Humorless mods

"With every new piece of news I am further dismayed with our failure as a species. I can't shake the nagging sensation that we deserve to become extinct."

Says the guy who runs an online drinking games database. Maybe if you actually chipped in and helped with something constructive?

http://www.askamathematician.c...

"The nearest known, reasonable, candidates for being an Earth-like planet (as of April 2013) are about 20 light years away (HD 20794 d, Gliese 581 c, and Gliese 667C c). Spotting dudes and ladies on one of these worlds requires, at minimum, a telescope array that’s at least 100 million km across. That’s an array more than half the size of Earth’s orbit. The good news is that an array like that (under absolutely ideal circumstances) isn’t that difficult to create. Setting aside that the telescopes would each need to be essentially perfect for their size (Hubble-quality), all we’d need to do is set them up in solar orbits about the size of Earth’s orbit. This is a lot easier than sending them to another planet, and about as hard as sending them to crash on the Moon."

"to get a picture of an alien that’s person-sized, standing on a world 20 light years away, so that it takes up one pixel in the image, using an exposure time of about one second, would require an array of telescopes with exposed mirrors and lenses with an area totaling more than several thousand times the Earth’s surface area and spread out over a region about the size of Earth’s orbit. This isn’t technically impossible, but it would be “expensive”, and would require substantially more materials than are likely to be reasonably found in our solar system. It probably isn’t worth it to get a blurry, tiny picture of some alien picking it’s nose 20 light years away and 20 years ago."

Are you saying the Earth is not in space? SKA is on Earth, and Earth is in space. Therefore SKA is in space.

I don't know about you, but I type MUCH faster than I can write. Perhaps you just aren't a good typist.

Genuine question, what is "dynamic" music?

Yes, I really do.

It's not always easy to tell. In spite of all the apparent business and legal experts on slashdot screaming how obvious this should have been with 20/20 hindsight, I rather doubt the contract stated "Apple has the right to screw GT over royally". I think in this case, the devil will be in the details - it's probable that Apple abused obscure clauses (or possibly even violated the agreement) that at the time seemed unlikely to cause issues - the lawyers here will probably have to go over a lot of detailed documentation over what happened to really figure out the nature of the screwing and how much Apple was at fault etc.

In spite of the necessity of contracts, all business interactions still rely on a certain level of basic trust.

all disappear if we reduce human population to < 100 million

OK, you go first.

Oh wait, it's only OTHER people who are the virus that need to be destroyed.

No, it's more accurate to state that some percentage of environmentalists are malthusians. Or, that malthunianism is simply one "path" of many to environmentalist views. I prefer to base views on fact and science. I'd like to keep a healthy "environment" and decent amounts of "nature" simply because it raises our quality of life, however, so does agriculture, but I think we could find a healthy balance if we worked harder at the "science" part. I think the earth can support 10 billion + and I'd be happy to see that many people, more even. But questions like whether or not global warming is occurring and the effects of that, that's a question of fact/science.

Because we wouldn't want starving masses to revolt against the corporate-welfare-enriched 0.1% .. gotta keep peasants satiated with bread and circuses or they tend to revolt.

Your argument is exactly what they used to say about why apartheid was needed, and also why they justified dictatorial policing - and it was very effective, as like New York, apartheid South Africa had very low crime rates and bragged about how "safe" it was while violating everyone's rights. I think it was Martin Luther King who said some powerful words about not confusing the presence of *order* with the presence of *justice*.

I understand the police want to keep safe but they also have a duty to uphold the constitution, and the way stop and frisk is implemented is a due process violation (and racist). Maybe there would be less hostility toward the police if the police thus weren't singling out and violating due process rights of brown people.

Huh wtf? I'm just saying it's much more of an engineering challenge to launch rockets into space if you're an underwater species than a land-dwelling species - that's a plain straightforward fact, there is nothing even controversial about such a statement. Did you reply to the wrong comment? Nothing you said makes any sense as a reply to what I wrote. Or am I feeding a troll? Yeah, more likely.

Maybe 1.2 million would be more realistic.

Smartphone sales in India for 2014 alone will be around 225 million (http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/13/smartphone-explosion-2014-india-us-china-firefoxos-android) ... but yeah, whatever.