fixedd
This has been well documented since the early 2000s. Programmers are statistically and significantly more productive if they have enclosed offices with closing doors. And decision makers that care have been acting on it for just as long (see Joel on Software, I'm not a huge fan, but this has been a harping point of his, as an owner of a software company, for years).
Any company that forces programmers to work in open-plan environments is either ignorant, or just doesn't care.
I imagine it isn't one of those things where it's "always cheaper to do X", but there's probably a break-even point. Does anyone know how to do the math to draw that chart?
On the last flight I took with Delta Airlines they had all the TVs drop down and they played five minutes worth of advertisements on the screens and through the loudspeakers. I just refuse to deal with companies that are hostile to their customers.
When I went to high school in this general area (15+ years ago) they used run-of-the-mill SUVs just fine.
Yeah... you solve that with employment contracts, not discriminatory hiring practices.
I really don't see how saying "smart people will get bored and quit" is any different from saying "African-Americans are lazy and will eventually stop showing up on time", or some other nonsense.
Long story short, the humans were WAY better at it than the bees (I forget the % increase, but it was significant), but it was so tedious that the labor costs still drove the end-user cost of the apples above what the market was willing to pay.
I imagine it will allow people to work on what they want to work on, instead of what they have to work on. I, for one, would stop spending ~40 hours a week building software for others and build myself an airplane instead. Next? Maybe a sailboat. Sure, the robots could do it better and more efficiently, but I enjoy doing that sort of "work".
But what do I know, maybe not everyone is like me. Maybe it'll turn into Wall-E, or everyone just ends up sitting around watching Friends reruns, or most people would form street gangs and battle it out out of boredom.
That said, I intentionally purchase hardware that's known to work well with Linux (if you buy a system with all Intel chipsets, you'll probably be fine). Also, the power management is still abysmal. I still have to tinker with powertop to get battery life comparable to other OS's.
The largest radio telescope we have (the 305 meter diameter Arecibo) would need to have it's sensitivity increased by around two orders of magnitude JUST to pick up our TV/FM/AM signals from outside the solar system. If we move into the narrowband signals then, depending on the source-strength, it could pick up signals at up to a few thousand light years... if it happened to be pointed in exactly the right direction at exactly the right time.
You'd have to build an absolutely monstrous dish to be able to detect any of our signals at even the center of our own galaxy (much less at the other end)... I haven't run the numbers on it, but I doubt it's physically possible to build a receiver large enough. Add to that that they're highly directional devices and I think you'll find the "N" in your scenario is actually a startlingly small number.
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Date 1: Every two people produce four offspring.
Date 2: Every two people produce three offspring.
Between Date 1 and Date 2 the birthrate declined by 25%, but the total rate is still positive.
We can infer life based on atmospheric compositions NOW, but only if that planet fits an extremely narrow margin... meaning, Earth. Earth three and a half billion years ago had life on it, but you'd be hard-pressed to tell it from orbit.
If you want to move to unambiguous (intelligent) life then.......
The largest radio telescope we have (the 305 meter diameter Arecibo) would need to have it's sensitivity increased by around two orders of magnitude JUST to pick up our TV/FM/AM signals from outside the solar system. So, the crap we pump out the most couldn't even be detected by Voyager 2, if we had strapped a giant dish to it.
If we move into the narrowband signals then, depending on the source-strength, Arecibo could potentially pick up signals at up to a few thousand light years... if it happened to be pointed in exactly the right direction at exactly the right time.
So, our most sensitive instrument is only capable of measuring a fraction of a percent of the spectrum in a fraction of a percent of the possible-directions-it-could-be-pointed if the point source happened to be sending a strong enough signal (aimed at us) at exactly the right time (which would be anywhere between 2 and a few thousand years ago).
I haven't done the math, but I suspect that regardless of the frequency and amount of energy we dump into sending out a signal (within the realms of not being scifi, anyhow), it would be impossible for anyone to detect us a thousand or two lightyears out (using EM radiation) without knowing when/where to look. They also wouldn't be able to "see" that for quite a long time yet. I couldn't find a list of "when did we start sending out signals at X frequency" (and I suspect it doesn't exist), but if we take 50 years ago as a guess and we assume we pumped out noise at a frequency that could make the distance at a power level sufficient to be noticeable and that there wasn't anything to get in the way of the signal then we're only looking at something like 2000 star-systems.
Also depending on how you draw your lines, the Catholics aren't even remotely close to #1 status. About 24% of Americans are Catholic while about 51% are Protestants. I'll agree that it's a little iffy, but I'm willing to count the Protestants as a singular group.
Perhaps I'm just jaded because I live in the land of "lets turn the US into a Christian theocracy".
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The premise that religiosity in any way influences morality (or "self control") is a joke. We live in a world where religious people are performing (or attempting to perform) genocides, who rape children (and adults), and who are subjugating the current out-group. We also live in a world where non-religious people are providing healthcare to the poor, counselling to the abused, and food to the needy. There are, of course, plenty of counterexamples where religious people are acting morally, and non-religious are acting amorally... all this just goes to show that there are moral people and those who are not moral, not that religion has any influence over that morality.
To further the point, the vast majority of religious people (at least in the "Western Religion" sense) go out of their way to cherry pick which of their holy book's rules to adhere to. This is because they have decided to act in a way that they, and their society, have deemed moral; despite what the book has told them was.
All of which are contrary to religious fundamentalism... which worries me as a US citizen.
People make mistakes.