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Oh come on !

This was definately a "5"!

So funny it made me search out Walter E. Williams Gift of amnesty against American caucasians of European descent:

The mo' colors - the mo' better!
~Mookie in Spike Lee's: "Do the Right Thing".

Do you even know that increased solar activity (i.e. more sonspots) actually means _less_ energy reaching the earth?

The first page states a claim that is very difficult for the global-warming denialists: "...since 1980, the solar constant has steadily decreased by 0.02 percent per year."

So build more floating islands instead. 70% of Earth's wet surface area hasn't been claimed.

Okay folks, here's the plan: we live on the island until we perfect space travel and terraforming, then we go grab one of those other planets that no one's using right now.

And here's my plan, Oh Great Leader: we live on the island AS technology continues to advance exponentially anyway, thanks to ~6 billion interconnected minds feeding off each other ("IP" anti-progress be damned), then we move to a self-sufficient, offplanet island as soon as possible in order to minimize the chances of the The Great Filter wiping everyone out. In the unlikely event that planetside humanity doesn't wipe itself out, then tech will continue to advance to Singularity in short order, otherwise, progress will come to a standstill and we'll be spam in space island cans for quite a long while until we screw like rabbits to get our brain-count back up.

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I tend to think that having congress award grants is a pretty bad mechanism for rewarding artists and inventors-as is completely leaving things up to major corporations. I think it might be interesting to distribute some vouchers to the public or a random subset of the public, empower inventors(patent holders) to reward basic science. I think there is also some room here for using democratic means to establish goals-and have some market-based mechanisms for determining how those goals might be met.

Those that *do* make it past that mass extinction filter (nuclear? bio? nano?), to Singularity, are probably so far advanced as to be unrecognizable and uninterested in us primitive biological ants.

It's a pity humans still have all their eggs in one basket; until we've got self-sustaining offworld populations, we're a ticking time bomb.

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Robin Hanson, professor of Economics at George Mason, who has also done some work with physics, has a page that might be of interest to anyone who likes this sort of thing, called "Fourteen Wild Idea." See http://hanson.gmu.edu/wildideas.html

It is far, far more likely that our exponentionally advancing technology will destroy us before we've had a chance to leave the nest, and transcend to a safer form (non-bio) minus some of our outmoded evolutionary jungle-brain baggage.

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"Overpaid" is an opinion. This article acts as if "overpaid" can be objectively defined. You may not think sports stars are worth it (hey, I sure don't), but apparently everyone else does and is voting with their dollars. If you want these people's salaries to be "corrected," you're going to have to sway public opinion.

Honestly, I'm so tired of reading articles by people who never understood the intersection of a supply curve and a demand curve.

Great reading on the subject from Walter Williams.

I don't think the sports stars should make that much money. Sometimes I even resent them. But for me to decree that they're "overpaid" means I think I have the right to prohibit thousands of people from purchasing sports tickets. I don't have the right to that kind of control over people's lives any more than I have the right to choose their religion.

The Foresight Exchange online game has been doing this since 1994. It was invented by economist Robin Hanson, who was also the mastermind behind the ill fated Pentagon effort.

One of the big problems with these "funny money" based games is the possibility of cheating. Sine it doesn't cost anything to register, you can create as many accounts as you want, for free. What you do is create multiple accounts under different names, and arrange to funnel money from one account to another. You have one account make bad trades so it loses money, which then goes into the other accounts, building up their scores. Since this MIT game is offering valuable prizes, they can expect problems with this kind of cheating.

This sort of happened in the movie Quiz Show (and indeed in real life), one of the contestants sent himself the answers registered mail. It was deemed admissable in court.

Here's the guy's testimony.

I assume this sets a precedent for dates to be established this way and would cover copyright.

