We already are surpassing radio to become something that is undetectable in space. spread spectrum and low power communications is already common place in the Ham Radio community. with 2.5 Watts I can talk to 30 people around the globe using PSK31 or Wspr. My signal will not be detectable past the moon even on the best radio equipment made. High power broadcasting is a thing of the past and will rapidly disappear. Some of these new technologies will make communicating with our own space probes easier, but hellishly harder to detect as power levels can be reduced.

A very advanced species will not be broadcasting at 200,000,000,000 watts with AM modulation or CW... what can be detected at light year or more distances. they will be using things that are far more efficient and will not be detectable. Honestly the whole SETI project is not looking for ET's TV stations or regular communications, it's looking for an intentional ultra high power beacon that was sent for the only purpose of saying "WE ARE HERE" which even reduces the chances of it being successful even more.

For SETI to detect a signal from Alpha Centauri. IT would have to be 10,000X stronger than any transmission ever sent from earth and on a constant time year after year after year so that it can be detected.

First, us humans prefer killing each other to science. This is a proven fact.
Second, humanity did not go from Horses to Nukes, a very very small percent of the population did it, those geniuses have everyone else standing on their coat-tails.

The next leap will be by a very small group that is significantly more enlightened than the rest of the 99.95% of the population. If those people are benevolent, then everyone enjoys the fruits. If they are not....... Well, things can go very differently.

Currently with how education is going, the general population is becoming more uneducated every year. WE do not glorify learning, but instead glorify morons that can carry a ball, or can sing a tune. And we Vilify in society those that do love learning and are very smart.

Honestly Humanity is a joke, almost a cancer. And if an advanced civilization stumbled across us, they would probably wipe us out to make the rest of the universe safer. We as a species love to hate others, we love murder, war, and control. WE thrive on hating those that are different or think or worship different.

I was expecting this to be about slashdot.

How much of this, though, is due to abusive practices like traffic pumping?

There were hearings and talk of reform. Did anything every happen?

Is it possible that the reasons that long-distance calls (in or out) don't complete because they've been too greedy abusively-routing 900-calls and the like through these areas?

This is the secret service. They want to shoot drones with a 50mm Howitzer that uses 00 buckshot rounds.

The Army alone has about 500,000 soldiers. A lot of them are in support roles but a private military also needs support.

Where are the families of the people in the private military? Because if they have to go back to the USofA (the "enemy" in this scenario) to visit Mom and Dad then there's going to be a problem. So you'll need room on the uber rich estate for the families of your military. And your support personnel.

Which brings up the infrastructure to support those families. Schools, hospitals, etc. Which means more support personnel.

Which means more schools and hospitals, etc.

Of course you can skip that if you want to. But remember who has the guns.

Solar sail can achieve 25% light speed, according to NASA, and Alpha Centauri is 4 light years away.

You want a manned mission (with robots doing all the actual work) to determine if the conventional wisdom that a manned mission to the outer planets is physically impossible is correct. Even if the pilot dies, you learn the furthest a manned mission can reach. There's seven billion people, you can afford to expend one or two. Ideally, they'd be volunteers and there'll be no shortage of them, but if you're concerned about valuable life, send members of the Tea Party.

No big surprise. The military are willing to invest what it takes for what they need. Military entities are, by necessity, pitifully naive when it comes to anything useful, but once they specify what they think they want, they don't shirk at the cost, they get the job done. A pointless job, perhaps, but nonetheless a completed job.

The corporate sector wants money. Things don't ever have to get done, the interest on monies paid is good enough and there hasn't been meaningful competition in living memory. Because one size never fits all, it's not clear competition is even what you want. Economic theory says it isn't.

The only other sector, as I have said many times before, that is remotely in the space race is the hobbyist/open source community. In other words, the background behind virtually all the X-Prize contestants, the background behind the modern waverider era, the background that the next generation of space enthusiasts will come from (Kerbel Space Program and Elite: Dangerous will have a similar effect on the next generation of scientists and engineers as Star Trek the old series and Doctor Who did in the 1960s, except this time it's hands-on).

