It's worse than that. The article is loaded in full and then is truncated via js.
You'd guess that's EXACTLY the kind of shitty behavior that google claims to flag/penalize the website.. but.. here's a google-golf hit for the article:
It's scummy on the economist's side from a SEO perspective which I absolutely hate in all media outlets that do this.
If the full article is allowed to be indexed by a search engine, the expectation is to be able to get the _same_ result as the search engine is seeing when you click through.
This is clearly a cheap way to rank higher in search results. If you don't want non-paying users to read, then the same excerpt should be shown to the search engine.
It's indexed because, as you say, it's transmited completely. So maybe just disabling js it's readable. I have economist.com disabled in uBlock Origin (it works), but I guess that disabling all js would work too?
Because of that, I think not taking measures against this behaviour is the lesser evil.
I'm a subscriber to and weekly reader of the Economist and I am more than happy to pay for the quality of reporting that I receive. That said, I wish there was some way that HN could indicate (on the article link on site's feed) that content is paywalled.
Somehow I had not heard about the James Webb Space Telescope before now. The Hubble means a lot to me personally, and I have dreading the day I'd hear it was going out of service. I can't wait to see what this new telescope will provide for us.
I recall Hubble often being fodder for late night hosts and other media, but we don't even think about it now that it's proved it's worth many times over. It changed the narrative once it was operational.
It's a fair question, and I'm not educated on the subject enough to provide an opinion. Like I said, I'd just heard about this, so I'm not aware how much has gone into it. If it's hitting the figures you're talking about, I would question it as well.
It's also an extremely complicated machine. Its deployment plan involves many moving, origami, mechanical parts including solar panels, the primary and secondary mirrors, and a sunshade. Plus it's all being done far away at L2 without repair access.
Cross all digits, pray to all deities, burn sage, and best hopes it all works.
Have you heard of the LSST? I'm actually more excited for that. Right now if a probe flew through our solar system we'd have almost no chance of detecting it. LSST is going to open our eyes to so many more smaller objects. Enrico Fermi famously wondered where is everybody. Well maybe they're small and they've been flying through our system all the time but we never noticed.
I guess my issue is that I'm not all that interested in SETI. It would obviously be amazing if we find other life, and I'm not against funding or people searching. I just think there is plenty to investigate and learn just by studying the endless ocean of galaxies out there.
"You know what I should be doing? Okay. Hear me out. You know that there's something called the search for extraterrestrial intelligence? Looking for aliens? I feel like I should be looking for aliens, man! Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha! No, I'm for real man, I wanna like, I wanna like guess the protocols, like, Yo, how would they contact us, man? I already have some ideas.
Okay, I'm gonna explain this real simple. You know polarizing stuff on your camera? When you use a polarizing filter on a camera it lets you, like, see shit, under the reflection and shit, like, but if you twist two polarizing filters against each other, or, like, even a single polarizing filter in front of a screen, because the screen also has polarizing filters in it, it turns completely black at one point, you've seen that? Do you have a polarizing filter? If you had one and put it in front of a computer's LCD screen, if you twist it enough, it turns everything black, it's like the two cancel each other out, the two polarizing filters block light out entirely.
What if we put a huge polarizing filter in front of the sun, and, like, know our sun and this other star's alignment through time, and it doesn't even have to like cover the whole area of the sun, just a big percentage of it, and then start flashing that shit in a pulse, so the very light of the sun, we don't even need to generate the light, it's already being generated behind us, we're going to be doing like fucking smoke signals, man. To all the other suns around us. I MEAN THAT'S CRAZY RIGHT? Hahahahaha!
Ok, ok, Imma bring it down. That's funny though. That's a good idea for SETI, I'm gonna tell them, Yo, we should be looking at everybody's son in like looking for tiny, fucking, but detectable changes. Obviously it's gonna have to be, like, with a telescope like Hubble that's outside Earth's atmosphere. Maybe James Webb's gonna cut it. I don't know. It's good for infrared."
Please do not post / upvote paywalled content. I, for one, am sick of it. It has nothing to do with the actual article, but please - no more paywalls on HN.
I have been buying the Economist on paper every week for the last 20 years or so, love it, and I possibly also have the online version, though I never use it. But if the article is meant for public consumption, then let's link it. If it's meant to sell a subscription, please don't.
given outline.com, seems like that's a viable option for balancing the needs of HN and publishers who hurt-themselves by not allowing new users to see selected popular articles.
(i.e. fool's errand to think anyone will subscribe for a single article, but many publishers aren't setup with sophisticated-enough ways to make selected content free, without exposing themselves to cheats e.g. readers simply using incognito mode or second browsers...)
