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."
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
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 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?
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?
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.
--
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!
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?
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.
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?
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...
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?