Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Behaviorism, Attrition, Elimination
Its maddening combination of color and shape drive one completely in -- No, wrong cube. Savage Henry Matisse writes: "There's a really super article analyzing the psychology behind Jobs' most recent flight of fancy, posted here. The thrust of it is that, rather than being a replay of the NeXT FUBAR or another instance of being too-far-ahead-of-his-time, the CUBE is really a very sly piece of manuevering meant to shoehorn Macs into the corporate compu-hierarchy from the top down. Very insightful-- an analysis kinda along the same lines as Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning was the Command Line" And for those who prefer the practical to the theoretical, RevAaron writes: "Many of us have been wondering about some of the details of Apple's newly released Power Macintosh G4 Cube, including whether or not it has an AGP slot or just a chip soldered onto the board. Listen to the story from the lead designer of the cube here at MacSlash."
Well technically, they'd still block excess light from your eyes ... FroBugg writes "Handspring has just released an OS upgrade for all their Visor handhelds, which is supposed to fix the DRAM problem that caused crashes and data corruption. Go get it here." This is the same RAM Problem Palm devices have as reported a few weeks ago, at which point no fix was out for Visors.
The end of a (very brief era): dubious_1 writes "The free internet service provider http://www.freewwweb.com has ceased operation. The service provided by freewwweb used ppp and pap authentication for its dialup making it available to users of any operating system. Users of freewwweb agreed to set their web browsers home page to a page used by freewwweb, to allow them to support the service through ad revenue. According to the web page you are redirected to when accessing the previous freewwweb.com site, the service lost by the demise of freewwweb is now being filled by Juno however, this service is only available for users of MS Windows 9x and nt. Unlike freewwweb, Juno uses a proprietary front end to authenticate users on their service. The web site specifically says that this client program is not available for either Linux or MacOS."
One recurrent Ask Slashdot question is about this very issue -- Where are free ISPs for Linux users? I wonder if there are any good answers now that freewwweb has snuffed it. Surely if billions of dollars are there to be made with free-for-the-viewing television programming, there's no reason that ad-supported ISPs should be uncommon. Can you say "target market"?
Credit where credit is due. We mentioned a fraudulent site established to mimic the look of online personal credit-card site PayPal. Jawed Karim writes, "You incorrectly mention that your credit card can get stolen by becoming a victim to the fake PayPal site. This is not true. The credit card is not exposed when you log into your PayPal account. Just wanted to make this clear. (The same correction has been made to the MSNBC article, at the bottom of it)"
Well, isn't the danger that customers lulled into thinking they were on the right site would be also lulled into giving their information away? Someone sure wants to steal credit card information with this site, but yes, it's more of a social engineering trick than an automated number grabber.
Yes sir, we know that the damn cat is still in the box. Swede2048 writes: "Lots of people think that SETI is a hopeless adventure, and mostly a waste of time and processing cycles. [including many who read yesterday about the "SETI-on-a-board product" ;) -- t] For those who haven't read it yet, last month's Scientific American had a great article describing the results SETI has already provided. By NOT finding e.t.life in the searched sky, SETI has placed some restrictions on what kinds of e.t life can exist."
There is one Linux friendly ISP out there that I know of. FreeInet is similar to NetZero in which is uses ad interface for the service. However, it can be bypassed in windows with just a regualr dial-up connection which means that Linux users can also follow suit. Now with this method, this also means that you are bypassing how the company stays in business, so if you must have free internet access and you bypass the ad interface for FreeInet then please do the right thing and at least spend some time each day on their homesite clicking on some adds.
I know, it may be boring, it may seem stupid, but there really arn't too many Free ISP's that are Linux friendly. Let's try and help those that are, and maybe in return, more companies will follow suit. The Linux community is to large to be ignored completly.
Trying to be different, just like everyone else.
No, I was just trying to offer some helpful clarifications...
I don't think that's the point. The article focuses more on the Fermi paradox, which exists independently of SETI@Home. Essentially, if aliens really do exist, then Fermi suggests that we should see some unmistakable sign of their existence.
Since we do not, then we must ask "where are they?" SETI@Home is not the end all and be all of searching for alien life, it is just one of the many factors contributing to the overall whole of the Fermi paradox. Think of our lack of success with SETI as not being proof that there is no life, only one small piece of circumstantial evidence.
Over time, we will gain more evidence through many different ways. Humans may not know anything definitive about life in the universe for thousands of years.
Personally, I find this to be more of a philosophical musing than a statement of scientific fact. One must admit that the implications of Fermi's paradox, while possibly wrong, do say a lot about our place in the galaxy. Who are we? Where did we come from? Where would other civilaztions come from? Why? Why not?
On NT you can just do a "start /low setiathomeclient" batchfile and run it at low priority. You already should be running your DB server at /high or /realtime, right? Oh and turn off the stupid priority boost on foreground apps. I can wait 2 extra seconds for my User Manager For Domains to come up but the background is where the real work happens on a good server. It is POSSABLE to get NT up to an OK level of performance/stability. It Just takes alot more than a 2 week MCSE!
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You can do both, you know...
technology won't fly the food across an ocean
Ummm... and birds will? Or are airplanes no longer technology? Do you think that the Wright brothers built an airplane to feed somalians? Hell, I bet they didn't know what Somalia WAS. They built an airplane to see if they could BUILD AN AIRPLANE. It has been other people since who have applied that technology to help people.
It may not be possible to see now, but I bet something very similar could happen with SETI. Distributed.net is great and all, but no distributed project until SETI really grabbed the common American's attention. Just by asking the question, you have already found an audience for helping people with a distributed project. I argue that w/o SETI@Home, these new ideas would not have happened for a long time.
It is all well and good to rant about meat production. We'd probably be a lot healthier w/o it. Unfortunately, it would piss MANY people off. As good as that might make YOU feel, it is a damned poor way to actually get anything done. You have to decide whether it is more important to you to accuse the rest of this nation of being heartless (thereby making yourself feel good)or whether it is more important to you to work with people who don't share all of your views in order to achieve your goals.
Enough grain is produced today, even with the meat industry, to feed the world. This is, in part, to basic research that has enabled us to grow disease resistant and drought resistant grains. There is a significant research project funded by the US Dept. of Agricuture to develop a grain that will grow in the terrible conditions on the Horn of Africa, to be GIVEN to Somalians. Having all those people quit their jobs to go "help people" as you seem to view it would be a detriment to Somalians in the long run.
Anyway, this post has gone on much longer than you really deserve. I'm sure it won't change your mind in the slightest. But, maybe, you should think about it, huh?
BDew"Fifty million Americans can't be wrong," said Rep. Billy Tauzin. Gore - 50,999,897 Bush - 50,456,002
Here the US is responsible for the death of over half a million children.
Ahhhh, your true colors finally appear. It's America's fault. (Oh, *I*'m sorry... the US. Because people might think I meant Paraguay when I said America...). Saddam Hussein is responsible for those deaths. What America is responsible for is not letting Saddam bully us into letting him feed his people AND build up an NBC weapons stockpile. Saddam has proven over the past ten years that given a choice between (a) delivering food to his people and (b) buying another tank, he will choose the tank EVERY DAMN TIME. Saddam will feed himself and his army. Everyone else is merely a distraction to him. I personally think that one of Clinton's few foriegn policy triumphs has been his refusal to back down on the oil-for-food program.
Do not demonize the US for killing Iraqi children. Demonize Saddam Hussein.
"Fifty million Americans can't be wrong," said Rep. Billy Tauzin. Gore - 50,999,897 Bush - 50,456,002
Essentially, if aliens really do exist, then Fermi suggests that we should see some unmistakable sign of their existence.
Maybe we do see it and just don't understand or can't comprehend what we're seeing. If you built a 8 lane highway right next to an ant hill would the ants understand what was going on? No. For all we know aliens have built a super-hyper-transwarp highway right next to our solar system.
-- iCEBaLM
>from the "we are the world" mentality. There are
>way too many people willing to appease tyrants
>rather than support fighters for freedom.
Okay, you think the US should stand up to tyrants and put them down. That's all well and good. I agree. But for every person who thinks that we should NOT appease tyrants, there's someone who, when America DOES fight tyrrany, will accuse the US of "imperialism" or "hipocracy" or other imaginary crimes.
Examples, you ask? Look at the outcry when:
NATO moved to protect ethnic Albanians in Kosova from slobo milosivich's plans for genocide.
America has been decicedly anti-castro for decades now (up until clinton recently decided to start sucking up to him).
We certianly haven't been "appeasing" saddam hussain these last ten or so years.
In each of these cases (and I could name more), where America (okay, and our allies, I'm not leaving you out on purpose) HAS adopted a policy of standing up to tyrrany, there wss as much of an outcry (imperialism, warmongering, etc.) as there would be (from a totally diferent set of people) if we had done nothing, or supported the regime in question.
It's a Kobiyashi Maru situation.
You can't please everybody, so you take the middle ground, pick your battles, and try to do what's in the best intrests of your citizens. And, all too often, just wind up pissing everybody off.
Sux to be president, eh? Who was it again who said, of the presidency, that anyone who WANTS the job, should, by no means, be allowed to have it?
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Imagine all the people...
Hell, if they're dead, let's cut 'em up and toss 'em in the stew. Just because they are dead is no excuse not to contribute to the elimination of world hunger.
--
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
SETI isn't directly detecting intelligent life, it's just detecting a side effect of it: strong, point-sourced radio waves that may, or may not have a pattern, but are definately not background radiation or interference.
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
There is no need to grow more food than what is already grown. The world produces enough to feed everybody well with current technologies.
Also, the countries where malnutrition is the most prevalent have food surpluses.
technology won't allow people contribute money to the cause,
Money doesn't solve problems.
technology won't fly the food across an ocean,
Why would you want a people to depend on food flown in by strangers across an ocean? You want people to produce their own food crops.
technology won't improve distribution channels in a country
Repeat: you want countries to grow their own subsistence crops. A big cause of hunger worldwide is having a privileged few control the land, who grow cash crops in order to export to the 1st world. You can do a lot of things in your immediate environment to counteract this. For example, eat what is produced locally. Diminish or eliminate your consumption of beef-- the amount of grain and water used to produce one pound of meat is huge. Even better, become a vegetarian. Together we can make the international meat industry collapse, and free up huge amounts of grain for the starving.
