. The funny thing is, even after they completely blocked texts, I was still getting charged for some, just not as many, until I called back and a representative realized they couldn't really charge me for messages after the provider promised to block every message.

Sorry for ranting, I just wanted to share with you my horror story. I guess I learned the lesson to never, ever trust the phone company.

You can't legally drive a car on public roads, but you can drive up and down your driveway if you want.

Not really.
Most of these papers just have an outline and the right parts of speech filled in, which is really easy to do. They probably just generated random ones until they found one that sounds correct.

The Turing Test, however, requires that the program is able to understand what someone says and construct a response to it that makes sense. To do that really well, one needs an artificial intelligence of some sort.

The paper generator would just spit out random papers every time it ran, and wouldn't take any input at all.

I have yet to see Linux fail to detect every monitor that is plugged in correctly. Usually if you have multiple plugged in, you can just reboot with one to get online and then try to fix the problem. (Although I usually just use links myself if I am in that situation, I don't know why that shouldn't count...)

The GUI tools in Linux do have a drop down list that you can select the make and model of your monitor from, and it will get the data it needs from that. There is probably the same list somewhere in a command line utility, but I don't know.
Any semi-recent monitor should communicate all the details to your computer with I2C anyways, so I guess the developers figured it wasn't necessary.

I know a lot of you are saying that the GUI tool works for multiple monitors on Ubuntu... but I'm guessing you haven't tried it, or at least not much.
I currently have 3 monitors, all different sizes, and one of them rotated, each as an independent X screen. The automatic configurations can't come close to figuring that out.
Two monitors on one graphics card can be set up, but all of the things I have tried doing just mess up configuration file.

However, the OP said for ordinary users, there are GUIs to configure thing. I don't think that most people really run more than one monitor.
Also, it takes a bit of reading documentation, but editing the xorg.conf file by hand isn't that hard, and Linux offers a whole lot more options for desktop configuration with multiple monitors than most OSs.

(Also, QuantumRiff, if you add the line Option "Rotate" "CW" #or CCW to the screen subsection in xorg.conf, it will rotate that screen. You could use XrandR as other people suggested, but I've not had any luck with that)

I hope you are being sarcastic and not actually thinking that applies here.
If you think I should be allowed to drive 90 MPH in a school zone or something, that's just crazy.
Sure, driving a bit over the speed limit won't hurt anyone in most cases, but if you disregard speed limits all together, that would be horrible for safety.

Your math is correct, your chemistry isn't.
A carbon atom has a covalent radius of about 80pm, but the atoms in sheets of graphite aren't bonded together. I don't know how far apart the atoms would rest, but it's going to be much farther than they would bond.

Ahh I need to work on my reading comprehension I guess, thanks for clearing that up...