"Even though it took an embarrassingly long time Microsoft has finally gotten a handle on viruses/spyware etc. to the point where no one is running screaming from their platform anymore."
When did this happen? Viruses/spyware was one of the largest stimuli for me to finally suck it up and emigrate for good (I was under no circumstances going to reinstall XP or buy Vista). And I'm not alone. Now I've found that Ubuntu does everything I want it to do, my friends will be getting a taste too.
It would not surprise me in the slightest if we were to see Linux achieve double digit market penetration (i.e. 10%) within 2 years. It's kind of like being one of the first kids to play multiplayer Doom and then Quake. You think to yourself "Damn! This is fun! I wonder why everyone else isn't doing this?" And soon enough (given several years), everyone IS doing it. It spreads from person to person virally.
The phenomenon itself parallels atomic physics; as soon as you have on average every split atom triggering another atom to split, you get a chain reaction. This is the same with people and ideas, software (or human diseases). It's just that the chain reaction aspect seems less obvious to us because of the time scale. It might be 2 months before I get around to install Ubuntu on a friend's machine, whereas a neutron emitted from a nucleus will strike another atom on the other side of the bomb in much, much less than a second.
Ubuntu is mostly there. It is there enough that I believe if I installed it myself on a poweruser friend's computer, helped sort out some driver issues, he'd be able to take it from there with the occasional internet search. And it is better than MS in a lot of important areas: stability, security, efficiency (in Watts), ease of installing new software (Synaptic). Not having to worry about spyware or viruses is HUGE. And it's free, by emigrating you've permanently opted out of the eternal upgrade for $$$ cycle, along with acquiring a mental Unix toolkit that will enable further migrations if necessary (e.g. to BSD or other free ixes).
And it is the power users who are critical to this chain reaction. It's not grandma using mail and web who will be installing it on friend's computers. It is the power user. So by all means, get your grandma and girlfriend using it, but if you really care about adoption rates, find another power user and guide them through an installation. Note that something like Ubuntu is gold to a power user (someone who is doing free tech support for friends and family) because it has the potential of being much lower in maintenance. No finding new spyware removers, reinstalling, or any of that. Convert, done.
After that, it's just a matter of time before you have hardware manufacturers and gaming companies coming over too. Then it's over. Within a year you'll get everything of note imported or created. Be it photoshop or office, the bugs will be ironed out extremely quickly. Word will become like Wordperfect used to be. There will still be a few people whining "But word used to work so much better!", but they will be ignored.
I'm amazed at how a person can take ten paragraphs to say essentially nothing but communicate a dreary pall of self-loathing. I shouldn't be; that is the primary skill that seems to be have been taught in most of the humanities and social sciences for the last half century.
That you (and Stross) can't seem to understand the genetic drive to colonize does nothing to absolve away its existence. If we understand that man as an instance of his genetic code, then such a drive makes perfect sense. It's not as if this is a new concept; The Selfish Gene was published in 1976.
And this urge to colonize is truly something that transcends race and ethnicity, simply because of the magnitude of such a task. You have everyone contributing in some way, from Jules Verne (French) to Von Braun (German), to Asimov (Jewish). Although I can't name individuals off the top of my head, I do know that the Japanese, Chinese and Indians all have active space programs.
I'd be glad if any of mankind's nations managed to form a self-sufficient outpost somewhere else in our solar system. I'd be ecstatic if they made an attempt to colonize a distant star system, even if we'd never hear back from them. And they can wave their flag proudly if they so desire. Good for them, and us.
Is the 640k analogy fair? I don't know. What I do know is that when most of the world's geniuses are working feverishly on a problem with a massive budget, they often find ways to do things. Often because you have n different problems in order to meet your goal, and this is the only chance you'd get where you have the number of world experts who can communicate and say "Well, I know how to do 'a', if you can do 'b', then do you have an idea how to implement 'c'? Well, it was classified, but I guess now we can access that if it will help the mission. Good, any ideas on 'd'?... Well, we could solve that with brute force, but that would take roughly 200 billion dollars. Well, if that's the only way, it's on the table. What else do we need to do?" etc.
You raise some very good points. Of course, the built in assumption with the thousand year voyage scenario is that there will be a thousand years of technological progress at exponential rates, with no dark ages for any possible reason (asteroid, nuclear war, epidemic, etc). And also that spacefaring technology won't hit a wall like economical jet transport speeds did. Maybe there are physical limits that a multi-trillion dollar effort 300 years from now will hit just the same as if they had started today.
The point being that it is impossible to really know unless you have tried.
Is it worth it? Well, it would be better than a trillion dollar Iraq excursion. Is it possible? I can't say for certain, but it's certainly more noble than "bringing democracy to the Middle East" or "creating a terrorist honeypot" or "finding WMD" or whatever the excuse du jour is.
"yet no one is asking whether it is even physically possible. It's not."