And, check out this article.
Are you adequate?
...to make up for the curves on the iMac. Aesthetic balance, you know.
I seem to recall somebody talking about the "bubbelization of America" when the iMac was still causing a stir. I will be really amused if the Cube takes off, and somebody laments the "cubization of America".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
That's clearly not true. Re-read the paragraph yourself, my friend. It states that the maximum any sponsor will have to pay is 150% of the largest amount in the last 30 days. This means that if the maximum donations in the last 30 days was 300,000, but then it hits 500,000, the sponsors will only have to pay 450,000 for that day -- but the next day the most they will have to pay will have increased to 750,000!
You are wrong. I see nothing wrong with letting some corporations foot the bill for food.
1) For those of you in New Zealand that seek a free ISP that is Linux (or any other OS) friendly, i4free is very excellent. I have now been using them since they pretty much started and am very happy with their service. The fact that they are working on WAP and other advanced services makes them even more desirable. I know of no other free service provider in New Zealand doing what they're doing.
2) I don't know if anyone else has ever thought of this, but I was reading some information from the July feature article of Scientific American and thought to myself, "What if we are the most developed, most advanced civilisation in existance?". Think about it. What if we, mere humans of planet Earth, are the most technologically and socially advanced living creature in the universe? Our broadcasts and attempts to reach other life may not be failing because there's nothing out there, but more so because maybe no one else has the ability to broadcast using light, sound or radio let alone receive the broadcasts. This is the complete inverse to what we've always assumed. So far we've assumed that life out there is at a similar or more advanced technological level to ourselves, but maybe we're the more advanced.
Nothing outstandingly mind numbing, but it is a possibility and something to think about on those long boring nights trying to get a program finished or server back online.
> Why should we waste our time trying to save people who choose to live where there is no food?
Are you implying that the people who are starving have the option to move to another country?
The latter is caused when war breaks out when rebels try to overthrow their corrupt governments. Another cause is infantile border disputes, such as the one currently going on in Eritrea and Ethiopia. What ends up happening either way is people become refugees for long periods of time while their fields and homes are destroyed. They have to rely on UN handouts because they are poor and there are shortages. Also the incredible amount of wealth spent on armaments and soldiers is lost, spent on war when it is needed for infrastructure.
The former cause is from whacked out weather. Things have been strange since El Nino and the entire world's weather patterns have been affected. Whether or not pollution is the cause is not known. Hopefully this is a short term phenomenon but no one knows for sure.
You are absolutely right that world hunger (especially in Africa) has mostly political and economic causes, but "to help the people overthrow their government" is crazy. The anarchist in me likes it, by the realist doesn't.
We see the recent elections in Zimbabwe. The people are poor and hungry and the economy is going from bad to worse, but the ruling Xanu PF held their freeist and fairest election in the nation's short history a month ago. Other countries are in similar conditions, with emerging democracy and strong opposition parties. These certainly should not be overthrown.
Certainly some other places might end up better if their dictators were deposed or overthrown by rebels. But in doing so you open up a huge can of chaos! Right now the Congo is being ripped apart by five or so different nations all fighting its "civil war." What's going on there is like Africa's version of the Thirty Years War (1518-1548). The reality there is utterly depressing.
What Africa needs is a growing middle class and an African Union. Union could start cooperation and bring peace among African nations, and the middle class could bring the economic leadership needed.
I think the differences between this and SETI are very easily quantifiable. This doesn't even deserve an answer.
And insisting in funding Columbus is inhuman. I mean, enough of the people in *our* country are starving; yet all these self-described explorers would rather find out if there's an alternate sea route than see if there's still life in Seville.
But here the analogy is spot-on. The Spanish crown should have cared more about feeding the famished Sevillans; instead of that, they genocided people like the Taínos.
Are you adequate?
With any window manager you can shift windows around wherever you please. With Windows, ad bars can be forced on-screen (unless you use a Visual Basic craX0r) so that you have to look at them. The fact that Linux users won't have to stare at the ads should be reason enough for NetZero et al. to abandon the plan. They just issued a press release with "Linux" in the text so that their stock would rise a bit.
From what I've heard, though, NetZero's one of those companies that _forces_ you to click on an ad every so often or be disconnected. But hey, that's nothing a little scripting (on Linux or otherwise) can handle, right?
For more information, click here.
So you call me a troll. Since this is /., what it means is that you disagree with me, yet have no counterarguments. Could you at least tell us what is is precisely that you disagree on, even though you can't defend your position?
Are you adequate?
I can strongly recommend UKLinux for those in the UK. Performance is good, and they offer 20Mb free web space with PHP, Perl and MySQL freely available on it.
Stephen Hawking has written another book. It's about time as well.
First a few facts. Most of SETI is passive, i.e. just throwing something on unused systems and let it sit in the background collecting data. Araceibo, the radio observatory used for this, has a small instrument package on it that collects the data while other scientists do the searches for the other whos whats and whys of this universe. If you don't think that searching for the answers of where we came from and why we're here, you need a bit more curiosity. It takes very few resources, and will not cause crops to fail, people to revolt, the nukes to go off, as you seem to be suggesting.
Second, helping starving people is noble, if the people want true help and not just a handout. Most of the problem is that the leadership in the countries where most of the starving people live are extremely opressive, and any attempt to change will be met with protest and fighting. You have to give these people things that they don't want, like freedoms of mental, social, and economical choice, no pseudo-democracies, no "people's" rebellions that 99.99% of the time quickly fall into.
Unless you can get people to throw down their want to arbitrarily control someone else, then we will continue to have opression, regardless on who's in control.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
Freewwweb went bankrupt in late June, and Juno bought out their existing customer base. The DOJ doesn't have anything against that.
I liked Freewwweb, but I really had to question how they were making money. I didn't get any more spam, I didn't have to set their site as my home page, and I usually got very good connections, even during peak times (I'm in the New York suburbs). Oh well, at least this thread has given me some ideas so that I can unshackle myself from Windows before I go back to school.
For more information, click here.
This wasn't in the text of the article, but it's an update on recently posted material.
This article on Canoe.ca states that Jimmy Smits, Samuel L. Jackson, and Anthony Daniels have already left the Sydney set of Star Wars. Smits is already done his work (having only been announced that he was cast on Friday!), Jackson is done dialogue and must return in August to do a few action scenes, and Daniels will return briefly for work in Italy (Naboo) and Tunisia (Tatooine).
Of course you're assuming that this advanced culture works similarly to ours. Which is pretty doubtful considering how many distinct cultures we earthlings can come up with on our little planet.
When punk rock is outlawed, only outlaws will have punk rock.
I got your free ISP for Linux right here: http://www.WorldShare.net.
On their front page, they state,
They seem like nice folks, but I've had no dealings with them. Anyone out there had any problems?
"And insisting in doing SETI is inhuman. I mean, enough of the people in *our* planet are starving; yet all these self-described geeks would rather find out if there's life in another planet than see if there's still life in Somalia. "
The world must look to the future, and that future is getting off this dust laden ball of rock and expanding. If people like you had their way an increasing amount of resources would be spent on people like those in Somalia who's actions show them to be no more than monkeys with guns, and eventually so much resources will be pissed away on touch-feely projects Earthside that will not solve anything that it will become impossible to have enough resources to commit to expanding into space. You want less strip mining for metals on earth? Space is where to get metals. You want less chemical production on earth? Space is where to get the chemicals, and where to refine the chemicals.
Finding life on another planet would give a world wide impetus in expanding space sciences, and would create more opportunities and less crap.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
Fuck 'em. Starvation is nature's way of telling you that you're not wanted.
Yes, but this is beside the point. I was addressing the fact that the SETI craze is symptomatic of deep problems within our modern industrial societies. The fact is that there is something ugly, something evil about our so called "civilizations", which results in people having their priorities completely fucked. Like dedicating resources to building dedicated SETI cards, while others, not only in faraway lands, but in their own city, are malnourished.
Are you adequate?
e) long or short term resource flight.
The african countries (and to a lesser extent also parts of asia) have lost a large part of their resources to "export" over a long time. More dramatic is the case of the former USSR, which saw basically all of its captial flee (into the swiss bank accounts of shady people who, incidentally, were friends of the people running the capitalisation) overnight.
Once the captial is gone, you are basically in the hole. Any amount of good management (read government) isn't going to make a difference if you have no resources to manage.
you can go to The Hunger Site and still use SETI for your unused cycles. A great solution, non?
$var = <STDIN>
$var =~ s/\\$//;
this is slashchomp
I went to their signup page - it SAYS they require Windoze AND M$ Internet Exploder to use it (can browse with Netscape but needs M$IE to connect - does this sound dumb? or dumber?) But I sent a note to FreeI (they announced Mac support, I asked them "How about Linux?"), and they said they are working on it - maybe - and suggested that a little push, something on Slashdot to work up some interest. I quote " If you wish us to be in Linux, please tell your friends, post this email in Slashdot and entreat them to email support@freei.net." So let's go, gang!!!!
I've got a friend that makes the same arguments about space exploration. "Why waste time doing it when there are people suffering here."
I'm not sure what these people want us to do, go back to a horse and cart? Bang stones together and live in a cave? Do you know where the dish is that they use for this? hmm, it's in Puerto Rico. Is Puerto Rico a 1st world country? Doesn't this mean that there is money being spent there that normally wouldn't?
Stopping progress doesn't help anyone. Sure if we all shared it would be a lovely world, but people don't. They are greedy. sure, they give a few bucks here and there, but how many people do you let into the USA or Australia every year?
Our PM tells us that Australia is going great, but not that great that we can let people stay that have no homeland.
Why do we send them back? Because our quality of life will go down. People say: I want to help the starving people of the world, but god forbid that I can't buy that 68" TV and DVD for the bathroom.
If (when?) we do find something, could you imagine what would happen to the people on the planet? We are not alone... I like to think that it might unite us a bit more than we are now. And if there isn't life out there, doesn't that prove how fragile and precious life is here, and maybe we might start to look after it a bit better. I think that Carl Sagan made some points like that.
sorry, just tired really tired. You we're probably only trolling anyway.
