The article linked in the summary requires you to answer survey questions or post it to your google+ / facebook before you can read it.

Don't put up with that crap. It's even worse than forcing you to watch advertisements before reading something. Filter out pcpro.co.uk with your hosts file or whatever other method instead.

Here it comes, all the reactionary Jew hatred posts...

No one seems so interested in the fact that Hamas sites rocket launchers, military command and control, and military supplies in private homes, hosptials, datycares, and schools...

The so-called Hamas "Human Shield" gets almost no attention, using women, children, and old men as "shields"...

No mention of indescriminant non-targeting of rockets into both Muslim and Jewis areas of Isreal by Hamas.

Oh, but those "goose stepping" Jews , bent on exterminating every Muslim in Gaza...

Who is it that has the destruction of Isreal as their official main goal? These are the people that want PEACE?

Actually, we know almost all basic chemistry, and the range of (stable) molecules that silicon can form is orders of magnitude less than for carbon.

Well, yeah, but I didn't want to offend the pedants even further. Unless the laws of physics (and therefore basic chemistry) are very different elsewhere in the galaxy, it's not unreasonable to think that carbon-based, liquid-water-dependent lifeforms are the most probable. In fact, I'd be willing to bet a tidy sum of money that the overwhelming majority of unique forms of life are not terribly dissimilar from ours as far as the underlying chemistry is concerned. They might be fantastically alien in all sorts of other strange ways, but they'll still be based on simple organic polymers. But this is still irrelevant to the discussion at hand, because even if there were different forms of life, we have no idea how we might detect them at astronomical distances.

I wish I had mod points. Every time I hear about planets not being able to support life, this is my first thought.

And every time a story about extraterrestrial life gets posted on Slashdot, several dozen people say exactly the same thing, as if they've had some brilliantly original insight that the scientists researching the subject missed. No one is explicitly ruling out the possibility that there are gaseous lifeforms living in the clouds of gas giants, or silicon-based rock monsters like the one in Star Trek. Hell, it would be a huge discovery if we found something like that. But since we're presently incapable of observing such lifeforms firsthand, and have no idea what we should be looking for at a distance of light-years, we have to settle for looking for the planetary "signatures" of temperature, oceans, oxygen content, etc. It may not satisfy the pedants, but it's still extremely difficult by itself. When we're capable of actually exploring other solar systems directly, then maybe we can start to look for fantasy lifeforms on frozen airless rocks and methane clouds.

Extremophile

I'm thinking more along the lines of "Life that will use radio signals (or similar) to communicate in such a way that we have a chance of detecting them without either of us leaving our solar systems".

But that's a bit wordy.

"Fat AGnus", not "Fat ANgus", like you typed. Googling that will get you, I suspect, pictures of large cattle instead of BBW porn and custom silicon.

All the hundreds of bases on foreign soil should be liquidated, and the foreign countries that get those back should start footing the bill for their own defense. Then we'll see how much they want to cry about American expansionist policies and so on.

In fairness, it's generally not the South Koreans (to pick one obvious example) complaining about American expansionism.

Society needs to figure it out, but that doesn't mean halting progress, it doesn't mean returning to a subsistence lifestyle and it doesn't meant that the middle classes are some important protected group that we dare not touch.

Fuck 'em, adapt or die.

Or if you don't want to be stuck talking to them, just play along until they ask you for your credit card number, tell them, "oh, I have to find my wallet" -- and then set the phone down and do something else.

I once got one of them to waste fifteen minutes on me by picking up the phone every few minutes and making some new excuse.

My point was just that "intelligence" can't be impossible to reproduce algorithmically, because physics is amenable to simulation and has given rise to intelligence.

If it can be produced by a mass of wet jelly sat between two ears, it can be produced by a computer running the right program. The challenge then is to unpick the puzzle of what that jelly is actually doing, and to do so sufficiently clearly to be able to specify that "right program".

Not saying it's easy; it's incredibly difficult. But possible in theory.

Heavy-handed Wikipedia editors with serious "WP:OWN" issues often run roughshod over articles, creating seriously biased articles that no one can change because these editors engineer "consensus".

This case will be refiled, and I hope it costs Wikipedia a pretty penny, if not in money, than in reputation.

Oh? Shotguns are illegal in the US?

64k is 65536 and don't let no fuckwit anal cunts try and impose some arbitrary bullshit standard with a stupid name on you.

I read KiB as a bad abbreviation of kibble. My cats eat kibble. They're enjoying some of this stuff as I type:
http://www.orijenpetfoods.co.u...

My cats know that 2 to the power of whatever is the important number.

MS bashing has been a core Slashdot content since before I created an account. If anything it's slackened off significantly since MS lost their complete dominance of consumer computing.

Where can I get me one of these civilian shoulder-fired SAMs?