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Of course.. budget sick bag or deluxe? 
How do you know so much about swallows? Well, you have to know these things when you're a king, you know.
modified 31-Aug-21 21:01pm.
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Quote: 5. "How much do you charge to wash every window in Seattle?" - Facebook Online Sales Operations job candidate
I would charge absolutely nothing, but I would cover my costs by pasting advertising materials over 95% of the window's surface and then spend the rest of my time trying to make it bafflingly complicated to find out how to close the curtains.
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I regret I have but one upvote for that one.
TTFN - Kent
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Kent Sharkey wrote: I regret I have but one upvote for that one.
I'll sell you some upvotes. Reply privately and I can hook you up. 
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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Quote: 5. "How much do you charge to wash every window in Seattle?" - Facebook Online Sales Operations job candidate
About 20% more than it would cost to hire out the job.
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Sarcasm is the answer. Deliberate sarcasm is our only natural defense against involountary idiocy.
Geek code v 3.12
GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- r++>+++ y+++*
Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
I use 1TBS
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den2k88 wrote: Deliberate sarcasm is our only natural defense
Riiiighht!!! It's our ONLY defense. Because there is no other defense possible at all.
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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One year ago, on March 18, 2014, Java SE 8 was released, and with it, the bliss of functional programming through lambda expressions and the streams API. Oh, don't worry. There'll be another release along in 5 minutes. It might be on that one.
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Richard Matthew Stallman is a stubborn man. And it is this trait of his above all else that has spawned the wonderful world of free and open source software, a world that was barely hinted at when he wrote the first document about his intentions. But it's still not Unix
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By analysing these planetary systems, researchers from the Australian National University and the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen have calculated the probability for the number of stars in the Milky Way that might have planets in the habitable zone. "Where is everybody?"
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1) Most life - even within an actual human - is simple and "intellectually unambitious" bacteria and smaller. I would expect extra terrestrial life to be similar.
2) Any communication (e.g. radio) that is able to leak across galaxies is massively wasteful and it is unlikely that it would be in use for a long period. For example, as soon as humans work out how to do point-to-point communication using neutrinos (or quantum entanglement) that communication would not be detectable.
3) The assumption that because life is found on earth, the conditions of earth are ideal for life is not strictly logical. If you consider the range of environments that bacteria and tardigrades can survive there is a distinct possibility that we are a distant (albeit exciting and productive) outlier of the true "goldilocks condition".
4) The above thoughts are largely the product of a bottle of Italian white wine. Errors and omissions (emissions?) excepted.
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That's a pretty good, and wise, bottle of Italian white wine!
Point three... a little quibble. Usually the Goldilocks zone is "liquid water possible", and I still think that - and a largely carbon-based metabolism - are probably commonish. The usefulness, and commonness of those two chemicals are difficult to ignore.
I need more wine to think on this. New corporate policy coming up! :wine: Wait! why doesn't that work? CHRIS!
TTFN - Kent
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True - but the Goldilocks zone is "liquid water possible due to solar influence". A radioactive core on a planet or gravitational "squashing" on a large moon orbiting a gas giant would also create liquid water outside that zone.
Also liquid methane / ammonia are also good candidates for supporting a different form of life.
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That's long been my opinion. We've anthropomorphised the search for life, by looking for it in our own image, or at least in the image of life on this stone.
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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Ah true - as they now think with Encaladus/Europa. Good point.
I'm still skeptical about methane/ammonia. It's possible, but Nitrogen just doesn't have the flexibility as a molecule as Carbon. Only three possible bonds - with some of the combinations being highly reactive - limits its use in my mind. Of course, it could just be my mind that's limited. The bacteria search[^] could lead to some interesting (and possibly mind expanding) finds.
TTFN - Kent
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The even more mind breaking possibility is that of life existing at a time scale incompatible with our own - for example if something was "alive" but had a metabolism so slow it only changed over tens of thousands of years, could we ever recognise that?
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Have you read Stephen Baxter's "Proxima" and "Ultima" by any chance? 
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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Maybe. We're really good at seeing patterns though (see those who think Earth is 'alive'), and finding stuff that's alive, but definitely wouldn't look like it from the casual observer.
They certainly wouldn't be likely to be detected by SETI, that's for certain.
TTFN - Kent
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On a sufficiently large timescale could sand dunes be considered alive?*
*I'm beginning to suspect that Italian wine was not entirely fresh...
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I may have to rethink my opinion of Italian whites - they are definitely more inspiring than I remember 
We're way deep into really hypotheticals, but I still think it's possible. Given a couple of generations of intense observation, I think we'd notice something was up. For example, the current estimate for carbon cycling on the Earth is 100-200 million years[^]. So we go to some other planet and start observing, and notice that some of these long cycles get diverted into "something". Over similarly long cycles, we notice some sort of signalling (chemical, electromagnetic, or sonic) happens between components of that "something". Our portable pattern matching devices (those grey lumps we all carry) notices that certain messages match certain phenomena, et voila: The Polar Vortex this year is Gaia[^] complaining about fracking
Yup. I think it's half-past wine for me.
TTFN - Kent
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Duncan Edwards Jones wrote: tardigrades
I love the tardigrade. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, in Cosmos, said it best: If an alien were to land on earth and do an exhaustive life form scan, it would likely conclude that Earth is a planet of tardigrades, with clusters of additional species here and there.
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There's one species that have never subscribed to YAGNI
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Forcing employees to sign non-compete agreements drives entrepreneurs into states where they have more rights, such as California. "You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy."
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Kent Sharkey wrote: non-compete agreements
which are unenforceable.
#SupportHeForShe If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.-John Q. Adams
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
Only 2 things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.-Albert Einstein
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