SETI@home is looking for radar pulses. Those are likely to be at a constant frequency and perhaps easy to detect.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
Have you ever heard of the concept modifier scope ambiguity? For every day, there is a fixed maximum amount of money the sponsors may donate that day.
Are you adequate?
In addition to Freewwweb, I had the dubious distinction of using WorldSpy as well which was swallowed by JUNO a few weeks prior to Freewwweb's demise. Personally, I had no real connection problems with either other than you might expect when living in rural VA (26.4Kbps average connection - no complaints).
I also felt as though the responses I got from JUNO's tech support were noteworthy for their lack of any basic grasp of the facts other than the average PC's being powered by electricity rather than rubber bands. Of course, I may be reaching a bit there.
I did send out a letter to JUNO's president asking that they consider some level of service offering for Linux users. My stab at a windmill perhaps, but I thought it needed doing.
NetZero has announced that they're working on a Linux version of their "Zeroport", but declined to give a date in response to my e-mail. At least, they appeared interested.
For now, I'm using the nearly-free WorldShare.net which seems like a reasonable alternative and does offer the fact that you can target a favorite charity. They require taking part in regular surveys, but the ones I've seen so far haven't been too offensive.
Ah, but what's a penguin to do??
We have met the enemy and he is us - Pogo (Walt Kelly)
And any moment now we can expect them to destroy Earth to build a hyperspatial bypass.
I have had two NT admins who ran SETI on high traffic NT servers during business hours. In both cases, we had users complaining about slowness and so forth. I sat down at one of the NT servers and there it was: SETI running and eating up 90% of the CPU time.
In both cases, the problem was not SETI, but immature individuals who should have had better sense. ("It's your fault. You shouldn't run NT!" - Sorry trollboy, I beat you to it).
One of them had the gall to distribute it across several workstations in our Amsterdam office causing user problems. That goes against everything I have ever learned about proper system administration - the best tech support for your users is having a well run network.
SETI enthusiasts need to run this on their own machines, at home on their own time. Leave other people's property alone. It is no different than reading other people's email, using your boss's servers for porn or IRC. It is unethical and goes against system administration ethics - if such a thing still exists.
This was posted on both the palm and handspring original post, but here it is again. How does an OS patch fix a hardware problem? Do they just tell it not to use that part of the memory, in effect giving you less than you paid for? I assume RMA's are still available?
What when your only viable means of obtaining the food you need to survive one more day is asking somebody else who has more than she needs to unconditionally give you some?
You can ask all you want. And guess what? That's why there are private charity groups to help people.
But that's not what you implied. You imply that there is a fundamental human right to be fed by others. There is a difference between someone demanding food and taking it against someone's will, and "asking" for food.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I had read that article yesterday, and it left me wondering why they seemed to only focus on the cube as a rebirth of a defunct machine? Why not spin the dual-processor G4 as a rebirth of the NeXT Risc Workstation that was in development before they dropped hardware?
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
No, he's being sarcastic.
Slashdot seems to forget there is a world outside of the US.
Abashed the Devil stood,
And felt how awful goodness is
Actually, regarding the "hopeless adventure" part...
Maybe the whole point of finding intelligent life in the rest of the Universe lies precisely in the hope it would bring humanity. It would be quite a boost for us as a race, I suppose.
It would be a higher goal for ourselves, more than merely surviving in our own little planet. Of course, I agree with feeding the starving, helping the homeless, and such, but there must be a way to balance both issues (and others just as important) when dealing with the resources we need to invest.
Note I said "invest", not "spend". There's a difference there. Regards, Luis
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
there was an interesting commentary on Apple's design here on zdnet. It goes through the history of Apple's design changes, and critiques the reasoning vs. the craze. some more commentary.
Here's a press release of Netzero.com announcing a Linux client for thier free ISP. Hopefully, this isn't vaporware.
Show me a way to use spare CPU cycles to feed the third world.
Crack rc5-64, and donate the prize money.
I'm a smartass...
Feminism is the wild notion that women are human beings.
Considering your sig, don't you think we should find out about earth's possible neighbors?
-------
-------
"It was people! People soiled our green!"
Well, considering that we made an attempt in the early 90's to try and give them some food, political stability, etc. under the guise of the UN, wouldn't you say we already tried to help? What did they do? steal food and shoot UN soldiers. who cares what happens to them now? I don't know about you but I'm not willing to let my heart bleed for a people that can't accept a good thing when it's given to them.
EOM
They make a graphite one that looks very good. But I'm with you, it needs XGA and a larger monitor.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
Here in Cincinnati, we are spending over $1 billion for two new sports stadiums, and yet every slack-jawed mouth-breather out there wants to take a swipe at science as a waste of money and resources? It seems to me there comes a point where if you don't get it, you never will. Still, it is pretty funny for the rest of us to see that you use a computer to express your hatred of science and technological advance.
With the introduction of the cube, I was for some reason reminded of my expectations for future Macintoshes of several years ago, when the Power Macs were first introduced.
What I did imagine out of a future Macintosh was that they would be more PC-like, with lower prices and also the ability to run Windows application through either software or hardware emulation. Heck, I even hoped there would be the option to run the now defunct Windows NT for PPC.
If I were shown the future of the Mac, maybe a picture such as displayed here, I would have been so awestruck that I would have expected that the Mac had already taken back marketshare, as a product like that could only come out of success.
I became a PC user when Apple cut the clones and also the PowerPC Platform. I thought that Apple was killing themselves, going in the wrong direction, towards disaster.
When I look at the Mac now, such as the cube, it is almost alien to me. I see it online, and in magazines, but I will probably never see one in real life. I have only seen a couple of iMacs, a G3 or two, no G4s, iBooks, and now probably no cubes. Apple is more worried about their product design than their market share.
In the end, that is how it should be. Apple has always been, and always will be a niche product. That is what makes Apple special.
"...we are moving toward a Web-centric stage and our dear PC will be one of
EverCode
What if possible aliens used spread-spectrum? It doesn't require much technology above radio itself, has several advantages, and would be impossible to detect above the existing background noise.
Ok, where's the troll that's going to say "Hey, if *you're* so concerned, why are you posting on Slashdot instead of helping the poor and saving the whales?"?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Wrote the webmaster.
[
I've been using nocharge.com for my linux box here in seattle and ahve had pretty good luck with them. No cost, no time limits.They dont use anyting proprietary, and there catch is - they charge $10 a call for tech support. but if your smart enought to run linux, you probably wont need tech support.
If the server had processes that wanted more than 10% of the time, and SETI@home wasn't giving it to them, then it was not running in "unused" cycles. SETI@home is advertised as not degrading your system's performance. If it doesn't live up to that promise, then it is at fault, not the admins.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Well, the response you'll usually hear is "the legacy of colonialism".
Which fails to explain why some colonies (Taiwan, South Korea) succeded after gaining independence; why some (Argentina) initially succeeded and now have falllen behind; why some still prospered as essentially colonial states (South Africa); and why most failed.
Another explanation you will hear talks about natural resources, which doesn't explain Taiwan's advantage over Nigeria or Russia; it only explains a handful of Arab oil states.
The real reason become simple to divine when you look at economic systems. Countries where capitalism was discouraged, where the government was active in redistributing wealth (whether to the people or to cronies), or where the reliable rule of law was not established, failed to develop.
Whether they were European states or non-European, independent for long periods or long were colonies, resource-rich or resource-poor, democratic or stable dictatorships, recieved much foriegn aid or little, it's never mattered. Material wealth flows from free markets coupled with stable governments. Always has, always will.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Urine is actually very sterile. Cheeck out this site. Do a google search for even more.
:)
Yes I know you weren't serious, but..urine is very drinkable, and many people do.
If you concentrate all of your energy into one frequency, you get more power, and so it goes further. If aliens were interested in broadcasting to other solar systems, they'd want the signal to go as far as possible. Also, any alien who wanted to communicate would want the signal to stand out over background noise; SETI isn't looking for aliens who are trying to keep themselves secret.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose that you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
Give a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day, but set him on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
First you say: "...they starve because a) their government is corrupt, ..." Then you say: "The solution is to help the people overthrow their government." But one of the main problems for people trying to overthrow these corrupt governments is that they are supported, militarily and in other ways, by powerful countries like the USA. Right?
If you've ever tried to interview anyone at Microsoft, you know that they are quite zealous about it -- an engineer at Microsoft would have to be cleared by the company to answer questions the way Ingo did. Are Redmond-cleared answers ones it would be worth fighting the bureacracy to obtain? I can't really see it ...
/. interview format after I saw him already answering questions at great length in the initial thread about TUX. If I find Microsoft engineers doing the same, then I would *absolutely* [Ja, hey Marge, you betcha!] solicit the same from them! :)
More importantly (and to the point), I asked Ingo if he would mind answering questions in
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Check this out:
... as for the case, well a little soft-form plexiglass and an old frying pan, and you can make your own damned PC104 cube.
... and that's industry-standard rack gear.
PC104 Starter page
Wouldn't be too difficult to build an Apple G4-like tower of PC104 components and match the overall form factor
Anyone else notice the similarity between PC104 carrier cages and the G4 cube? That little module animation of the G4 cube looks a lot like the various computer modules in the Shuttle's experimenter bays, for example
No reason we can't follow suit. Just find a cheap supply of PC104 components, build a stack, and away you go. Simple.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
To keep even more within the spirit of the Linux community, how 'bout someone just write a Perl script to download the ads (and register the hits) automatically? ;-)
the real at&t mix
Well then, since the UN figures the world can only support 1 billion people continuously, and we're WAY over, I'm sure you'll be heading off to get euthanised Real Soon Now.
Or don't you care about the planet?
It shows no such thing.
Doing SETI is completely orthogonal to helping starving Somalians. Show me a way to use spare CPU cycles to feed the third world. Show me a way to use food to find extraterrestrials. I'm waiting....
The world isn't black-and-white -- just because I'm doing one thing doesn't mean I'm not doing something else also. There are lots of different things people can do with their resources and time, without them interfering or affecting each other at all.