They're fools to not make all their content free anyway. I'd only pay for a service I use a lot. How am I gonna develop the habit of using your page a lot if every time I open an article of yours I'm blocked? I'll just go to another site, thank you very much.
Ad blockers block ad networks. A fancy publisher like Economist doesn't have to use ad networks. They could sell online ads the way they sell print ads.
So there are trade-offs involved? Different parties have different interests? Different publishers use different models? That sounds about right, and contradicts the false dichotomy offered above.
The dichotomy is the same people who complain a lot about paywalls on HN are also blocking all ads and JS. Paywalls are the offered alternative to ads already.
You'd like to change the subject, but you haven't. I run uBlock Origin to encourage publishers to run their own non-privacy-violating ads from their own domains, the way they did before the ubiquity of surveillance capitalists. Every time publishers have asked me why I use uBO, I've told them that. That they can't adjust to market conditions, is their own failure of imagination. This impasse won't last forever, anyway. Today's unimaginative publishers will eventually be replaced by new ones with new models we haven't even considered yet.
I don't know much about The Guardian's financials but Wikipedia is only paying for hosting costs and some administrative staff which is easier than a newspaper where you've got to pay staff to write your content rather than having it written for free.
The guardian has all their content free and aggressively asks you to subscribe. Maybe there's more to their finances that I don't know about but they seem to be doing well.
One thing that I constantly think of when I read this article is just how recent in history electromagnetic broadcasts are. What if there's another planet in our neighborhood, but its society is just a mere 1000 years behind us? 1000 years is almost nothing when looking at just how old the universe is, and just how long our planet has had life.
But, what if we develop some other means to communicate in the next 100, 200, or 300 years? It means the window of time that intelligent life uses electromagnetic communication is very, vey short.
A scifi book whose title I've forgotten had jumpable spaceships with quantum communicators that went back to a central switching station. Viola - instant communication with every other communicator in the universe, and with no leakage. Maybe future us has quantum Dick Tracy watches.
I think it was in was in one of Stanisław Lem’s novels where a character postulated that the window of opportunity where a civilization is advanced enough to communicate with others but not yet advanced enough to not care about that any more is a mere 3.000 years. Even if it was 300.000 years ...
Assuming all star systems in our vicinity have inhabitable planets and they all develop such civilizations – what are the chances any of those two windows overlapping?
Or, what if we're the first. Someone has to be the first. The Universe is devoid of intelligent life, and we're without technological peers.
A billion years pass, the Universe is rich with intelligent life. And they can still detect the echoes of the ones who were first, crying out across the universe in search of companionship.
>A billion years pass, the Universe is rich with intelligent life. And they can still detect the echoes of the ones who were first, crying out across the universe in search of companionship.
Or what if the window of time in which life can exist on a planet is so short compared to how long it takes for life to appear on that planet, that it is extremely unlikely for two planets to have life at the same time?
This means that if we wanted to communicate reliably with up and coming extraterrestrial lifeforms, we would need to maintain older forms of communication, and that extraterrestrial civilizations that are ahead of us, that want to be talked to would do the same. In my opinion it is worth exploring how religion came into existence, given that many of them share the common theme of regularly attempting to communicate with some extraterrestrial entity or entities with some level of certainty.
I'm not the first to make this observation but our search seems limited by our imagination which in turn is limited by our current level of technology. In the Victorian era canals were considered a technological innovation. So we looked for canals on the surface of Mars and some of us were sure we saw them. Radio was invented so we decided to search for radio signals from space. The concept of solar panels was invented so we decided to see if any civilizations were covering their star with a fleet of them. Lasers were invented and recently we're talking about powering light-sail probes with them so now we have optical SETI. LIGO detected gravity waves and so... well you get that point. I don't think we shouldn't look for all of these things but I think we should temper expectations. My suspicion is in a couple hundred years the idea of looking for ET radio broadcasts will seem as silly as looking for canals on Mars does to us now.
The radio telescopes are programmed to report only signals that are varying at a rate that matches our own. Life working ten times slower or faster than us would be automatically ignored.
The "Dyson Sphere" notion cracks me up every time. They are advanced enough to build so much space stuff it blocks starlight, but not advanced enough to have fusion power, so have to rely on solar panels? Might as well look for signal flags.
Any actually advanced aliens will live out in the Kuiper belts where useful elements are conveniently frozen. Goldilocks planets are for extreme primitives.
What makes sense about relying on the "largest possible" variant of anything, when you can make small and portable ones, and bring them with you anywhere you need them?