I never thought the private sector would do bugger all, it's not in their blood. They're incapable of innovation on this kind of scale. It's not clear they're capable of innovation at all, all the major progress is bought or stolen from researchers and inventors.

No, with civilian government essentially walking away, there's only two players in the field and whilst the hobbyists might be able to crowdsource a launch technology, it'll be a long time before they get to space themselves. The military won't get there at all, nobody to fight, so the hobbyists will still be first with manned space missions, but it's going to take 40-50 years at best.

We have the technology today to get a manned mission to Alpha Centauri and back. It would take 15-20 years for the journey and the probability of survival is poor, but we could do it. By my calculations, it would take 12 years to build the components and assemble them in space. Only a little longer than it took for America to get the means to go to the moon and back. We could actually have hand-held camera photos taken in another solar system and chunks of rocky debris from the asteroid belt there back on Earth before Mars One launches its first rocket AND before crowdfunded space missions break the atmosphere.

All it takes is putting personal egos and right wing politics on the shelf, locking the cupboard and then lowering it into an abandoned mineshaft, which should then be sealed with concrete.

I guess we'll be well prepared for nuclear war then. Lets get right on that. Or maybe not.

Because short of the martial law of troops in the streets with body armor and M16's..... Oh wait... Our COPS have those now.
Well they dont have assult vehicles...... Wait....
Nor do they have grenade launchers...... Welll.....

So basically they have been planning on the shit we have today for decades?

Won't the option be to either let the GPU use the extra 1/7 speed memory, or force the data back out to system memory over the PCIe bus at a much lower speed? Outside of benchmarks, I don't think many applications are going to be demanding that extra memory anyway.

At least the old Unix names were at least somewhat relevant to their purpose, even if severely shortened to save keystrokes:

grep: Global Regular Expression Print -- Ok, still pretty bizarre sounding if you're not a bearded unixguy
man: Short for MANual. Straightforward.
awk: Beats me. I think it's named after the author's initials or something
sed: Stream EDitor: does what it says, edits streams of characters

Bullshit.

Google are a highly effective propaganda company.

But, as providers of a platform for developers, they are absolutely horrible. Writing software for their "platform" is like building a house on quicksand.

They make me look back on the time spent developing for Microsofts products with fondness.

Well, I was programming in the 1970s, so this is recollection for me, not history. And you've got it wrong in either case.

The famous port of the Unix kernel to C was in 1972/73, not 1970, and at that time, C was still a private language within Bell Labs. The K&R book "The C Programming Language" was published in 1978, but C didn't gain much traction outside Bell Labs until Microsoft and Borland released compilers for it in the mid 1980s.

In the period from 1965-1970, computer science was taught using ALGOL, and between 1970 and 1980, it was taught using PASCAL - mostly the UCSD p-System. The Christmas shopping season of 1977 was the first time you could buy a computer and take it to your house, and these machines were programmed using interpreted BASIC and hand-coded assembler - nobody in microcomputers had ever heard of C. The first compiled language for microcomputers that had any widespread success was Turbo Pascal, released in 1983 for CP/M and DOS. C did not make any serious inroads into microcomputer popularity until the mid to late 1980s.

This wasn't just some random thing - there were good reasons for it. Many of the microcomputers of that era didn't have curly brace keys, so there was a version of C where you could type (* and *) instead of { and }. But more to the point, compiling Pascal is incredibly faster and easier than compiling C. Pascal does not have a preprocessor, header files or multiple passes - the syntax of the language lends itself to being fast and cheap to use on extremely minimal hardware architectures.

Some of the features of Turbo Pascal - like the "with" statement and the set operator - have never been duplicated in any other language. Trying to paint Pascal as an also-ran to C is both historically and technically incorrect.

Just because open source projects can choose terrible names doesn't mean they have a monopoly on it.