Helping SETI@home doesn't mean I'd "rather find out if there's life in another planet" than help my fellow man, it just means that's the best choice I've found for that particular resource, extra CPU cycles. It doesn't say anything else at all about my character or lack thereof.
--
has more on the freewwweb thing. fuckedcompany.com also makes for some interesting reading.
... is a cover for a distibuted encryption cracking effort put on by the NSA.
:P
Sniff, sniff.. hmm, smells like troll to me.
--- Submission is feudal.
And, of course, Quebec will recognize the right of self-determination in those areas in the north and along its borders where peoples of the First Nations and Anglo-Canadians are the majority?
Or will the PQ continue to insist that distinct communities within the nation-state of Canada have the right to self-determination but distinct communities within the future nation-state of Quebec do not?
Steven E. Ehrbar
"I mean, the odds are just insurmountable, and how would it help us if we discovered that there's life somewhere in the universe that's too far for us to go, or for them to come? "
Insurmountable. A lot of things are supposedly insurmountable. People landing on the moon, climbing mount everest, finding cures for diseases. The difficult we did yesterday, the impossible, that's tomorrow.
"And insisting in doing SETI is inhuman. I mean, enough of the people in *our* planet are starving;"
And I care?
"yet all these self-described geeks would rather find out if there's life in another planet than see if there's still life in Somalia."
I don't care about somolia. It doesn't matter if they all die. It doesn't matter if we all die. It's all pretty irrelevent.
"It shows that they don't have any *real* concern for life, in this planet or other-- just playing with their tech toys."
Who cares? What makes you happy, you know . . . go ahead, work at the soup kitchen, I'll be in there when I want a free meal.
We could go off and save everyone before we do anything else, but guess what, then we'd NEVER do anything else. There will always be one more person starving, without a home, not willing to work, whatever else you can throw in there. People die, that's what we're here for.
Dan
Anyone try www.freeatlast.com.
I use it on my Linux box after freewwweb died. I have no problems getting through (except a constant 3.5kps).
I only bring this up because I did not see it anywhere else.
"Here's another thought - try looking at ULTRA-LOW FREQUENCIES.. "
Scientist 1 and 2 are searching over the ultra low frequency range for E.T.I. (extra terrestrial intelligence) when they here a mysterious low rumbling . . .
S1: "Hey, Doc, do you hear that?"
S2: "Yeah, is it?"
S1: "I think so."
S2: "How exciting, to have found an E.T.I."
10 seconds later, a door opens
Kid: "Hi, Mom, Dad, my friend just dropped me off, he's got a PHAT system in his car."
Boom, Boom boom boom, Boom, buzzz
Dan
Montreal for the Montrealians!!
Viva Montreal Libre!!!
(Where will it end?)
"...they may harpoon us, but they ain't gonna pick us up on no radar screen!"
Could the /. team make/convert/move the "Slashback news" into new section called "Slashback"? Eg. like "Your Rights Online" and "Features" is? I like to read them, but I'm not intrested in searching them all the time from the news archive.
What do you think?
if sci-fi movies have tought me anything it is when we find the aliense they will help us out, or kill us all. either way problem solved
Get a grip, pal. It's just slashdot, not the fucking UN.
;), it just shows initative and imagination. Pretty funny, in fact.
As far as I am concerned (if anyone cares
Anybody wanna sell me their +300 account?...
"...they may harpoon us, but they ain't gonna pick us up on no radar screen!"
You assume I don't understand the causes behind people going hungry, when there is no evidence whatsoever in any of my posts that I don't.
Well, one has to make assumptions since you refuse to actually make an unambiguous point. And there is a lot of evidence that you don't understand the causes, since you implied that people should be doing something other than SETI to feed Somalians. And then you came out and said... "Where did I claim I had an answer?"
How does the fact that I argue that SETI is a waste of time necessarily imply that I know the exact details of what everybody should be doing?
So then if you don't know what people should be doing, then why do you expect everyone else to know what they should be doing, other than SETI (or whatever hobby)? You brought up the Somalians. Can you back it up?
Where did I go into specifics at all about what should be done, as opposed to what is certainly a waste of time and people?
*sigh* [RM101 runs his fingers through his hair] You haven't. That's why I asked. But it's a lot easier to metaphorically wave your hands around and act affronted rather than actually answer my questions, isn't it?
The comment that you try to pass off as a "theory", so as to be able to attack me (due to your lack of justifications), is obviously hyperbolic. Any reasonable person can see that.
Again you dodge the point. You espoused the theory. Can you back it up with facts and logic, or is emotionalism the extent of your debating skills?
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Take the signal itself. We have recently seen the growth of spread spectrum communications. ever seen a frequency analyzer plot of a SS signal? It can look as if there's nothing there. Further, SS communications don't use a carrier wave in the way traditioinal communitactions do, so detecting SS signals is very hard to impossible.
The military started using spread spectrum because it is resistant to jamming, and is more secure. Even if you know there's a signal there, unless you know the frequency code, you can't figure out what's there.
What does this mean to SETI? IF the LGM have spread spectrum and IF they use it (it is more efficient communication) and IF they don't intend for others to intercept it, THEN we won't hear anything, even if the antennas are pointed the right way and watching the right frequencies.
My personal biggest problem with SETI is that it is not really good science. You can not prove a negative, because all you get is an absense of proof. The scientific method does not apply. I do not really object to SETI@Home because I see it as using already wasted resources. It is cool technology, though.
-Russ
blessings,
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
An iMac starts at $800, including monitor, and it's a pretty powerful machine. Last I tried to price out PC/104 or SBC-based PC systems, I couldn't even come close to building a high performance system for that kind of money. Not to mention the fact that fiddling with those components is a lot of work.
(half tongue-in-cheek conspiracy theory follows)
I wouldn't be surprised if SETI@home was actually a US government project to build their own massively-distributed general purpose supercomputer. Can you think of a project that's more likely to attract geeks and non-geeks?
Personally, I'm running MPRIME , which helps find large prime numbers. Source code is available and they're responsible for finding the world's 4 largest primes. Since the algorithm is simple and well-documented (proven, even) and the results are verifiable by other programs, conspiracy theories are a little harder here.
I've always found the main strength of SETI in it's search for extraterrestrial _INTELLIGENCE_. I mean, we still haven't found anything intelligent on Earth, so surely we must look for it elsewhere.
According to your analogy, when we come in contact with alien life, we will eventually kill them all (or most). :-)
...
Not that it's relevent
You are absolutely right that world hunger (especially in Africa) has mostly political and economic causes, but "to help the people overthrow their government" is crazy. The anarchist in me likes it, by the realist doesn't.
"Overthrow" is the wrong word. What I mean to say (which you said better anyway) is that political stability has to attained. Preferably, that should happen non-violently through free elections, etc.
We're going OT here, but this isn't a full picture at all. A lot of the shortages are because of (c) crop failure and (d) people being driven from their homes.
I should have singled out "crop failure" as a cause, which obviously is a short-term problem that needs to be addressed by "dumping food and money". I was mostly focusing on the solutions to long term, chronic problems, which was the original posters focus.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
And insisting in doing SETI is inhuman. I mean, enough of the people in *our* planet are starving; yet all these self-described geeks would rather find out if there's life in another planet than see if there's still life in Somalia.
Quite frankly, you show a very naive understanding of the problem. Third world people do not starve because of a lack of food, they starve because a) their government is corrupt, and/or b) they do not have sufficient capitalism.
Dumping food and dumping money has been tried over and over and guess what? It doesn't work, because it doesn't get to the people who need it, and what does get there, doesn't solve the fundamental problem.
The solution is to help the people overthrow their government. But unfortunately, we have too many people like yourself singing "we are the world" rather than facing the fact that politics and economics have to change to solve the problem permanently.
Bottom line, those people have to fix their own problems. We can't just wring our hands and magically cause problems to go away. But hey, at least you will look good to your friends.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I mean, it's a great country and all, but it's not the topic, isn't it?
Are you adequate?
No one's really sure that E.T uses radio waves, but hey, you gotta start somewhere, right? I believe there is a project out there to monitor visual wavelengths too (don't have a URL or anything, sorry.) Btw, light waves are considered part of the EM spectrum.
Oh, then there's the problem of language.
Of course it will be difficult, likely impossible to translate. Does that mean we should stop looking???
Our EM signals probably don't reach far outside our solar system because they're not powerful enough to overcome all the natural noise out there.
Most of our signals (radio, tv, etc) are so weak that they fade out long before natural radio sources have a chance to drown them out. I think its much safer to quietly listen for signals than it is to actively "PING" the whole universe, anyway... ;)
Here's another thought - try looking at ULTRA-LOW FREQUENCIES.
Current SETI projects already cover quite a bit of radio spectrum real estate...
Actually, the reason we can't read their transmissions is that E.T is using strong crypto and it just looks like noise. The FBI was right, we need clipper chips. Damn you, Ronald Rivest!
Bah, Randian drivel. You need to get off that religion/industry. People are *not* able to do what they want with their own money-- there are laws, you know. And a world where they could would have to allow slavery and many other things no reasonable ethics can tolerate. (Of course, Randian "Objectivism" is *not* a reasonable ethics.)
In fact the usual way I react to people like you who whine about how I spend my own money is to INCREASE my donation to SETI.
How immature, with your "hostage" game. "Stop pointing out the truth about SETI, or I'll make sure less money goes to feed the starving".
Discovering ET life will be the biggest thing in history and I want to say I was a part of it.
Yeah, because you are an egotistical Randian who doesn't care about others. Don't be surprised when others don't think highly of your "mighty acheivements".
What will you be able to say? that you lined some rich arab beurocrat's pocket's with gold?
As I told somebody else: Point out where the fuck I claimed sending money was the solution to hunger.
You really have a small mind if you think "taking action to solve social problems" mean "sending money".
Are you adequate?
Really?!?! God, I've been soooo confused all these years!!!
Yes, you have been. You are looking at the surface effect, rather than examining the cause.
Why is it, then, that a sizable portion of the US population is food-insecure?
Food "insecure"? What does that mean? Point me to a news story about someone dying of starvation in the US. You can't. If someone chooses to go hungry, then that's the choice they've made. We are literally surrounded by free food, free food stamps and welfare. Not to mention that, ahem, if someone wants an actual *job* it's trivial to find one.