If you can build a Dyson sphere the idea of needing particular elements is probably irrelevant too. Assuming they aren't all electronic intelligences living in a virtual world, they could probably just convert bulk matter into whatever they need.
Strangely enough, controlled fusion of light elements is overwhelmingly easier than constructing nuclei to order, which itself is overwhelmingly easier than creating atoms from pure energy. In any case, you need the energy.
So, copious supplies of frozen light elements will be useful for much longer than one might imagine.
Electronic intelligences living in a virtual world will depend on a reliable supply of both energy and computing substrate. There again, extreme low temperatures are beneficial to reduce signal noise and spontaneous decoherence.
63 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] threadYou'd guess that's EXACTLY the kind of shitty behavior that google claims to flag/penalize the website.. but.. here's a google-golf hit for the article:
https://www.google.com/search?q=the+search+for+extraterrestr...
Surely.. only the "excerpt" is served to google right? Nope... click though the cached copy. The article is indexed in full.
Right.
I have nothing against linking paywalled resources, but that's scummy behavior.
Skipped.
It's scummy on the economist's side from a SEO perspective which I absolutely hate in all media outlets that do this.
If the full article is allowed to be indexed by a search engine, the expectation is to be able to get the _same_ result as the search engine is seeing when you click through.
This is clearly a cheap way to rank higher in search results. If you don't want non-paying users to read, then the same excerpt should be shown to the search engine.
Because of that, I think not taking measures against this behaviour is the lesser evil.
(edit: small potatoes)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope
https://xkcd.com/2014/
Cross all digits, pray to all deities, burn sage, and best hopes it all works.
Okay, I'm gonna explain this real simple. You know polarizing stuff on your camera? When you use a polarizing filter on a camera it lets you, like, see shit, under the reflection and shit, like, but if you twist two polarizing filters against each other, or, like, even a single polarizing filter in front of a screen, because the screen also has polarizing filters in it, it turns completely black at one point, you've seen that? Do you have a polarizing filter? If you had one and put it in front of a computer's LCD screen, if you twist it enough, it turns everything black, it's like the two cancel each other out, the two polarizing filters block light out entirely.
What if we put a huge polarizing filter in front of the sun, and, like, know our sun and this other star's alignment through time, and it doesn't even have to like cover the whole area of the sun, just a big percentage of it, and then start flashing that shit in a pulse, so the very light of the sun, we don't even need to generate the light, it's already being generated behind us, we're going to be doing like fucking smoke signals, man. To all the other suns around us. I MEAN THAT'S CRAZY RIGHT? Hahahahaha!
Ok, ok, Imma bring it down. That's funny though. That's a good idea for SETI, I'm gonna tell them, Yo, we should be looking at everybody's son in like looking for tiny, fucking, but detectable changes. Obviously it's gonna have to be, like, with a telescope like Hubble that's outside Earth's atmosphere. Maybe James Webb's gonna cut it. I don't know. It's good for infrared."
I have been buying the Economist on paper every week for the last 20 years or so, love it, and I possibly also have the online version, though I never use it. But if the article is meant for public consumption, then let's link it. If it's meant to sell a subscription, please don't.
(i.e. fool's errand to think anyone will subscribe for a single article, but many publishers aren't setup with sophisticated-enough ways to make selected content free, without exposing themselves to cheats e.g. readers simply using incognito mode or second browsers...)
But, what if we develop some other means to communicate in the next 100, 200, or 300 years? It means the window of time that intelligent life uses electromagnetic communication is very, vey short.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansible
Assuming all star systems in our vicinity have inhabitable planets and they all develop such civilizations – what are the chances any of those two windows overlapping?
A billion years pass, the Universe is rich with intelligent life. And they can still detect the echoes of the ones who were first, crying out across the universe in search of companionship.
Or what if the window of time in which life can exist on a planet is so short compared to how long it takes for life to appear on that planet, that it is extremely unlikely for two planets to have life at the same time?
A lot of questions, and a lot of possible answers
The "Dyson Sphere" notion cracks me up every time. They are advanced enough to build so much space stuff it blocks starlight, but not advanced enough to have fusion power, so have to rely on solar panels? Might as well look for signal flags.
Any actually advanced aliens will live out in the Kuiper belts where useful elements are conveniently frozen. Goldilocks planets are for extreme primitives.
So, copious supplies of frozen light elements will be useful for much longer than one might imagine.
Electronic intelligences living in a virtual world will depend on a reliable supply of both energy and computing substrate. There again, extreme low temperatures are beneficial to reduce signal noise and spontaneous decoherence.