Sure thing! You can actually find quotes like this all over:

http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/wew/artic les/fee/average.html

http://www.cei.org/gencon/029,03332.cfm

http://www.off-road.com/green/ecoquote.html

http://www.bloomington.in.us/~lgthscac/biblicalchr istianity'sdefinition.htm

If you copy one of those quotes into Google, you'll come up with a whole slew of good results.

Offtopic Stuff:
Always good to compliment the fellow slashdotter - the sliderule thing mentioned in your sig is awesome. I got a couple sliderules and read the Log-Log Duplex Decitrig Slide Rule Manual to learn how to use them. My plan was to use a sliderule in the classes where calculators were not allowed :)

Hopefully the sliderule will not go the way of the Abacus.. the symbols in the books that teach abacus algorithms are all forgotten; nobody knows how to use an abacus like we did at the beginning of the century. It took only 50 years of western influence (pencil and paper math) on Japan at the beginning of the 20th century for them to completely forget how to use it. Pretty amazing. Although we can at least read our former sliderule books, hardly anybody knows how to use them. And for a legitimate reason too: we have calculators.

The energy released is 180.737 kJ, in comparison, the nuke on Nagasaki released approx 84TJ , and the gravitational potential energy released by the fall of one of the Towers was 2.2TJ, the biggest ever explosion, the Novaya Zemlya Hydrogen bomb, produced 58 megatons, or 240,000 TJ.

WOW!!

That could be "rational ignorance". It's often in your self-interest to not study a decision too deeply, because the opportunity cost of such study is greater than the loss from making a sub-optimal choice. This happens in politics all the time and it's why it's relatively easy for special interests to extract money and power from the general public.

I don't read science fiction for exactly this reason. What meaning could science fiction possibly have when science is constantly going beyond our imaginations already?

They were supposed to have protection systems to prevent a cascade failure like this. Making the protection systems fancier isn't going to help too much if they don't install/maintain them properly.

Actually, the primary purpose of the protection systems in place is to prevent grid trouble from physically destroying generators, transformers, transmission lines and other infrastructure hardware. And they worked, otherwise it would have taken weeks rather than hours to get the grid up again. IIRC, in the blackout of 1965>, major infrastructure damage resulted from a grid collapse and it was from this experince that many of the currently implemeted ideas were learned.

Would be interesting to know how the system and software works, but then again, that information could be dangerous in the wrong hands.

Actually, this is very unlikely. Systems like the American power grid are highly resilient.

Blow up a transformer? So what, there goes a neighborhood.

Blow up a substation? Big deal, so a town or small city is messed up for a little while.

Blow up a power plant? A shame, but other production facilities on the grid can pick up the slack for a while.

Catastrophic power failures are rare, because minor failures are common, expected, planned for, and almost always isolated to a small area. By definition, terrorist groups do not have the resources to do any more than minor damage. In attacking the airline system, "minor" damage can be effective, as September 11 showed, but the power system takes more damage from a little summer thunderstorm than al-Qaeda could ever do -- and for the most part life goes on unaffected.

This is why I find all the bleating on by the newscasters & politicians that "the power outage was not the result of terrorism." Well of course it wasn't, this isn't the sort of attack that a small malicious party can pull off. It just isn't. Power stations go out all the time, but normally nobody ever notices. Indeed, it is very, very hard to deliberately bring down a power system: NATO spent a month bombing the power grid & computer networks in Yugoslavia, but they never managed to do much more than bring a city like Belgrade down for a few hours before power was restored. If NATO couldn't do it, then I doubt terrorists could either.

If you want to bring down a whole grid, the best way to do it is by plain dumb luck (or an overwhelming lack of luck, depending on your point of view :-). It was a random fluke that caused yesterday's outage, just as it was random flukes that brought down the grid in the last two major outages, in 1977 & 1965. On the bright side, that suggests that the mean time between power grid failures may have doubled, and the next event like this may happen in 50 years... :-). (Incidently, the Presidential Report on the 1965 outage makes for fascinating -- and newly relevant -- reading material).