And where the fuck did I advocate "dumping food and money"? Point out the exact fucking words.
You've said that geeks should be doing something other than SETI. Since you apparently have the answer of what people should do, and it doesn't require anyone giving up any food or money, I would be most interested in hearing it. You've already posted some, er, theory that saving energy will feed third world people. I would be interested to hear exactly how that works as well -- specifically.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Ah, yeah, the loon theory of the origin of life on Earth, which no biologists believe. It was proposed by a phycicist (sp?) who also happens to be a magician, and no biologist believes it.
"Give me a fish, I eat for a day. Teach me to fish, I eat for a lifetime." Think about it.
Try teaching to fish to somebody who is dead.
You need to feed them first. *Then* you can worry about making them self-sufficient.
Are you adequate?
The Cube article makes a lot of sense, but I think it assumes a more complex plan than is actually in the works.
Jobs is a brilliant man, no arguing that. He has a sense of how people think about technology.
First, he appealed to the geeks and hackers. He tweaked their need to be Free by giving them a personal computer - the Apple.
Then he appealed to 'the rest' of people, who saw computers as very complicated, crypric things. He gave them a GUI and called it a Macintosh.
In between the two events, he realized that catering to the uninformed would be difficult in the future, so he donated Apple IIs to schools, to train the next generation of Apple customers.
Then a bunch of bad things happened to Mr. Jobs, but Apple eventually realized it's mistakes. Steve gave us some real computers (ahem!) that appealed to people's aesthetic as well as their adrenal glands.
Jobs sold iMacs to your neighbors college kids, and that made your kids want one too, didn't it? Same with the G3.
Now, Steve is aiming at your early adopter neighbor. You know the one, he has the 2000 Eclipse and the new SUV in his driveway. He has the cool flat-screen or Bang&Olafsen stereo or the newest whatchamacallit-thingymahooey. He know's your kids will drool and chew your ear come Christmas time. He knows your wife will ooh and aah, and it's going to make you question your manhood.
Steve knows that 90% of American males are competitive beyond reason, and will likely buy one (especialy at the very reasonable price) just to keep up with the neighbor.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
And have you never wondered what the advent of this observatory has meant for the Arecibeños that were displaced by its construction?
And just how many people were living in that limestone basin before the telescope was built?
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
Ok, where's the troll that's going to say "Hey, if *you're* so concerned, why are you posting on Slashdot instead of helping the poor and saving the whales?"?
Posting on Slashdot doesn't save the whales? Next you'll tell me there's no magical penguin that goes around installing Linux of good children's computers...
Information wants to be free -- but informants want to be paid.
Earthlink is great stuff. Their technical support staff are pretty clued in, and their customer service staff are wonderful. I signed up during the USB camera deal, and when I didn't get mine, the customer service rep got the new one shipped to me in several days. I don't have any problems with connectivity, and I dial in from my laptops (Windows and OpenBSD) on a regular basis. I haven't had any problems in finding an Earthlink dial-in when I travel.
The only thing I would want from them is the dialer program (which can dial an 800 number and query for local access numbers automatically under Windows). But that hasn't really gotten in the way of anything.
(I wish you would leave your email visible, because I'd much rather respond in private than clutter up this thread with off-topic material. End rant.)
Rev. Dr. Xenophon Fenderson, the Carbon(d)ated, KSC, DEATH, SubGenius, mhm21x16
I'm proud of my Northern Tibetian Heritage
How about a distributed net to analyze satelite data for Third World Farmers? The pactice is becoming commonplace among big operators in the US Grain belt, allowing fine adjustments in fertilizer application, quick response to infestation, etc.
Emailed this on to the folks who run http://www.thehungersite.com
Ben Masel: 51,282 votes for US Senate in the Wisconsin Democratic Primary
The main causative elements of a starving country have tended to be issues of distribution. Poorer countries are usually more agrarian, but all of the paying jobs are in cities-so everyone moves to cities-where there is no food. The technology level of most such so-called 3rd world countries makes it hard to get food to these cities (with rampant unemployment) in time before it is uneatable.
In the particular case of Somalia, its distribution issues have the most to do with its engaging in a long and destructive war with Eritrea, combined with drought conditions. All of the resources of Somalia are being destroyed to use for purposes of war.
Unless these deep-seated problems of too much development, too fast are resolved for poorer economies, there will always be starvation no matter how much food is sent in. Growing globalization is not helping these issues.
Cheerio.
------------ An uneducated mind is as useful as an educated cabbage.
Ceci n'est pas un post
What if the aliens are peaceful, fat, edible, and can be induced to land in Africa?
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Funny, if you support the "common man" over the "oppressors" and such, why are you, now, defending the likes of hussain, milosovixh, and castro? Any one of which is a hundred times worse an "oppressor" than clinton could ever hope to be. (you don't see many people their lives risking on home-built rafts, in the straits of Florida, trying to get IN to cuba, do you?).
Now, I don't know anyone who escaped from hussain or milosovich, so I won't bother more with them, but when I lived in Florida, I *DID* meet a number of people who were lucky enough to escape, alive, from castro.
>Second, Castro's crime simply was aiming for Cuba
>not to bend over to US interests over those of
>its people.
There was also that little matter of allying themselves with an enemy determined to destroy us at all costs ("we will bury you" ring a bell?). Oh, and also that little "pointing nuclear missiles
at us from 90 miles away, a distance from which there would have been little or no warning before millions are vaporised" incident just MIGHT have had a bearing on the direction of the US's cuba policy.
>US interests over those of its people.
>Cuba was not a wonderful place before Castro.
If you seriously beleive that castro cares, in the slightest, about "the intrests of his people", or that cuba is a wonderful little "workers paradise", I suggest you visit Miami sometime and ask the people who've BEEN IN CUBA, and been lucky enough to escape with their lives (and most often, with very little else) what it was like.
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Imagine all the people...
1.The MacJunkie guy eating his hockey puck mouse for claiming the G4 Cube photos were fake
The pictures were fake. Just because the cube is real, doesn't mean the pictures are real. Ancient Zen proverb.
2.Upgrading that Visor on your head so that getting out in the sun after an all-night programming session won't zap your memory
The real issue here isn't just upgrading the visor, but overclocking the visor. Heck, overclocking a beowulf cluster of visors.
3.Reading "Slashdot sucks" posts attached to redundant flames of redundant comments to the recurrent topic of free Linux ISPs
I preferr reading smarmy "+2 funny" lists attached to "Slashdot sucks" posts attached to... yatta yatta yatta.
4.Posting an article about a fraud mimicking of a credit card site and not mentioning the outright rip-off of Debian's website
information wants to be $36.95 (California residents add 7% sales tax). Ancient Zen proverb.
5.Craving the latest multi-processor board from SETI so that you can crack pr0n site passwords
No, craving the latest multi-processor board so you can run a spell-check on "pr0n".
6.Coffee
The other two poll options were originally
b) tea
c) me
7.Britney Spears
Wait... didn't she already get voted off the island? Or am I thinking of someone else?
2 1337 4 u!
Its a very easy guess what message Alien life would send us:
"Any of you *faggots* touch any of my stuff....and, I'll kill you"
=)
Supernaut
Dead serious too.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Not to mention that, ahem, if someone wants an actual *job* it's trivial to find one.
Okay, so this is flamebait, but FUCK YOU. Let's see you get a job without money, clean clothes and a place to sleep and clean up. Seriously, try it. Go out and dumpster dive to find some old rags that might keep a person half-ass warm in the winter, let them get nice and dirty, don't wash or shave for at least two weeks, and go out and get one of these "trivial to find" jobs. Jobs are like many other things in a capitalist society: easy to get for the people who already have them.
Intolerant people should be shot.
The only problem with this is that there is a fundamental flaw in what is known as the Fermi "paradox". It makes the rather large assumption that we (humanity) will be able to recognise this "unmistakable sign". Why should we?
True enough, but if that's the case, then SETI is pointless. This is like the Ask Slashdot where the question was "Does Water Really Have To Mean Life?" There are a lot of damn good reasons why it does, as I outlined in my reply.
Still, with all of that in mind, we have no way of proving that water and life are definitely without a doubt intertwined. Heck, by Hume's Principal of Induction, we have no way of proving anything (I'm not a philosopher, so don't flame me if my interpretation of Hume is wrong). All we can do is make good guesses and hope for the best.
We, as humans, have guessed that another alien species will discover the unusual property that radio waves can propagate over long distances. We assume that this species will be one that communicates with others of the same species, and that it will use these radio waves to communicate with others in locations beyond it's normal range of communication. As for proving that, we've got nothing except ourselves. But without any other reference model, can we really do any better?
I have an account closing in on 1100. Make me an offer.
But one of the main problems for people trying to overthrow these corrupt governments is that they are supported, militarily and in other ways, by powerful countries like the USA. Right?
Yes, you're right. I don't exempt much of the U.S. from the "we are the world" mentality. There are way too many people willing to appease tyrants rather than support fighters for freedom.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
If we threw away all human endeavor outside of feeding the hungry, then why would the hungry bother eating the food? People want to live for reasons more interesting than another day in a bread line.
Go and click it manually for a while first. I'm pretty sure they set up a maximum per x hours a while ago to appease sponsers worried about exactly that. I know that freedonation.com did anyhow.
Intolerant people should be shot.
i always liked to believe that E.T. are waiting for humans to get our shit together. I'm not so certain that technology is the only thing preventing us from getting in touch with our "neighbors".
Why in gods name would an almost certainly enlightened race of beings want to have anything to do with a group of bipedal assholes who fight over little sections of dirt, or whether or not one group of bipedal assholes is slightly more tan than another group of bipedal assholes.
i'm sure that, if someone is watching us, they're thinking the same thing 2 rich white guys think when they talk about going to Compton "i'm not going there! i'd probably get my ass shot at!"
besides - what would the followers of Pat Robertson do when they find out that humans aren't Gods special little creatures?!?!(Which we aren't BTW - it's pretty fscking dumb to believe that, in a nearly infinite universe, organisms here on Earth are the only ones that are self-aware).
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Well, I know this is just a troll, but if everyone else has been trolled I suppose I can throw my two cents in.
