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61107905
comment
byGigsVT
4 @12:29AM
(#47219793)
Attached to: Aliens and the Fermi Paradox
if that were true you'd have been able to get a cool name on slashdot. And "were" would actually be spelled the way you spelled it.
61107647
comment
byGigsVT
4 @12:21AM
(#47219767)
Attached to: Aliens and the Fermi Paradox
You are ignoring the fact that it seems like one highly intelligent and technology-developing species could probably not evolve in coexistence with another one on the same planet, at some point one would win and kill off the other one.
I'm sure it's been proposed/discussed many times before, but I don't know if this concept has an "official" name or not.
61107393
comment
byGigsVT
4 @12:12AM
(#47219739)
Attached to: Aliens and the Fermi Paradox
They would laugh when they learned that our supposed evidence of the big bang was actually just us picking up their interstellar music streaming service.
61107155
comment
byGigsVT
4 @12:04AM
(#47219707)
Attached to: Aliens and the Fermi Paradox
Directionality is a mostly irrelevant consideration.
The fact that an antenna is 9db or 30db higher in one direction quickly becomes irrelevant with the vast distances of space. Antennas don't work like flashlights. They are more like a light bulb with a two-way mirror on one side that reflects 50% of the light and lets 50% of it through out the back. At VHF and above, things like mountains act like mirrors that reflect signals straight up (among other directions), as well.
You are somewhat wrong about AM... at least broadcast band AM is mostly only directional in the sense that there's dead zones straight off the ends of the dipole. They are shooting quite a bit of signal upward. Our ionosphere does strongly reflect and attenuate what would make it out to space in those bands though.
This goes toward your comment about the 50s and 60s... we have far more powerful transmitters in operation now (some VHF TV the better part of 1 megawatt!), and in bands that aren't reflected by the ionosphere. If anything we are getting louder and louder.
Unfortunately the first thing they might see of humanity is free-to-air broadcast TV, and just assume that we are all complete idiots.
60839305
comment
byGigsVT
14 @12:20PM
(#47165631)
Attached to: Kickstarter Expands Allowed Projects, Automates Launches
Any company that bans gun related stuff does have a political agenda.
60839265
comment
byGigsVT
14 @12:18PM
(#47165617)
Attached to: Kickstarter Expands Allowed Projects, Automates Launches
Agreed. It's incredibly stupid and shortsighted for kickstarter to ban "weapons and weapons accessories".
57024421
comment
byGigsVT
014 @11:47AM
(#46324183)
Attached to: Why Copyright Trolling In Canada Doesn't Pay
A studio enforcing their copyright against personal-use downloads might be a somewhat crappy and ill-advised practice, but it's not "trolling". To me if you were going to call something "copyright trolling" it would be more like using copyright letters to silence people, aka SLAPP, not using copyright the way it was intended, to prevent people other than the owner from making copies of the entire media as a substitute to buying it from the media holder.
57024317
comment
byGigsVT
014 @11:43AM
(#46324121)
Attached to: Your 60-Hour Work Week Is Not a Badge of Honor
I'm seeing far more liberals (on the internet, generally pretty wealthy) that are pro-guns, so not that hard for me to picture. But I will grant you the average conservative probably wouldn't get it.
57024159
comment
byGigsVT
014 @11:37AM
(#46324077)
Attached to: Speedier Screening May Be Coming To an Airport Near You
Ignoring the general stupidity of many TSA practices, and that this is an artificial market created by government inefficiency, what's so fundamentally wrong with paying more to get through faster?
If your money is worth more than your time, you'll wait, if your time is worth more than your money, you'll pay. That's a fundamental decision every time you say something like "I'll pay someone to change my oil because I don't want to spend 20 minutes and get dirty doing it myself", or "I'll eat out so I don't have to cook". Time/money/value decisions are something you make dozens of every day.
57023981
comment
byGigsVT
014 @11:29AM
(#46324011)
Attached to: Speedier Screening May Be Coming To an Airport Near You
I was once at an airport, I think it was LAS... people were all piled up in a clusterfuck right after of the entrance to TSA where they check IDs, even though there was about a mile of Disneyland spiral queue that was not being used. A helpful TSA agent started to open up the spiral queue, and was actually rebuked by a superior because "that's not the way they do things", and everyone that went in the queue had to rejoin the mosh pit of people.
And then they closed two of the four open screening lanes because "it wasn't busy enough to justify having that many open". We had to literally jog across the airport to catch our flight after being stuck in that mess for 50+ minutes.
I'm not sure it would take new technology to fix the TSA, just some people running the show that don't have their head up their ass.
56822101
comment
byGigsVT
2014 @11:56AM
(#46276717)
Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Options For Ongoing Education?
Someone who knows PHP and Javascript really well is not a common thing. If you do go the web route, focus on the JS more than the server side, since that's where things are actually happening these days. Learn how to write JS that doesn't leak DOM nodes or memory (for god's sake, please). Half the JS libraries out there leak like a sieve.
56822029
comment
byGigsVT
2014 @11:53AM
(#46276665)
Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Options For Ongoing Education?
Learning to write good PHP code would be a huge benefit, since it seems to be a rare skill, and as you point out, the language gives you plenty of rope to hang yourself with.
56821929
comment
byGigsVT
2014 @11:49AM
(#46276613)
Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Options For Ongoing Education?
I take issue with the idea that a CS degree at most schools would give you the foundation to be a good programmer.
There's far too much emphasis on math, and far too little emphasis on what really matters in software. I will never ask one of my employees to solve a partial differential equation. But I will ask them to write maintainable code (even simple shit like don't copy and paste big blocks of code seems to not be taught at all) and to consider usability and UI at every step.
56821777
comment
byGigsVT
2014 @11:43AM
(#46276517)
Attached to: Killing Net Neutrality Could Be Good For You
If Slashdot were created today, I wonder if it would be some kind of homogenized youtube channel or twitter account.
The barriers of entry have come down, but inevitably, so has the quality of content. The white noise isn't a conspiracy, it's a consequence of commoditization of publishing. It just turns out that most people don't have anything worthwhile to say.
56821629
comment
byGigsVT
2014 @11:38AM
(#46276429)
Attached to: Your 60-Hour Work Week Is Not a Badge of Honor
It is interesting how much your "well off liberal" rhetoric overlaps with "fox-type conservative". You are both afraid of some dark skinned boogyman. Except, your plan is appeasement, while the conservative plan is self-defense.
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