Press 1 for English

A lot of people have ranted about the whole "Press 1 for English" thing, so I'm actually going to skip that. Suffice it to say that it doesn't really bother me that much, although I wish it would be just the default setting, and you didn't have to press anything.

Today I think I found the most stupid customer service do loop ever. I was attempting to update my address and phone number with American Express. I went to their website to do all that online. Sadly, the password I had made there wasn't the one that I thought it was. At first I thought I had just fat fingered it, so I retried immediately. When it was wrong the second time, I went with the other one that I thought it was (all strong passwords, with Upper Case, lower case, numbers, AND special characters). At this point the site told me that I had locked myself out. Oops! Oh well, I'll call. So I call the Toll Free numer, enter my card number, and it then proceeds to tell me that I am not calling from a number on my profile... Hello!? That's what I am calling to change! I hit 0 repeatedly trying to get to a human being, and the fucking machine hangs up on me!

Grr... Okay, I go back to the website. I start looking for a phone number to call that will get me to a human being. Ah, found one! So I call that. I manage to get a human being after a few minutes of button mashing and saying "representative" to the computer a few times. Ugh, why can't you just punch 0 or * just once and get direct to the hold line for a human being? Hell, I'd even accept a three or four digit secret code to get direct to a human. But I digress.

The representative is kind and helpful and gets my contact information updated. I am still locked out though, and I would like to administer my account online, so I ask him to reset the password. He says that he can't do that, but I can use the online tool for getting my password. This is where it gets BRILLIANT! So I put in my online ID, click the "Forgot Password" link. I enter the card number again, and click "Forgot Password" again. At this point it is going to try to verify my identity. Here is where you'd get one of those security questions, right? No, it is asking me for (get this) MY FUCKING PASSWORD! Why would it ask for my password if I clicked a link for "Forgot Password"? That has got to be right up there with "Please email us if you are unable to connect to the internet" type of moronic stupidity!

After about a dozen bouts of "Please hold sir" and the poor customer service representative checking with his IT or supervisor, I finally get it reset so I can go in and change it. Now get this... American Express doesn't allow passwords to be anything outside 6 to 8 characters, and doesn't allow for special characters! Only Upper Case, Lower Case, and numbers. All my 12+ character STRONG asswords that I have at my disposal were no good on this site! I guess they are just begging to be hacked if they have such simple passwords.

Sorry, just had to rant! How about you, any stories to tell about such rampant fucktardery?

While I like SETI@Home...

I have to say that I have always been a fan of SETI@Home. So much so that my wife is constantly giving me shit for running it. Of course, if I sit and analyze what it is that SETI@Home is doing, I have to be totally honest. It's a LONGSHOT to say the least. I know a lot of people will say that we have been broadcasting for over 60 years now. However, something very simple seems to escape a lot of folks: The Inverse Square Law. It applies to any omnidirectional radiation. Our crude radio and TV counts in that.

The longshot of course is that there may be intentional high power transmissions. Of course, the fact that we as a human race have only made a total of 5 transmissions ourselves doesn't speak for there being that great a chance of us finding too much. And those transmissions were all of limited length. They would probably be like a "Wow! signal" to anyone out there that just happened to pick it up.

It is very unlikely that alien civilizations are going to pick up television transmissions according to the table from this site: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/astronomy/faq/part6/section-12.html

Note the range for UHF television (2.5 AU) and the range for the UHF carrier (0.3 LY). Neither estimate is enough to make it out to the nearest star. They don't list a range for VHF television but FM radio is in the middle of the VHF television band and the estimated range for that is 5.4 AU. Again no where near enough to make it to the first star. Let alone out of our own SOLAR SYSTEM!

The optimistic ranges for detecting a nearby planet are based on either massively powerful transmitters or highly focused outputs from large transmitters.

The calculations that I made suggested that one would need an Arecibo sized antennae with a 250,000 watt transmitter to be able to send a detectable signal to a planet as far away as 150 light years.

This is easily with the capability of earth's technology. The Arecibo antennae has only limited steering capability. I think it is mostly constrained by the direction it is pointing as it rotates with the earth so there are lots of potential targets it couldn't be aimed at. The 250,000 watts could be pulsed so that no where near 250,000 watt of continuous power would be required. But will the powers that be that control enough of earth's resources ever feel like funding a major effort to transmit to unknown alien civilizations?

I have wondered about the feasibility of a laser transmitter to reach stars. If the powers that be wanted to dedicate some resources to this idea the authors suggest that we might hit a 1000 light years with a currently feasible optical laser. I think that bumps the stars for which a signal might be detected from about a 1000 that lie within 100 light years to about a 100,000 that lie within a 1000 light years.

The article on the possibility of optical SETI: http://seti.harvard.edu/oseti/tech.pdf

And keep in mind, so far, everything about SETI is privately funded! So don't go on some tangent about wasteful government spending, this is not the place to look.