Why are you here? Why did you take the time to post this? Your time could have been much better uttilized working in a garden or small farm creating food for starving people.
The energy you spent while reading Slashdot could have saved some small amount of non-renewable resources. Not just the energy your computer takes up either. The energy that heats/cools your home. (if you had been in the garden you wouldn't have needed that.) And the lights in the room where you were sitting. And if you were playing music that's just sensless waste.
While we're on the topic of sensless waste, you do heat your house in the winter? What temprature to you keep it at? More then a couple degrees above freezing is just waste. As long as your pipes don't freeze why waste energy when you could just wear anouther layor of clothes?
I'll assume that someone as moral as you carpools in a zero-emisions vehicle whereever he/she goes, so we don't even have to discuss that.
Meanwhile, what are you thinking when you're not occupied? I hope you're thinking about new and better ways to make the world a better place. I hope you're not selfishly day-dreaming or reading a book. Well if you don't meet the critia above don't you dare tell us what interesting scientific research we can or can not support because of starving people elsewhere in the world. You're not devoting 100% to fixing the worlds problems but we don't come in and tell you what a sensless waste your life is. -Andy L Ok, now someone ask him about the space program!
Seems at least possible. If there are alien civilizations out there, we're bound to get into a genocidal war with one or more of them. It might not be even partly our fault, but I won't take that bet.
Intolerant people should be shot.
Given the cosmic spans of time we are talking about the chance that an inteligent civilization would be in a stage where it communicated by radio waves at the same time we communicate by radio waves is nearly nil. Life on other planets, even those closest to us in length of existance, would likely be millions of years ahead or behind us technilogically.
Think of what was cutting edge just a thousand years ago. Back then the cutting edge of communication was giving a runner a document to run to the other kingdom. A thousand years from now we'll think radio communication as inefficent as having handwritten notes run hither and yon is today.
Advanced civilizations which presumably have devised means to circumvent relativistic restrictions would not be using communication systems like radio which operate at a virtual snail's pace.
The reason extraterrestrial life has not dropped by for a visit is the same reason you personally have not dropped by for a visit to ant piles or bacterial colonies. It's of no interest to you just as our simple single-cell-like civilization must seem to civilizations more advanced then ours. Even if they did drop in we'd be just as unaware as bacteria under a microscope.
Summing up, looking for advanced civilizations by searching for radio emmisions is like looking for pedestrians on a highway as a sign of life. Its a search for the wrong thing; we should be looking for biproducts of things which are at the 'magic' stage for us but would be commonplace for advanced civilizations... quantum tunneling, strange gravitational anomolies, etc..
I still believe SETI is a good effort; truth is we problably don't know what really to look for so to look for _something_ even if it might be the wrong thing is a good start.
-- Greg
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
Kossé qu't'as contre le Québec, ostie d'Américain de tabarnak? C'est pas de ma faute si ton pays est tros cave pour savoir qu'il existe autre chose que ton gros cul de crétin pis tes osties de McDonalds à la con. Le monde entier t'haïs, mon gros criss. Mange un char de marde pis retourne baiser ta soeur dans le Midwest pis crosse-toé en regardant ton gun.
There are plenty of proggies out there for automating (or simulating) web-surfing activity. Mostly, these are for the purpose of ripping off AllAdvantage, or some of the other "pay to surf" sites.
Are any of these GPLed? If so, one or more could be modified to be put to very GOOD use (for a change). If you can simulate mouse clicking on a given link good enough to fool AllAdvantage, it sould be easy enough to duplicate the principle so as to automate accessing the hunger site link.
Imagine if every geek out there were to drop this script in cron, set to run every 24 hours (as the site claims this is the max. That would rack up a healthy cart of food, yes?
But even better, how *DO* they know to only allow one access a day? The obvious answers would be that they log your IP address, or they set a cookie. IP logging would be problamatic for THEM, as many people are on dialups with dynamic assignment. So they may disqualify one IP address even though there's a new user trying to donate.
But if it's a cookie-based method, wouldn't it be simple enough to script an automatic removal of that cookie, making it possible to donate MUCH more often than once
Thoughts? Ideas?
I think I'll start messing with THS tonite to see if I can figure an easy way to do this.
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Imagine all the people...
Really?!?! God, I've been soooo confused all these years!!!
they starve because a) their government is corrupt, and/or b) they do not have sufficient capitalism.
Why is it, then, that a sizable portion of the US population is food-insecure?
Dumping food and dumping money has been tried over and over and guess what? It doesn't work, because it doesn't get to the people who need it, and what does get there, doesn't solve the fundamental problem.
And where the fuck did I advocate "dumping food and money"? Point out the exact fucking words. And for bonus points, can you find the messages in this thread where I explicitly say that it is *people* who solve problems, and not money, contradicting your argument against me?
You need to learn to *read what's in fucking front of you*, dammit. And stop assuming others are stupid and you know what they think, and that they are how you think they are.
[more I-know-it-all, I-know-what-you're-thinking, you're-naïve drivel deleted]
Quit your strawman arguments.
Are you adequate?
Was it just my area or did anyone else have about a 1 outta 10 chance of actually connecting when you dialed up and didnt get a busy signal?
:)
Maybe it was just your area that caused you to get busy signals -- where I am right now (Austin) I'm having no trouble at all connecting to their local number. The connection is a little slow, but I'm not sure it's not the phone lines (other people I know in the same complex are getting slow connect speeds with different services).
Also the stupid banners ate up so much memory and time.
I don't know what ISP you're talking about, but freewwweb doesn't have any annoying banners (which is probably why they failed). They just asked users to set their page as your homepage. The only memory hog used there would be netscape
"Save the whales, feed the hungry, free the mallocs" -- author unknown
Really?!?! God, I've been soooo confused all these years!!! Yes, it looks that way. Why is it, then, that a sizable portion of the US population is food-insecure? For many of the same reasons that other, "poorer" countries are. People are incredibly stupid, lazy and manipulative. Yes, there are people out there who genuinely cannot work because of a physical or mental disability, and sure, these people could use a hand. They are in the minority, however, mixed in with a huge jungle of people who demand handouts in exchange for nothing. I might not have the perfect answer to your query -- but I can answer the inverse question: why am *I* food-secure? Why do I have food to eat? Because I fucking work. I do something that my employer considers valuable enough to pay me money, that I might exchange it for foodstuffs. An incredibly simple concept that seems to have blasted over your head... It's a real pisser that some children get born into absolutely horrid living conditions. I really do feel sorry for them. But hey, I have to eat, too. Natural selection's a real bitch, isn't it? There's countless solutions, but these people don't want to put forth any effort to implement a single one of them. > [more I-know-it-all, I-know-what-you're-thinking, you're-naïve drivel deleted] Quit your strawman arguments. Such as? I didn't see any strawman arguments. I read some rather intelligent counterpoints leveled squarely at your simplistic ideas. I also note that I don't see any intelligent arguments in *your* reply to the above. And by the way, one word about your subject line: "lame." Yup, mine too, but I had to get your attention somehow :P
Read my stuff.
I haven't found anything quite comparable in the PC world (iPaq, Sony's machines, and Dell tried but all fall short).
I don't care much for Apple styling, Apple software, or Apple corporate politics. But PC hardware vendors should take notice and deliver something similar. The value of the iMac and the cube is not in the translucent plastic, it's in the ergonomics of the hardware.
How can human beings judge whether or not they have discovered intelligent life? The patterns of repetition, harmony, etc., are as common in nature as they are in communication -- What if we already found them, and missed it?
Got Rhinos?
WTF? So you don't believe that eating is a fundamental human right?
Eating is a fundamental human right. The opportunity to earn food for oneself is a fundamental human right. One man demanding another man to supply him with food is not.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
The only problem with this is that there is a fundamental flaw in what is known as the Fermi "paradox". It makes the rather large assumption that we (humanity) will be able to recognise this "unmistakable sign". Why should we? Considering that we, as a species, couldn't even come up with a single language to speak to each other with. What gives people the idea that we are going to be able to make even the vaguest of sense of what an entity completly alien to this planet is going to say, and the method used to say it?
Just because we are a noisy society doesn't mean that others will also be so.
-- David Smith
C:\ is the root of all evil.
And insisting in doing SETI is inhuman. I mean, enough of the people in *our* planet are starving; yet all these self-described geeks would rather find out if there's life in another planet than see if there's still life in Somalia.
People are starving. Great. People have always been starving. The US and other nations have tried many times to help third world countries only to be thwarted by third world dictators and corrupt governments not delivering the aide to "their" people. SETI@Home has nothing to do with starving kids with big brown eyes on infomercials.
SETI@Home is a wonderful project. Will they ever find e.t. life? Who knows. Will they solve all the worlds problems? Nope. But is it an incredible idea and an intriguing adventure? Absolutely. So what if they never ever find anything? My computer wasn't doing anything at the time anyways so the extra processor cycles may as well be used in this great experiment. SETI@Home is bringing together thousands and thousands of people in a new and unique way and together all of them are working towards a common goal. Their project is an inspiration to those who think that their dreams are unreasonable or their goals are too big and unrealistic. If the people who say SETI@Home is a waste controlled the world there would be no international space station, no trip to the moon, no freedom, the world would be flat, and the earth would still be the center of the universe. People are telling SETI@Home that they can't/won't because they're afraid that they might.
You live IN A DESERT!
Go WHERE THE FOOD IS!
Sorry, couldn't resist.
What about spread spectrum? Would SETI pick this up? Many new cordless phones are spread-spectrum phones - it is more robust because it's relatively immune to interference and allows better use of the shared frequency band. I was told that the bandwidth available using spread spectrum is dependent on the speed of the processing - so faster processors = more bandwidth. However, to SETI - would they even see a signal like this?
We've been using radio for just over 50 years. If we go to high-bandwidth digital connections in the next couple of years, if car radios are replaced with car satellite receivers, the whole radio spectrum of our planet can change drastically in just the blink of an eye, cosmos-wise.
And insisting in doing SETI is inhuman. I mean, enough of the people in *our* planet are starving; yet all these self-described geeks would rather find out if there's life in another planet than see if there's still life in Somalia.
