The Planetary Society is doing an optical SETI search for laser signals. http://www.planetary.org/explore/projects/seti/optical-seti.html/ Is it pointless? Well, you don't know until you look, and even then it could take a very very long time. Problem with a laser is you have to point it somewhere

Since this is a Slashdot video, what would be really nice is if we could have some screen captures interspersed throughout the transcript.

It seems like if someone were to create a small 486 single board computer, similar to a Raspberry Pi, for under $60 or so, there would be an incredible market for it. For running everything from industrial equipment to a DOS/Windows retro gaming rig. Are there any cheap systems like this out there? I've seen lots of cheap ARM based boards but haven't come across any x86 ones.

As someone who was fortunate enough to see the northern lights in the lower 48 last year, this is good advice. Keep your eye on the forecast; unless you're far up north, good opportunities don't come along too often. Find a dark spot in the country with a good view, and be patient since they do ebb and flow. Although it can vary based on the space weather, your best chance is usually around midnight, and you can get frequent updates here http://helios.swpc.noaa.gov/ovation/

It took me a couple tries to finally see them the first time. And even that night, for the longest time, until my eyes adjusted, I thought I was just seeing hazy clouds. Every once in a while it would light up with color overhead, but sadly those only lasted a few minutes. Most of the time it was pretty faint, but still an amazing experience, and yes a long exposure is a must to get a decent photo!

That may be true, but think about the sheer number of hobbies devoted to building or fixing yesterday's technology that are neither practical or efficient...but still fun! The way I see it, if we get to that point technologically, people are going to create a planet just because they can. Who wouldn't want to design their own planet??

I'm the opposite; I would love to just browse around Best Buy like in years past but I can't do it any more due to the constant badgering by their employees. I ventured back there for the first time in probably a year, and it got to be so ridiculous I left without buying anything. I was asked about a dozen times in less than 5 minutes if I needed help with anything. Some people would love this constant attention; I'd prefer to be left in peace to actually browse on my own. I'd much rather read reviews online and then buy from a B&M store in case I needed to make a return. Even if I had to pay a reasonable premium. But the customer experience there is just so terrible due to the up-selling and constant badgering, I just can't do it.

Wish I had mod points, because I couldn't agree more. If you've been there that long, you might as well make the leap to management. Although it may not always seem like it, companies desperately need people in charge who know what they're doing. Demonstrate that you have the 'people' skills and know how to present to upper mgmt, and you're probably a shoe in.

I have a friend that was in the same situation a while back. They had been an expert for years with new managers rotating in every 12 months or so. Being new, the managers were terrible at understanding what was going on, and even more terrible at explaining to upper mgmt, which only served to make the rest of the group look bad. Finally after 3-4 years of this they just told their director they were considering their career options but what they were really interested in was being a manager as soon as a position opened up. The implied threat of course, is that they were willing to leave. This is the kind of thing that gets things moving. They were promoted within the month. So if I were you, I'd give it a shot, but take a look around and see what else is out there. If nothing else, maybe you'll get a raise or some perks while you're looking at other options.

Why are we still working more than 3 days a week? All this technology we have is being wasted on stupid crap like this... monitoring employees is not progress.

My problem with the whole situation is that as a society, we are rewarding the wrong kind of risk taking. We should be rewarding risk taking that is actually an investment in our future... things like developing technology like a fusion reactor or a high capacity batteries. Not betting whether the derivatives market will rise or fall. These banks are simply gambling on the price of stocks and other securities at a given point of time. Fundamentally it's nothing different than going to the casino, and that should never be supported with taxpayer money. One simple thing to do is say no more bailouts, ever, for what is essentially gambling.

Yeah, that was a catchy TV theme. Golden Girls in space... who knew?

That's also my main complaint with broadcast TV... it suffers from the same problem of being either perfect, choppy and generally awful, or "no signal" Are there any digital codecs out there which have graceful degradation of quality for either video or audio?

I just saw a Nova special about this exact topic called Dogs Decoded. He wasn't one of the researchers listed but I'm sure there are many out there. It's on instant watch if you are Netflix customer

For work Mondays always seemed to be packed with meetings so it's pretty unproductive IMO. Sunday though, is the most productive day in terms of the things *I* want to accomplish, as opposed to work I do for someone else. I just never have the time or motivation in the evenings during the week, so when Sunday rolls around, I know I have to hurry if I want to get everything done.

I could be way off base here but my understanding is that for a display with that pixel density the light coming from the different areas of the screen is sufficiently dense to cause interference at the focal point before reaching the eye (with a ton of very specialized calculations in the background). So yeah in essence, it's displaying the fringes on the display rather than the image. If you do a search for "computer generated holography", CGH there's some interesting links to papers and current methods of doing this.

Here's a great reason to keep going smaller: once you get down to the 10k or so pixels per inch level, you've got the main ingredient for a holographic computer display. As in the pixels are dense enough that you can display the holographic fringes necessary to show a true 3 dimensional image without any glasses/lenticular lenses, or any of the other tricks used today.