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.
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?
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...
...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"?
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.
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.
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
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).
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?
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?
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.
Slashdot seems to forget there is a world outside of the US.
Abashed the Devil stood,
And felt how awful goodness is
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.
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.
[
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'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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
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 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
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.
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?
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?
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]
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.
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.
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?
Read the very articles which you are commenting on. The problem is in how the DRAM works. DRAM must be refreshed to keep its contents. In this case, the DRAM fails if refreshed in one fashion versus another. The software patch changes the way the DRAM is refreshed so that the contents are not corrupted. That is how a software patch can fix the hardware. You do NOT lose any memory, because indiviual bits are NOT remapped.
Instead of just posting for attention, why not read the articles which are referring to first?
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Read the articles again. They say that the affected memory is mapped as used by the patch, so it will indeed give you less than you paid for.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
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.
If you feel so strongly about it, how about giving up internet access and donating the few dollars that you gain to charity? Sheesh...
Relatively speaking? Compared to what?
The iMac was the top selling personal computer for a number of months, and is still holding its own.
Just because a single company doesn't put the dozens of companies supplying machines for the 'other' platform out of business does not mean they failed at anything. Apple has lots of cash, growing marketshare, a high stock price, and so on. By what measure do you consider Apple's marketing a failure? Seems like it has worked to me.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
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
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...
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!
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
"Advertising" is sometimes false.
SETI was chewing up 90% of the CPU (actually plural - there were four in the server).
The admins are at fault because:
1) The server and workstations in use did not belong to the admins or to the SETI project. They were bought and paid for by the company and its' stockholders and were bought for company business purposes.
2) The admins should have been spending their time on work-related activities and not on downloading and installing SETI on company workstations and servers (over 50 workstations, mind you). Running SETI was not why they were hired, nor did it have anything to do with the company.