It shows that they don't have any *real* concern for life, in this planet or other-- just playing with their tech toys.
Are you adequate?
I use WorldShare as a backup to my pay ISP. One survey a month isn't bad and besides that they donate 5% of what you would have paid them to your favorite charity. WorldShare has recieved an 89% recomendation at ePinions. There are also a number of other free ISPs listed there too.
I'm always curious why people assume that a civilization that is almost certainly more technologically advanced than we would also be more "enlightened" (whatever the hell that means). It just doesn't follow in my mind that technology makes everyone nicer. (I don't think it makes anyone meaner, for that matter.) After all, the only reason we're less likely to brutally murder each other now than, say, 1,000 years ago, is only because we have less motivation (there are more resources, so people don't *have* to fight over them), and even when we do kill each other it's generally a cleaner way of doing it (I'd much rather get a 9mm to the head than a claymore to the gut).
I suppose my point is that human nature has never really changed, only our outward behavior has become less brutal. I would expect other intelligences out there that came from a similar evolutionary path (social omnivores & hunters) would approach us the way we would approach a lower tech race on another world: exploit 'em for a buck. (Mind you, I don't see anything wrong with this per se.)
The only real question is, what type of exploitation would it be? Outright enslavement, or some form of creeping commercialism? Now there's a scary thought to say good-night on.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Light and "the EM spectrum" are the same thing.
First, compared to most astronomical radiation, SETI looks at pretty low frequency.
Second, and more importantly, the reason they look where they do is that the biggest signpost in the EM spectrum is the 21cm spin-flip line of neutral hydrogen. 21 cm = 1.4 GHz. If you want people to find your signal, you need to put it somewhere recognizable, and the 21cm line is by far the most obvious feature in the low-frequency EM spectrum.
[TMB]
Failure of SETI doesn't prove that there isn't intelligent life out there. But it could prove that what is out there doesn't particularly want to say anything to us. Maybe there's an interstellar war on. :)
--
--
Do I look like I speak for my employer?
All this in the dead of night, at about 2 a.m. Central Time. Color me impressed.
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
The hope of a better life is what has driven our species to explore our world, and better make use of our environment through technology. To give up that instinct to stretch ourselves and push the limits of what we can accomplish and what we can discover, to limit what we hope to accomplish by our own ignorance, is to give up that hope which makes our life worth continuing. Maybe we can't bring the benefits of our success to everyone on this world, but that is no reason to give up on ever reaching beyond what we have already.
Maybe finding other civilizations won't have any direct benefit. They might not be able to feed our hungry, or cure our diseases, or end our wars. They might even be a bunch of assholes. Assholes or not, it isn't enough for me or the thousands of others who run SETI@Home to simply guess if we are alone in the universe, and we won't be satisfied until we know for certian.
That is why I run a screen saver.
Maybee our bible teacher was right. Maybee God created us and us alone. Maybee there isn't anyone else out there because the whole thing was created for us.
Of course, this isn't a viable opinion, is it?
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
Anyone have the text to repost? It's fallen off the page and the site has no archives from June or July.
the iPAQ is silly, Sony's machines may be (?) great for some things (smart, like some HPs, to include both a CD-RW and a CD-R drive), and the Dell WebbedPC was a silliness that I bet still causes laughter in Round Rock.
...) So you need another order of lime green beads (hey, I liked my old green iMac, despite its flaws) and none of tangerine (ick -- so what?!) Aren't apples supposed to conform you your personality and all that?! Heck, IBM is currently offering more "personality matching" with their interchangeable color covers on some lines. That's stodgy, "any color so long as it's battery ..blue," "a big ship takes long to turn," "nobody ever got fired for buying" frickin' IBM!
...
Yes, Apple makes cool hardware in a way that no one else yet matches. The ultrathin Vaios (and the picturebook) are about the only notebooks which approach the current PowerBook (or even the iBook) in design excellence, IMO. (I like certain others for various other reasons, and I think ThinkPads look cool, but for shape spiffiness, Apple wins.) Not color (see below), but for shape, the iBook is rad. Wish it had an XGA screen and a DVD player -- in that case, I would buy one. The shape f the G3 ThinkPads is pretty cool, but a wee bit too contrivedly curvacious, and I think it fits less well there. I'm into the pixie shape of the iBook (Dominique Swain) a little more than the swoopier, fishnetted G3 (Lena Olin), even though I'd like the actual capabilities of the G3/400 more, and I want a 5-hour .
If they would make a *black* and clear iBook, all the males who don't savor carrying a disgusting orange notebook and who are a little iffy even on the gender-corrected baby blue one but would *enjoy* a sprightly, long-battery-life, Airport-ready notebook would snatch them up.
Those colored panels can't *really* cost that much, guys at Apple -- why not make them available to *anybody in any color they want?!* (or at the very least in the various colors you already buy the little plastic beads for, from snow to ruby
Weren't the iBooks going to have a sort of slip cover that would take paper inserts like a protective book cover?
So, agreed with jetso123 -- Apple is raising the state of the art in desktop computers. G3/G4 cases are nicer to work with than any PC case I've seen; Airport is relatively cheap for the Mac; fanless is rad. Bring it on with OS X. But please, upgrade the iBook (that graphite SE barely ranks notice, and not a couple of bills) with XGA, DVD and a video out
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
This is SOOOOOO sneaky and subliminal that only Jobs could have pulled it off. Apple will gain market share by.....assimilation! Doesn't that cube, on some level, remind you of a Borg Cube?
While you sleep, the cube sends out nanoprobes into your bedroom and into you, turning you from an overclocking, Linux-booting, propeller-headed web junkie to a MacAddict, complete with pony tail and wire-rim glasses. Apple is finally playing by the Wintel rules.
Scary, no? Resistance is futile. You, too, will be assimilated.
There's alot of assumptions here. First, that an alien race would want to be found and/or communicate. Maybe they're sufficiently advanced (and have met other species - maybe hundreds of planets) that we're just not worth their time. Anyone who's been around a three year old can understand what I'm saying here. Second, who's to say the aliens use the EM spectrum the way we do? Maybe on their planet light was the best way of communicating due to magnetic interference. Or maybe they don't have the same materials to make the same kinds of electronics we do. If they make electronics at all. For all we know, they're using quantum subspace carrier band signals to phone home.
Oh, then there's the problem of language. How exactly are we going to be able to tell when something is trying to communicate with us if we don't know the language. Imagine getting a burst of static out of your speakers from your PC instead of a picture. Would you be able to decode it? Maybe they're using a different encoding scheme. Something unintelligible like Word 7 .doc maybe.
Oh, and then there's the problem of signal propagation. Our EM signals probably don't reach far outside our solar system because they're not powerful enough to overcome all the natural noise out there. Maybe if we had a dedicated nuclear reactor and a transmitter we could push a strong signal out there. And who's to say there isn't a galaxy or three between them and us? Kinda hard to transmit through solid rock.. especially at the frequencies we use.
Here's another thought - try looking at ULTRA-LOW FREQUENCIES.. if someone was trying to talk to us, they'd want to be sure a galaxy wasn't in the way. We're scanning in.. what... the gigahertz range? Signals deteriorate muuuuch quicker when they're higher in frequency.
Just a few thoughts.
Oh, yes, what wonderful things Columbus brought to the American Indians. His arrival brought forth lots and lots of Europeans to the Americas, who proceeded to infect the native peoples with European diseases, colonize their land, destroy their civilizations, and commit outright murder. I would venture to say that the world might have been better off if Columbus's voyage had been delayed a century or two. Imagine how much quality of life could have been improved/maintained on both sides of the Atlantic. Similarly, I don't think we would be prepared to deal with the consequences of finding alien life if it were to be found.
The most ironic ever thing would be if personkind were to extinguish its energy sources and die because of a stupid, needless search for life in other solar systems, wouldn't it?
Are you adequate?
Ben Masel: 51,282 votes for US Senate in the Wisconsin Democratic Primary
Of course their strategy is to get the cube into offices. Look at the design. It's camoflagued as a paper shredder! Or is it a smokeless ashtray? Either one.
People are *not* able to do what they want with their own money-- there are laws, you know
Yup. They (should) only keep me from infringing on others rights. Other than that I spend (or don't spend) the money as I see fit. I'm sorry if you find my purchasing patterns unwise, but I spent nine hours a day working. I don't tell you how to spend your money, what to believe in, what to say, where to go, etc. Pardon me if I don't give a flying f**k how you think I should spend my time.
FRB
If you don't have anything nice to say, say it often.
- Ed the Sock
Personally, I think the surest sign that there's intelligent life out there is that the *haven't* tried to contact us.
c. 2000 CiAsA Boark Inc.
Yeah, but the G4 Cube costs way more than an iMac...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I just want to clarify a bit here about the consequences of crop failure in a free market context. Or, more precisely, the lack thereof.
Let's say a given region which normally exports food has a bad spell and must import food. What happens to the price of food in that region? Obviously, it goes up. After initial speculative pricing, it will tend towards a level equal to the cost of food in the nearest exporting markets plus the transaction cost of processing and shipping.
But what of the demand? Well, people will *demand* food theoretically right up to the point of suicide if they are allowed. That is, demand is almost completely inelastic because *not* having food is a sure recipe for getting no other values -- 'cause you'll be dead.
Sophisticated markets have the ability to provide for such circumstances through financing. That is, by spending future capital today to pay for temporarily increased prices.
This is exactly what happens in free-exchange markets. Say, for example, between US states. Crop shortage in Minnesota this year? Yeah, wheat prices go up, but the rest of the midwest bread basket covers the difference quite comforably. And as markets advance, the world's best analysis possible is placed against these factors by playing commodity futures markets to stablize prices.
So why don't we see the same effects globally? Because these markets are not permitted in many countries where starvation is prevalent. If people are simply not allowed to bid up prices for food, then there's no possibility of market planning in anticipation of those prices!
Out of all the things economists disagree, the Law of Comparative Advantage is the one that virtually all agree upon. And that all food shortages ever are -- time-cycled instances of comparative advantage. When such trades are blocked or nullified, the only guarantee we have is that somewhere, available resources are diverted into less useful purposes.