Resist the culture of fear! Most of the fears that the government and media have been pushing on us for the past couple of years are way overblown. The news this week wasn't that the power system is unstable, or that terrorists could have done this. No! The news is that the system is remarkably robust, and that our system is so good that we can go for decades at a time without glitches like this. That's a very good record, when you put things in perspective.

I actually don't want to get into whether or not having source code access improves security. A lot of people firmly believe that openness lends to security (and I happen to agree with them, in general), but some of the arguments against source availability are pretty persuasive too. Let's not get into that right now.

You write...

Apache (the core) isn't resistant to attack because it can be compiled and run just about anywhere. It's resistant because the developers assume that it *will* be attacked and they take that very seriously -- beyond adding features.

Well put. After re-reading my post again, I think you've done a better job of putting your thumb on Schneier's argumeent about the pliability of systems that have well designed security. The point, which I guess I didn't really explain well enough, is that a well designed system sags instead of buckles; it softens instead of shatters. Apache tends to sag & soften; IIS tends to buckle & shatter.

No system can ever be completely resistant to catastrophic failure. I think that Godel's incompleteness theorem and Turing's halting problem are, in a way, proofs of this assertion: no matter how well any system is designed, there are always cases that fall out of the design scope, and will cause Interesting Failures.

This can be a depressing insight. You will never have a perfectly safe system. Ever.

You can respond to that in a couple of ways. One is to say "fuck it, we can't win, so why try"? Another way is to say "we can't anticipate what will happen, but we can try to compartmentalize the damage from certain problem classes." You could say that Microsoft has been moving to the second point of view here, but it's taking them an agonizingly long time to get there, while Apache/Linux/etc have long beeen designed from this point of view.

Interestingly, and to go back to Schneier's excellent article again, this sort of thinking also comes up in real world security considerations. Some of our systems are brittle (the airlines), and single failures can have catastrophic results. Other systems tend to be plastic (the power grid), and catastrophic failures are rare -- because single failures are common, expected, and planned for.

This is why I find all the bleating on by the newscasters & politicians that "the power outage was not the result of terrorism." Well of course it wasn't, this isn't the sort of attack that a small malicious party can pull off. Power stations go out all the time, but normally nobody ever notices. Indeed, it is very, very hard to deliberately bring down a power system: NATO spent a month bombing the power grid & computer netwroks in Yugoslavia, but they never managed to do much more than bring a city like Belgrade down for a few hours before power was restored.

If you want to bring down a whole grid, the best way to do it is by plain dumb luck (or an overwhelming lack of luck, depending on your point of view :-). It was a random fluke that caused yesterday's outage, just as it was random flukes that brought down the grid in the last two major outages, in 1977 & 1965. (On the bright side, that suggests that the mean time between power grid failures may be stretching out... :-). (Incidently, the Presidential Report on the 1965 outage makes for fascinating -- and newly relevant -- reading material).

(To get even further off track, this kind of thing is also why Bayesian spam filters are such a good idea: at the micro level, each filter tends to do a fairly good job of being able to classify each user's patterns. But at a macro level, everyone ends up with a unique profile, and spam crafted to circumvent one user's Bay

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As anyone who saw the first episode of James Burke's original series Connections or the comedy movie Canadian Bacon would know, this is not first time New York has been involved in a major blackout. "While the [power] grid, which remains intact today, has proven to be highly effective, the night of November 9, 1965 serves as a reminder..." (Scroll down to the paragraph that starts with "At 5:27 p.m., November 9,")

If someone else has better links, please post them. This is just the first one I found.

...TWICE. (Well, one wasn't quite this big...)

There was the 1977 NYC only outage, and the Great Northeast Blackout of 1965. The latter seems similar to the present condition.

...TWICE. (Well, one wasn't quite this big...)

There was the 1977 NYC only outage, and the Great Northeast Blackout of 1965. The latter seems similar to the present condition.

