If it's here and it wants to be spotted it would have announced itself by now. If it doesn't want to be spotted we don't have any realistic hope of spotting it. Keep in mind, anyone out there with routine interstellar travel of any kind, even just with automated drones, is more than likely to be hundreds or at least tens of thousands of years ahead of us technologically.

That said, it's always possible that the machinery only wakes up every so often. If it only sticks it head out to look around every 10000 years or so it might have missed us last time (or we might still be below it's detection threshold but I find that hard to believe personally). So, we could examine the asteroid belts, and the trojan asteroids around the gas giants, looking for things that give off an anomalous amount of heat or have a higher than expected metal content. Logically any plan to explore the galaxy is going to rely on something like von Nueman probes; that is to say probes that get to their destination and build a few hundred copies of themselves to send to the next start system (and to provide redundancy in this one).

There seem to be a lot of RTL sticks out there. I know of a dev who is working on a server app that takes an RTL stick and creates a routable Ethernet stream from them with the intent of making it compatible with my SdrDx app. I do support USB soundcard SDRs, but quickly grew less than enthused with USB as people constantly complain about windows installing the wrong USB drivers over the ones that are correct and things stop working, plus it's a PITA to maintain the separate code bases for USB across Windows and OSX. Ethernet based SDR setups are *so* much cleaner to handle, plus Qt (which is what I use to make this cross platform) has network drivers that work well, and identically, on both platforms. The real win, though, for a lot of people is the ability to remote the SDR away from local noise.

Everything is relative. 22 light years, ludicrously far away in every day terms, is a hop skip and a jump in astronomical terms.

I personally use Lynx to browse, why would I want images/audio/video built into it?

And can we please, please, please get a similar demand for Facebook?

And it's pretty ridiculous to then say, "the US government is lying!" when they're actually taking concrete steps to get this right and doing so as transparently as possible.

And the politician caught embezzling money rapidly begins taking concrete steps to determine how such an accounting mistake could have happened. And the politician caught getting blow jobs in the Oval Office makes a contrite apology to the American people and begins taking concrete steps to fix his marriage. And so on.

News flash: When politicians get caught with their pants down (literally or figuratively), they begin taking concrete steps to fix the problem. The thing is, it was still a problem before they were caught, and they were doing nothing about it then. Therefore, it is safe to assume that they are only fixing the things that they were caught doing, and that they are probably doing other things that are just as wrong, but because they have not yet been caught, they won't clean up their act.

The fact of the matter is that most politicians, CEOs, and other leaders are sociopaths. They got into positions of power through not caring who they hurt on the way up. They have absolutely no morals, and cannot be trusted to do the right thing. They must be treated like little children, and watched constantly by a vigilant public. The absence of that watchful eye can only result in tyranny. We've been looking the other direction for far too long, both as a society and individually. It is time to remove the veil of secrecy and show these leaders for what they are: traitors against the United States, its Constitution, and its people. Some crimes just cannot be forgiven with a simple apology and a "We promise not to do it again." But even if it could, they already tried that once before, back in the Bush administration. And although once is a mistake, twice is a pattern of abuse.

This is required for a democracy: you need to be informed before you can make the informed choice.

For the most part, I would agree with you. However, there is the need for temporary operational secrets, particularly where the revelation of those secrets would compromise the identity of operatives in the field, or would reveal our attack strategies on the battlefield during a time of war. There should, however, be time limits to such secrets.

How, then, do you explain China? They remain content to make copies.

They're starting out further behind than those other countries, under a regime that doesn't really encourage free thinking, so for now, they're still trying to catch up in areas like process improvements. Give them another decade.

But the light from those places will never reach us since it is trying to fly towards us on a kind of conveyor belt ("space itself") that's moving the other way more rapidly.