This goes just as much for IMF handouts and charity food drives as it does for farm subsidies and trade barries. Diluting incentives to plan for the future is as harmful as anything.
The first poster was dead on.
Fermi's little question rests on a series of potentially bad assumptions:
A.) Intellegent Life, when it arises, sends out radio waves and/or pokes about the planets while it exists, since such life tends to be curious and won't all be lay-abouts, it will come to visit.
B.) We are smart enough, as we are, to detect life out there, if it exists, by eavesdropping and such life will make itself obvious, as we have, for a long stretch of time.
C.) They have enough free time to deal with us, rather than each other, or would logically be inclined to deal with us, absent some strict moral code the whole galaxy embraces.
The first assumption is incorrect on it's face, looking at our own history.
We've only been sending out radio transmissions for a tiny fraction of our own recorded history... and it may be tommorrow we stop. Nor have we had much success ( for all our talk ) of colonizing other planets. We touched the moon for a few hours. I'm sure it's possible, but it may be not something that takes off in a big way, even here.
I know, I see all the hands raised to volunteer... but wait till the first three missions to nearby stars fail.
Or, what if we find we do have neighbors, and they want us to stay off their porch? If the galaxy is aa crowded as is implied, maybe all the fish staking claim and enforcing territorial boundaries makes colonization much more difficult and slow ( picture a whole bunch of contenders, all of them too busy fighting/standing each other off to bother with the earth... )
All these civs use radio? Why? We may have some very different technology than radio in the future. Or we may use radio in ways we don't know right now. Who can say?
Beyond this, when winnowing out stuff, the article is also correct in stating that the lifetime of planets is involved. There is no compeling evidence in our own history that life sustaining environments will produce 'intellegent' life...
5 billion years to get Howard Stern... wow. Pretty short window on actually getting the message out.
So, all those planets with civs on them may have a 200 year window where they use Radio, and then dump it for something better...
How about this, too, the article assumes an advanced civ _must_ have a star to orbit...
Why? If we have fusion power, do you need a star
anymore? A planet? Why not build a ship and dump the planet? It might be, eventually, that's more efficient and portable of a system.
Besides, if suddenly you were getting radio transmissions from some little planet off in the distance, wouldn't it be easier to listen and see how much you could learn about them while they broadcast credit card numbers and the human genome over the radio waves?
Why stop that? Whether your intentions are benign or malignant, surely it's better to just snoop the lines?
Could you let me know how Earthlink works out? I've been beating my head against the brick wall which is Juno tech support ever since the breakup myself.
I'm about to give in and get a paid access Juno account.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
And insisting in doing SETI is inhuman. I mean, enough of the people in *our* planet are starving; yet all these self-described geeks would rather find out if there's life in another planet than see if there's still life in Somalia.
What a wonderfully articulated Luddite view. Let's see where this takes us.
But Columbus *is* a hopeless adventure
Your Highnesses, your proposed funding for that Genoan Columbus' foolish search for *another* passage to India is ill advised.
I mean, the odds are just insurmountable, and how would it help us if we discovered that there's another sea route for the vital Indian spice trade that's too far for us to go, or for them to come?
And insisting in funding Columbus is inhuman. I mean, enough of the people in *our* country are starving; yet all these self-described explorers would rather find out if there's an alternate sea route than see if there's still life in Seville.
It shows that they don't have any *real* concern for life, in this country or other-- just playing with their nautical toys.
Just asking.
It's a joke. You may wish to look it up if you are unfamiliar with the concept.
2 1337 4 u!
I recieved a reply from the support guy at the site. Apparently they are aware of the discrepency. The form is out of date and was scheduled to be updated, but the whole way they sign people up is about to be re-done anyway, so it will get fixed probably as part of that re-work.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Talking of hopeless adventures... I am sure that anyone who really DOES care and who has actually TRIED to do something about the Somalias of this world will tell you that there is nothing quite so hopeless.
Talking as someone from a neighbor state to Zimbabwe, I would say that the best thing about their elections was the simple fact that Zimbabwe is doing something about Zimbabwe's problems. At the end of the day, that is what it takes.
So forgive me if I don't feel too guilty about my PIII and hot and cold running water. The sum total of my *good* deeds are paying my taxes, the odd buck to a beggar and communicating some of those around me.
Every person who reads this website is part of the elite. We are all in the top 5%. Enjoy it.
Myth. - Raise a glass to Bacchus, your true god.
One Apple hardware design I find absolutely awful is the trackpad on the laptops, and there is nothing one can do about that. It would be great if they offered a choice of trackball, trackpad, and trackpoint.
Temporarily, I signed up with the only other Linux-friendly ISP (Basic PPP dialup) that I know of: Earthlink.
Any other PPP-dialup freebees out there that I don't know about???
---
IMHO, of course.
May the SOURCE be with you.
hear me out here: Another principle is that the more advanced a social structure gets, the more able it is to kill in larger numbers. Humans now have nuclear weapons, we are currently capable of wiping out most every organism on the planet aside from cocroaches and 'nsnyc.
what this leads to is the "bigger trigger" effect. A friend of mine once said "there is no learning curve with nuclear weapons" - and he was right. Perhaps when the US was the only country in the world with the bomb, we knew we could detonoate it without fear of retaliation. However, i'd personally like to see what happened if we decided to return to Hiroshima or Nagasaki for a second honeymoon. Kabloom, the population of the earth goes from ~6billion to 372,000 in a matter of a day or two.
It can be inferred that another race of beings with technology that, to us, is indistinguishable from magic (figuratively speaking) Would have either A)Learned this lesson early or B)Killed themselves. Why? Because any race of beings that is capable of interstellar travel, perhaps harnessing wormholes, etc. has probably got a "bigger trigger."
That's why i think it's almost a complete certainty that a race of beings visiting us from a galaxy millions of light years away is either going to be super nice, or dead.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
No, because the primary purpose of SETI is to advance scientific knowledge, it's not *simply* to find ET, if it was then it would almost certainly fail; because any alien culture sufficiently advanced/developed to create intelligent signals, would probably encrypt them. Therefore ET's call home would indistinguishable from white noise.
Here in the netherlands, we have lots of free internet providers, tons of them (I think there must be 15+ of them, and it's a small country), and no ads!, no properiety dialers, just ppp and pap.
However, in the netherlands, we have to pay for our local calls, no matter if it's a paid-for or free internet provider.
The free internet providers have a deal with the telco and get a percentage of the telephone calls they generate.
allthough I'd love to have free local calls and a paid-for internet provider, this has really opened up the internet for a lot of users. and a recent survey even showed the free internet providers have a better product (speed etc) then the paid-for internet providers.
---
Specifically, what kinds of patterns? If they're looking for most types of non-random signals that you'd find on a digital file, I'm not optimistic. At least one other person here's already pointed out that compressed (or even encrypted) data should look like random noise. And it will all be compressed digital data; the analog period of our civilization may look long from our perspective, but it's already coming to an end.
I'd be hunting for something that would look superficially like random noise, but which can be demodulated and fitted to some block error correction code or another. Even our hard media like CDs (and especially CD-ROMs), hard drives, etc, are all using ECC to prevent byte errors; transmitting digital data across even interplanetary distances makes ECC coding a must.
And error correction encodings aren't like a random file format; they're designed by mathematical principles to correct as many errors as possible given the number of data words and parity words. Of course, those numbers (as well as the number of bits in a word) are open to variation, and there's more than one block encoding algorithm out there, but what I'm saying is there's a limited number of encodings that should be checked; it's not an intractable task.
Of course, if we actually want to pick up interstellar transmissions, we need to be searching not just for error correcting codes, but for wavelengths much longer than anything we currently receive; a space faring civilization would probably have an antenna hundreds or thousands of km long in each stellar system, transmitting in wavelengths designed to be recieved by similar systems...
Just wanted to throw my two cents worth in on this point. I work for one of the major free ISP's in Europe. Even though our official reasons for not supporting linux are lame, the real reason (directly from our CTO and I was involved in the decision) is that linux users are too smart and no matter what we do, they will figure out a way around whatever ad showing program we develop. Plus there is the fact that so many linux users never even start up X. How are we supposed to show ads in the console?
Apparently the fix for the DRAM problem has to do with how the unit refreshes itself while off.
The update from handspring states that "depending on individual usage, the patch may impact battery life. But how much exactly?
There's a thread here on Deja with details that somebody reached by working from the specs on the particular RAM used in the Palms and Visors. His results are a doubling of power drain while the unit is turned off.
Here's to hoping he's wrong.
What makes SETI think that any technological civilization will use radio for very long? Or at least plain radio. I wonder if they can detect encrypted radio signals, or some sort of tunneling microwaves that go faster than light like has been described on slashdot? I mean, what's a few hundred years of radio use compared to the thousands of years that a civilization may exist?
I just read this in Scientific American: after the conquistadors colonized Florida, and converted/enslaved local indians, said indians started suffering from various nutrition problems caused by their forced change of diet, from a mostly proteinic diet (hunting, sea products) to a vegetarian diet (mostly corn). In particular, their ancestors used to have fairly good teeth, but they started having rotten teeth because they would'nt eat meat that would counteract bacterias in their mouth.
SO SHUT UP! YOU EVIL CONQUISTADOR!
Should we really be mouring the death of freeweb? I mean, I used it for a very brief time on my Linux machine and was very dissatisfied with it. Was it just my area or did anyone else have about a 1 outta 10 chance of actually connecting when you dialed up and didnt get a busy signal? Also the stupid banners ate up so much memory and time. Maybe it was just my crappy connection, but I would imagine it was a service to us Linux users for them to stop. Who knows? Another, better pro-Linux service might be compelled to take form seing as though there is nothing out there(more market).
"The 85 I fear they don't got a clue."
"Lots of people think that SETI is a hopeless adventure, and mostly a waste of time and processing cycles. [including many who read yesterday about the "SETI-on-a-board product" ;) -- t]
As opposed to what? All those processing cycles spent on something useful like... Screen savers?
Sorry, couldn't resist :-)
Poll: what did you find most interesting of the recent Slashdot coverage?
(Guide to Blind Moderators: in case you haven't noticed, the last two items cover two of the recent polls and the other items are parallel to the summary in this article...)
Poll Mastah