1. Hot day with tons of ACs running. Check.
2. The "magic smoke" being released from one or more power substations. Check.
3. Instant power shutdown as a domino effect of overloaded substations occure. Check.

1977 Power Outage

It's still moving. Erie, PA, flickered when it happened and just went out (5:10 PM Eastern). It's on the lake between New York and Ohio, so it's on the cusp of whatever grid we have here in Pittsburgh. I think I'll go turn off my air conditioning.

If Congress enacts laws preventing price discrimination, both foreigners and Americans will lose because it will reduce the profitability of drug manufacture and hence drug development incentives. I ask you which is preferable: a life-saving drug at a high cost or no life saving drug at all? Americans would be much better served by trying to do something about FDA's costly approval process.

Sound economic policy? (in sig for those who don't read them) From a man who thinks the industry with the highest profits for the last several years is imminently going to go bankrupt because we the people are sick of being price gouged? Please!

Considering the Pentagon had a bidding/betting on world catastrophe site, until whiney democrats (myself among them) got them to pull the plug. It's probably, also in the works and we just haven't heard about it yet.

Yes, that was a brilliant idea you fellows had, stopping that. Do you have any *idea* what they were trying to do? Any *at all*?

Seriously, people like you make me so damn mad, I actually see red.

Here's an idea. Feel free to read Blind Man's Bluff. Yes, it's a book about spying. We had spys! We're such terrible people, I know.

Anyway, in this book, they describe the search for a missing nuclear weapon - I believe it had fallen out of a plane during mid-air refuling, though I don't have the book on hand. Three of them had fallen, two of them had been found and recovered right away. The other one sank, and was lost.

Now, losing a nuclear weapon at the bottom of the ocean is a bad thing (tm). Weeks of searching failed to turn up anything. Some guy (like I said, don't have the book handy) did exactly what the idea futures market was suggesting - had people 'bet' on the location of the bomb. So, it had two parachutes, did they both open, one, or neither? When it sank, did it move this way, or that? And on, and on. He sat around with academics, and a bunch of cases of scotch, took the scenario that the most people bet the most scotch on, figured out where that put the missile, and found the damn thing.

In less than a week.

Idea futures trading is an amazingly accurate way to get a bunch of people to work together as a brain trust, and glean information from them that they don't even know they know. You can read more about it here. Naturally, the author takes credit for the idea, saying he generated it in 1988, but oh well.

(Posting anonymously on what I think is an excellent post just because I'm so fucking pissed off right now.)

Sure, information is classified. So are earnings numbers from public corporations--but still, there is a consensus that is built by both professionals and casual investors, that is often correct--or close to it.

It seemed it was an idea worth perusing. I don't agree that it was a bad idea "from the beginning." You don't sound like you've really allowed yourself to think through the other side of the argument. Did you read the backgrounder article? After reading that, can you still categorically say that this is just bad, bad, bad, with no possible redeeming value?

As for me seeing things black-and-white: you have to admit your posts had a fervent religious pitch to them, and you through in a lot of irrelevant nonsense, about how the $600K should be use to fund . I would like to think that slashdotters can argue the merits of a case, rather than just get into a high pitch screech that sounds more like reactionary close-mindedness.

...Northern Mexico had a widespread power outage that was attributed to a failed substation here locally. Somehow, with the summer load and some brakes that failed, it took down most of Northern Mexico and, from what I understand, parts of some border states in the U.S.

For the HS crowd, there's Botball, which had it's DC area competition this weekend at UMCP, sponsored by the K.I.S.S. Institute for Practical Robotics. KIPR also puts together neat kits if you're looking for something to play with (a word of advice, Interactive-C blows and it's type checking system is flakey at best).

There's also Trinity Colleges's Autonomous Robotics Firefighting Contest which has a league for just about anybody. Qualifying alone is an impressive feat.

