The British already have a twenty mile long extension cord that they use to power the trains going through the Channel Tunnel. They reel it out as each train goes through, and then wind it up afterwards to prepare for the next train. There is no other way to do it, since it is totally impossible to transfer electricity to a moving object through, say, a power rail.

In particular, we discovered that it was fixed on May 21, 2013 (between the releases of glibc-2.17 and glibc-2.18).
Unfortunately, it was not recognized as a security threat; as a result, most stable and long-term-support distributions were left exposed (and still are): Debian 7 (wheezy), Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 & 7, CentOS 6 & 7, Ubuntu 12.04, for example.

I haven't installed either MS Office or Photoshop for a year or two now.

The files "in the cloud" are no longer compatible with previous versions. Adobe has stated that their cloud software can "export" to older version of Adobe products (at least for now) but newer features may not be included. This practically means that if you have the CC files and Adobe fails to exist and you haven't exported to older versions, you're SOL.

The same goes for most cloud-based apps including Office, Google Docs etc.

No. 6000 years. Not 4000. (This isn't helping your argument to authority btw.)

It is now currently 2015AD. The earliest true written language examples come from 3200BC.

http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vaj...

That's 6000 years. Not 4000.

The major breakthrough that fed the industrial revolution was the discovery of easily manufactured steel using the bessemer process. Prior to this, steel was too inconsistent and too expensive to create the industrial equipment needed for rapid technological advancement. (other metals are too soft, too brittle, too heavy, or too expensive.) The materials required to produce mass manufactured steel are not very rare, and the properties of them were well known well prior. Most were known at the time language was first being put down in permanent form. (In fact, fired clay tablets-- requiring kilns-- are the best surviving examples of such early literature, and many such texts discuss the shipment of smithable ores, indicating that the humans knew the properties of those metals in sufficient detail to be able to construct a bessemer reactor if they had the idea for it. That idea came about in the western world in less than 120 years-- Human understanding of those metals went from simple metalurgical formulae and psudo-religious hogwash in the dark ages to structured science after the renaissance during that time, permitting the creation of the theory behind the bessemer reactor.)

The big factor was probably a population requirement not being met previously-- a situation exacerbated by warring over resources and over gods and politics. You need sufficient population numbers to sustain a boom in technological growth, and the ancient world lacked the workforce.

However, this has more to do with the fact that our planet had several events that nearly wiped out the human race, putting our numbers at low values initially. Things like the Toba eruption, and of course, the ice-age. Things like the black death also would have played significant roles in reaching the required number of humans needed for an industrial revolution. Humans have a surprisingly small amount of genetic diversity, indicating a prior genetic bottleneck in the past, hinting at such a catastrophe early in our history.

It is foolish to assume that all possibly intelligent creatures would have such setbacks both in nature and in culture.

As a consequence, even if we take the linked article at face value, and have 2 G type star systems with habitable planets forming at exactly the same time, there is a pretty good chance that they could have us beaten technologically by now.

eh, apparently you can't, mate.

Dunno. I stopped using Office after 2007. To me, continuing to use it would have been like the person who keeps going back to a spouse that beats them senseless a few times a week, but "has completely changed now", so goes back to get beat again.

The open office suites serve me well, and I have complete and full compatibility no matter what platform I am on. and more options. Considering they still have the Ribbon, I don't even consider MS Office at all.

I have zero need for Redmond's offerings.

If today's software is used as an example, it seems like most team programmers are chosen for their willingness not to to rock the boat (or management ego) first and programming skills last.

Is your reading comprehension broken?

The point was that humans went from just one step above agrarian culture, to nuclear power in 200 years, out of a possible period of 10,000 years in which that rapid progress could have happened.

This means that just looking at our own species as the model, we could have been at our current level of technology thousands of years ago, had we decided that waving our dicks around and arguing over gods and politics was less important than improving ourselves through discovery, invention, and knowledge.

It is reasonably possible for another species to have reached our level of sophistication 9,000 years before us, as a consequence-- and now be 9,000 years ahead of us in technological innovation. That's a pretty significant amount, given that our own use of writing is only around 7,000 years.

But what did you take away from it? Some bullshit canard about how humans should focus on going to space that you beat about like a strawman.

Brilliant.

Countries that have a higher minimum wage also have far more generous welfare systems. So low poverty is correlated with a higher minimum wage, but not caused by it. America has a minimum wage of about 33% of the median wage. France has the highest, with a minimum wage about 60% of the median. America has less than 6% unemployment, while France has over 10%, and over 25% unemployment among unskilled young people.

Using Chrome latest here.

Why??

And it still has a way better UI than Firefox or Chrome for high resolution desktops (ie. desktops).

This does not really resolve fermi's paradox. It just helps define fermi's paradox.

The human race has been in mostly the same state physiologically for more than 10,000 years-- That is to say, you could clone a person who lived 10,000 years ago, and never tell them their origins, and they would integrate into our society without problem.

Our civilization has been prevented from leaving the earth by our own silliness. Our big push out of a major duldrum of ignorance has been a bittersweet one; After the renaissance, we discovered that we were capable of much more than we had. We focused on that, and coined a now much maligned term: "Progress."

For the better part of the past 2 centuries, humans were focused on attaining such "Progress", and technological advancement grew at previously unprecedented speeds. We literally went from covered wagons and horses to nuclear power in 200 years.

It wasn't biology holding humans back from this rapid achievement-- It was attitude and social conventions. Things like warring over who's god has the biggest dick, or over who has the most money. (Things we STILL fight about to this day!) When there is a major social focus to improve, we have historically demonstrated the ability to do it.

If we can thus do this-- Go from horse drawn conveyances to nuclear energy in 200 years-- then there is very little reason to expect other potential civilizations from doing so as well, and perhaps not having spent quite as much time arguing over who's god has the mightiest member.

Yet, when we look up into the sky, we dont find any. We strain with our radio telescopes, and hear only the strange EM flux of gas giants, the hissing and popping of stars, and the screams of magnetars.

This finding does not settle Fermi's paradox. It just sets a slightly smaller boundry.