Yep, that's pretty much the hard argument for what I said. Keeping in mind that light doesn't give a north end of a southbound rat how we define anything. Of course, since that light never reaches us, its existence is wholly theoretical, but I just go with the last semi-sane thing I hear from a cosmologist. :)

Yes, tubes and fets share various characteristics, but there are a lot of things they don't share and I guarantee you that a good grounding (hah!) in fets of all kinds isn't sufficient to go off and do tube design beyond the very simplest applications. There have been some seriously weird tubes with no corresponding single-semiconductor solution; quite aside from the huge range of voltages involved, there are screen grids, directly heated cathodes, gas-filled regulators, CRTs (imagine depending on knowledge of a FET to make a CRT work, eh?), coupling issues, various kinds of noise peculiar to tubes, weird stuff like microphonics, just a whole host of interesting issues and devices. Plus, things you'd take as similar act quite differently, even starting just from a rectifier diode. And tubes glow in the dark. You're thinking orange, right? But an OA2 in normal operation is a beautiful, bright purple. And there are tubes that are green bar graphs, tubes that can display characters... :)

Yes, that ham made a huge difference for me, and I try to do the same - happy to wear the "Elmer" hat. Been an extra class for decades now. Also, lately, been working on a free software defined radio app, so in way, I'm getting right back to my roots.

When I was young kid, in the early 1960's, I visited a ham radio operator a bunch of times. Cool radios, etc. He taught me some key things about tubes, started a long slide into technology that still hasn't stopped. I asked him about transistors. He looked at me somewhat askance and said "yeah, "I heard about them things. Tubes, son. I know tubes." And went back to teaching me about tubes, and resonance, and etc. Outside of his place, I hooked into an NRI electronics course, and spent a summer sucking that down, while running to my older friend Tony to help me with the math. NRI was teaching tubes then too, but they had an excellent section on transistors, and so I grew comfortable with them just as they were becoming interesting and more widely used. Tubes, except for certain specific jobs, just aren't used much now as we all know, and I've always been grateful for my luck in terms of timing; a few years earlier, and I'd have been looking askance at transistors myself. But instead, I've been comfortable with semiconductors right up until they got too small for me to handle (surface mount, trembling hands, etc.) And I know tubes.

The idea that another revolution of similar importance may happen in my lifetime...

Damn. I just feel like one amazingly lucky fellow. :) Now, will I be able to grasp the tech if it makes it to market? That, as they say, remains to be seen. Getting older doesn't mean you're without a clue. It just means you no longer always know where you put them.

But space isn't something. Period. That's why expansion of distance between two somethings with nothing between can exceed light speed.

As far as we understand it right now, I should add.

You do realize that making unfounded accusations just makes you look somewhat dim and clueless, yes?

Yes, really. By the time the election rolled around, I could:

vote for Obama

Vote for Romney

Realistically, those were the only choices. Inasmuch as I want the ACA to go forward, Obama was actually the only choice, as Romney wasn't saying anything at all I could get behind.

Any idea of voting for Paul or someone even less popular would have lost Obama a vote against Romney, while doing absolutely nothing to see the person I voted for actually get elected. I could not, in good conscience, do *anything* that would, or even might, help Romney.

Given the circumstances, I am content with that vote; I think it was the best choice available at the time.

If you think you can fix the American political system, by all means, do so. Until then, though, it's turd sandwich or shit bagel. Picking is a matter of holding one's nose and hoping you really like bread.

In Electronics and computers you have the same situation. Why would anyone develop some totally new technology at the expense of years in the lab and millions of dollars of salary and equipment with no way to assure a payment?

They do now. Have you seen how blatantly China and other developing nations ignore patents and produce blatant knock-offs of American goods? And before that, it was Korea, then before that, Japan, and I'd imagine somebody else before that, and at some point, if you look back far enough, it was America making knock-offs of patented continental goods.

So throughout pretty much the entire history of the industrial world, you had some developing nation ignoring patents and making the products anyway, and before very long, those nations were the ones doing much of the innovation, because they weren't content to just make exact copies for long, unlike the lumbering companies with patents, who basically sat on their butts and tried to milk their inventions for every penny they could while doing as little as they could to improve things. All of modern technology, ultimately, exists in large part because patents were ignored.