Also, if you're interested in the simulation league, you may be interested in checking out this paper which was written by one of the profs in my department.

</karmawhoring>

Couldn't this be caused due to a helium flash? I know for a short period stars which have masses high enough to burn helium undergo a very short and energetic outburst.

Nonsense. No one is actively destroying any culture. Is Victoria's Secret out there plotting against traditional grass skirts? Is McDonalds trying to overwhelm the pita? Sorry, Gort, but here's a piece of Klatu Barada Nikto for you: rather than outsiders trampling old customs, it's the insiders who are foresaking them. People aren't eating McDonald's hamburgers because they've been forced to under an imperialistic dictum...they're eating them because they like a cheap, easy meal better than they like roasted caterpillers in banana leaves. And when something better comes along, poor Ronald McDonald will get dumped in the same landfill of history that some of these languages are finding themselves in.

In 1994 Leonard Adleman solved a seven node instance of the Hamilton Path problem with a DNA computer. As many of you know, this problem is NP complete. That means that only exponential time algorithms (for sequential computations) are known for it. Adleman's machine ran in linear time. RSA decryption is thought (although not proven) to be NP complete. Since then, many NP complete problems have been solved in polynomial time. (I devised an algorithm for Set Cover.) The secret? Massive parrallelization requiring expontential space. Basically, there are so many DNA molecules foating around in the tube and so many enzyme that if you combine them cleverly, you can create all possible answers to a problem. You can then cull out the right answers. The expontential space is the drawback to DNA computing. There is a hard upper bound on the number of DNA molecules that can be used in a computation (for reasons I don't fully understand). It looks as if the article refers to a universal turing machine of sorts implemented in DNA. This an improvement over the previous algorithms which were just hand crafted machines.

Sure, force me to cope with the cognitive dissonance of having a Rush subcriber as a /. fan. ;)

hehe, well couldn't email you cause you dont list it, so now everyone knows. They are going to think you sit in your closet reading Walter Williams when no one is looking...

And the only reason I told people I subscribed to Rush is so all the irate Conservative haters would mark me as FOE, never see my comments, thus I wouldn't have to listen to their tirades. Ok, maybe not. :)

Here, have a mirror on our university server.

I think Hoover was a verb in the Great Depression.

It's true, Xerox GUI was invented way before MS and Mac. Read it here

"And sometimes these fees amount to far more than a few dollars or cents. At Virginia's George Mason University, for example, in-state undergraduates pay $2,375 in tuition -- plus an additional 60 percent, or $1,416, in fees."

I go to GMU, and I'm not sure who pays that much extra. Other than the fact that we get less budget assistance than UVA or Va. Tech, and as a consequence pay more tuition than either, I'm not sure what these fees are. I do know, I've never paid that much extra myself.
Maybe they mean housing, but it should cost a lot at a former commuter school that is trying to build as many dorms as it can as fast as it can (plus it's optional for all students). Maybe it's the activity fee ($50) or the meal plans (non-mandatory for everyone but on-campus freshmen-juniors). Might be the lab fees (I'm an EE, so I don't think my experience is representative. We have labs with many easily destroyable parts :)
Suffice to say, despite this damning pdf, I'm still not sure.

I could go on to get a job right away, or continue my formal education and get a Masters in Computer Science. Thinking about it, I've decided that I would like to further my knowledge of Computer Science, and pursue a masters degree.

I think a MS degree is an excelent step but I would suggest getting out and working a bit first. There are many good schools, as well as many diferent types of programs to choose from. I just started going back to school for my MS, but it took me 3 years to decide what I wanted to specialize in. By working it gives you more of an opportunity to see all the different parts of the business world. This will allow you to steer your degree program to help you fulfill your career goals.

On the flip side, if you have already decided that going straight back to school is the right thing to do then may I suggest George Mason University. It is a state school located right in the heart of Northern VA. There are a lot of technical companies located in the area that will give you great internship opportunities and work opportunities after you graduate. Also since it is a Virginia state school the tuition is only about $210 per credit (in state rate). The instructors I have encountered are great too.

