Really? Sounds like the sort of mistake some ignorant Hollywood movie-maker would do, and say later that "nobody except a few scientists would know the difference any way."

It seems that life, intelligence, and civilization are the things that we find most interesting, in ascending order, when discussing exobiology. And, in ascending order, much, much more difficult to achieve. In other words, simple life is almost common, complex life is rare, intelligence even rarer, and civilization the rarest of all. Each step requires more time, stability, and opportunities for differentiation, than the last. A lot of the uniqueness of the Earth, according to the article, has to do with its suitability for developing land-based life. I wonder if achieving a land-based civilization is rarer than a liquid-based one. If there are aliens sending probes over here to investigate us, maybe it's to study this weird, land-based civilization. I admit that one advantage to land-based life development is that it's much easier to form divided ecosystems on land than it is in an ocean. This could create more opportunities for divergent evolution, speeding things up if you want to see a particular result, like intelligent life. However, it seems to me that there could be situations on other planets that can create a similar effect in a liquid environment. Perhaps not common, but possible. My point is, it might be chauvinistic to focus so much on conditions that allow the development of land-based life. The other, hidden chauvinism is towards carbon-based life, but it's hard to blame ourselves for that since it's so difficult to figure out how other kinds of life could work.

Somebody mod that post up for funny!! Politicians caring about the U.S.! Invading countries to remove tyrants! LOL Good stuff...

I worked at a newspaper and would see journalists and editors doing things like searching for words completely manually. I would say, "hey I have a very quick tip for you that will save you hours every single day for the rest of your career. In fact, it'll save much, much more time TODAY than it takes to teach it to you." and they would say "I don't have time!!! I have too much work to do!!!." Often I would just jump in and show someone how to do it, doing search and replaces in less than 10 seconds that would take them well over 30 minutes. That impressed a few people enough for them to start using it. But I found that many of them would persist in doing it manually anyway because it was just "easier." So what I discovered is that there are a lot of people who will work their fingers to the bone, unnecessarily spend hours working instead of enjoying life (these people were all salaried), even injure themselves with repetitive stress disorder, osteoarthritis, and so forth, to save the slightest mental effort involved in learning something very slightly new.

Wasn't Everybody who said this, just dumb-asses who couldn't take one look at the size of Japan and notice that it is going to always be highly limited by its living space. There's only so much a relatively tiny country can accomplish, no matter how well they adopt rational management methods and aggressively export their products. Whereas China, not so much limited, they are fully large enough to grow the infrastructure required to overpower us all. And with a government that, unlike most countries, actually plans ahead, it's a pretty scary scenario for the rest of the world. Think we're gonna get to learn what it's like being on the receiving end of what we've been giving the Brown countries all these decades.

Well, we're doomed to become their slaves regardless, but it will gratify Master greatly that we learned to speak his tongue.

I didn't bother to read the article, but I imagine it says a bunch of laser beams come out around a circle and then magically combine into a big beam that goes straight out from the circle. So give the credit to George Lucas' production artists.

I've been wondering for months what's with the onslaught of "new" ideas and inventions being touted on Slashdot that anyone half-conscious would see have known have been around for decades. Secretly, I figured it was ignorant 19-year-olds who had simply never seen the technology develop. Now I see even CmdrTaco doing this and it's not even April Fools' Day. and he's GOT to be older than 19. So WTH?????

You plugged a strange USB device into a machine with you logged in as an admin? Why would you do that? Have you ever heard of logging in as a standard user and running admin tasks using admin commands? Can even be done in Windows using the "Run As..." command.