And the government can? Let me let you in on a little secret: the federal government's accounting problems dwarf all the Enrons, Worldcoms, and Imclones put together. See Which is Worse: WorldCom or Congress by Walter Williams.

And, as At&T, the RIAA, and AOLTW have shown eliminating all regulation is the best way to encourage monopolies. I hate bad government, I also hate bad corporations.

One of those two types of entities has a territorial monopoly on the use of violence and the (perceived) right to tax. Spot the greater danger to your freedom.

The IETF is an amazingly transparent organization that has consistently "delivered the goods" with almost no back-room politics. ICANN is its exact opposite, perhaps reaching a nadir when one of its own board members had to sue to see the financial records. Why doesn't ICANN operate in a completely transparent manner? Do you feel the slightest bit uncomfortable with its policies and procedures? Given your background, Welch's comments in the McCarthy Army hearings come to mind.

There is a development group working on a port of Waba for the Newton. Waba is a Java'ish environment that is aimed at small platforms like PDA's. By porting this environment to the Newton, this group is making continued development on the Newton feasible for those who can't get the old Newton Development software. It also bouys up Newton development by providing an expanding market for the resulting software to the developer because the code will work on many other platforms (and PDA's) as well. In addition most third party Waba software that was written by those who aren't necessarily targeting the Newton platform, will, nonetheless, work on the Newton.

Unfortunately, this wonderful work is not much good to me because my third, and only functional Newton is just barely functional. It is so delicate that moving it around causes complete system failure. It's fine on my desktop, but I can't take it with me, which defeats the purpose. of having a PDA! Getting yet another replacement has become increasingly difficult and expensive. Consequently, I've switched to an iPAQ running the SavaJe operating sytem. At least that supports a FULL J2SE (Java) environment so there are lots of applications that I can run on it.

Best of luck to those WabaNewtDev folks out there. If you're a Newton enthusiast, you should definitely consider supporting these folks. They do great stuff!

Do you have any experiance with the interface builders listed here?

I'm not doubting your story or anything, but details about these tools a pretty sketchy.

The site you linked is, judging by the snide comments abut Windows' "features", a tad biased.

That couldn't possibly be because MS has been consistently behind their competition in GUI design. Did you actually look at the screen shots?

What were the predecessors to the Visual Studio IDE?... To drag-n-drop GUI building?

One of these might fit the bill.

To IntelliSense?

Autocompletion was hardly a new thing. MS seems to be pretty vague about what else it does.

Dropdown menus that show frequently-used items, adjusting themselves over time?

I admit I can't think of an example off the top of my head, but then I don't have much more than a passing familiarity with most other GUIs.

It seems most folks on slashdot believe Microsoft can simply bully its way to the top of any field, forcing people to adopt anythning it produces.

Perhaps because it often does? OEM contracts come to mind.

Yet products like Bob suggest this isn't true.

Some things just suck so bad that no amount of bullying will help (and yes, I have used Bob).

So, why do some, but by no means all, Microsoft products succeed? Clever copying of proven ideas? Subtle innovation? Reinvention of older ideas, with improvements based on 20/20 hindsight?

I would replace "innovation" with "variation on a theme", and add the strategy of attrition. Just because a company or product failed doesn't mean there weren't some good ideas there. MS has always been good at picking up those ideas and running with them. Successful? Yes, but hardly innovative.

People snipe at the idea of a .Net VM as a Java ripoff. The Java VM is a Pascal P-code VM ripoff, but done better. Java swiped ideas from C++, and improved certain things. Could it be a similar case for C#/.Net?

I never claimed MS was the only one that did that. I just have a problem with them claiming credit for the idea, when anyone who takes a little time to investigate can find that it simply isn't true.

For the record, I find Windows quite usable. MS has taken a lot of good ideas from a lot of sources and put them into something that works, but none of it is new (with the possible exception of menus hiding stuff, but I actually find that irritating).

You have a good grasp of economics and a refreshingly succinct way of making your point that reminds me a bit of Walter Williams. Have you written up any longer papers on the subject? Do you post regularly in any other forums?

I think it might even be legitimate. All you have to do is show this to your girlfriend (or boyfriend if you are that way). I think it is originally an article from the Boston Globe.

Some Dads are not entirely self-centered. Go figure. Some Dads are even (gasp!) socially aware. If your Pop fits the profile, try a gift in his name to one of these: Habitat for Humanity Save the Afghan Children RAWA The Heifer Project Southern Poverty Law Center Adopt a Solar Family in Guatemala Palestinian Red Crescent Maen David Adom

I recently went to a talk by a guy (Dave Brown of DAU and GMU ) who got his PhD recently, and used Legos in his dissertation experiments. He showed that by "learning" a Bayesian network from actual performance data of a system you could create a model that would predict the performance of the system much more accurately than the textbook formulae it was theoretically supposed to follow.

To show this he studied battery decay patterns by running lego models around and measuring the speed they went as they ran out of juice. He also uses lego models for prototyping in the classes he teaches at Defense Acquisition University.

In short, this guy gets to play with legos at his paying job, and for his PhD project. The bastard. I'm so envious. I gotta figure out how to work that into my job.

Reminds me of decision markets. Caught this link from a presentation by Vernor Vinge:

decisionmarkets.pdf

This page shows life expectancy at ages 65 and 85 increasing from 11.9 to 17.7 and 4.0 to 6.3 years in 1900 and 1997 respectively.

One reason to look forward to an aging population: World Peace, Thanks To Old Men?

Is this really new? I don't know where I first heard it, but I know that a "big crunch" has certainly been theorized. I've always thought that it seems likely that a big crunch might cause a big bang to follow. I don't know, maybe I was assuming something.
You're right, the "big crunch" is not new. However, this way of explaining its cause is. From the article I posted earlier, The idea of a cyclic universe has been around ever since the Big Bang was first proposed in the 1930s. But no one could find a way to make the "big crunch" that ends one cycle of the universe "bounce" to become the big bang of the next.
I guffawed at first, too, until I read this better writeup.

If you look at the complexity of human beings, it's just crazy how many things have to go right to get intelligence. I mean, it took 2-3 BILLION years just to get us, and no other animal form is even close to us.
According to that logic, it took me 4 years to finish the final assignment of my final course in univeristy. What if there was a lot of time where things were happening, but not towards our development as human beings? I'm not saying that you're incorrect, but for the purposes of your final conclusion, I don't think it's valid.

When you combine that with the fact that it only takes 2-3 million years to fill a galaxy once you have intelligent life even at sub-light speeds, that means it's probably never happened before in this galaxy.
Well, our galaxy is about 150,000 light years across. It also has about 400 billion stars. Even if we had the capability to transport lots of people at the speed of light, we could only send 1 person to every ~40 stars! So it's likely that we wouldn't make physical contact with a civilization, but perhaps radio contact. Depending on how long intelligent, radio-capable civilizations last (self annihalation? extinction?) our intelligent, radio-capable years may never overlap with those of other civilizations. Perhaps many intelligent species have evolved and died in this expansion?

So given that intelligence almost never happens, and it took about 1/7th - 1/4th the age of universe for it to happen here, I think that gives evidence that we needed a hell of a lot of universe cycles to get it to happen.
Well, scientists still have no idea if (and definately no idea when) the universe will coalesce. If the cycle takes 1000 billion years, our civilization took only 1% of its lifetime to evolve to this point.

Anyways, it's a lot easier to pick apart a theory than it is to make one :) Your idea is interesting, but I just think that some of the facts aren't sound.