Who are you to declare that interstellar travel is impossible? I could accept an "agnostic" or "weak atheist" type position, but to boldly declare that based on 2007 technology we will never colonize space is myopic. I'd use the example of the US Patent clerk closing the office because everything had already been invented, but that's a myth, along with Bill Gates and "640k ought to be enough for anyone". http://inventors.about.com/library/lessons/bl_appe ndix5.htm
I'm skeptical of Kurzweilists who see never-ending exponential curves and don't bear in mind that past performance is no guarantee of future results. But counting us out is premature. I read your prior post. Your arguments are 1) We can't construct a biosphere. 2) A journey to the nearest star would take 40k years WITH CURRENT TECHNOLOGY, and energy sources would burn out.
I'm not sure if you understand the huge and latent capability humanity has. If you want to get an idea, compare the state of technology at 1939 with that of 1945. Jets, radar, impossible codes cracked, atomic bombs developed, tested, dropped. You are saying that a $200 million failed experiment and our current hundredth-assed effort at space exploration is all we are capable of, all we have in the tank.
"If we were actually going to do that cool stuff in a transparent way, I'd be all for it. But we're not. We're going to lob satellites into orbit to support networked weapons systems, and to spy on people, and all the rest."
That stuff is already there and will be funded no matter who is in charge. So that argument is a red herring.
I'm naive enough to think that if we push for space exploration hard enough, it might just happen. At the very least, it's in our nature to explore and to colonize.
"I oppose the RIAA on privacy grounds, and because the logic used (downloading is NOT piracy, if you own it, I believe), but if peoples attitudes really now is that they should pirate rather than buy, then I think the RIAA is between a rock and a hard place, and they can't simply ignore that."
They can cry me a river. I have as much sorrow for the RIAA as I have sorrow for the Catholic Church's monopoly on bible printing being broken by new technology. And sure, the Church fought that as well. They couldn't simply ignore it.
So next time when you are in a hotel room, open up the drawer next to the bed, pull out the free Gideons and ponder the fate of the RIAA.
It's not just in the top thousand OSS projects. It's not only in the top hundred. It's not even just in the top ten OSS projects. It's in the TOP FIVE! Not only does it have ls, cat, grep and sed, if you order within the next 5 minutes we'll even throw in openssh free!
"The US dollar is unique amongst currencies as it is close to being a global currency."
Yes, this is worthy of discussion. Other governments are always more skeptical than J Random Citizen. And Russia doesn't care much if it can pay US taxes. Thus, a global (paper or digital) currency will be backed by either gold or whatever is the most critical commodity of the day. Gold, for a confluence of reasons (divisible, fungible, rare, unique color, nearly impossible to destroy, impossible to counterfeit economically, easy to test) makes a good world currency.
The US dollar is no longer backed by gold, but it is backed by oil. Even though the US dollar has been massively inflated over the years, so long as the world's oil changes hands at the supply for US dollars, the US dollars have value.
In a particular country, if you don't pay tax, you go to jail. In (most of) the world at large, if you don't buy crude oil, your economy stops functioning.
"After 10 years of driving an Open I am now driving a Nissan. I am pleasing with it, but I be damned if i care if Nissan is worldwide being adopted as the cure of cancer or not. I just drive my damn Nissan and don't care if my neighbor drive a Volvo or hate japanese cars...."
I suppose you are fine with being locked into a never ending upgrade cycle with a car that has plastic bits that will break in 10 years time, has a worse drag coefficient than some production cars invented in the 1920s and 1930s because stylistic obsolescence dictates that cars can't look the same every year, uses more fuel than necessary as a result, and as an industry destroys competing models such as electric cars that would be cheaper for you but less profitable for them.
Linux/BSD is not the equivalent of just another Volvo or Toyota. It's like thousands of mechanical engineers spent their spare time improving a free design that would fix all of the above problems, that could somehow be manufactured for free.
"(Vista) has been driving people away from Windows..."
Absolutely. And the beauty is that this is an unintended consequence of their business model. New version, new quirks to get used to, all because MS needs the regular revenue stream.
It's that and malware rendering systems slow, difficult to use and untrustworthy.
The Windows market share is in dynamic equilibrium. There are a reasonable number of people who leave, and similar numbers coming back. The MS business model in large part causes the first scenario. Whether their former users return from a flirtation with another OS is a function of that OS's utility compared to MS.
I've attempted to make the leap 5 times or so in the last 10 years. I switched again a few weeks back. It's only now that I'm finding linux to be livable. It's taken quite a bit of work to get it to that point, but so does getting a vanilla windows install to where I want it.
"I'd love to know where all these managers who get taken out for fancy lunches are exactly because I've never seen any real evidence for it in 5 years - and 2 of those as a manager."
In many countries the kickback is part and parcel of doing business. So far in a similar time period to yours, I've seen employees bribed, managers contracting or employing relatives for expensive and unnecessary services, and managers caught making sweetheart deals.
I'm guessing you have no ownership in the company you work for, or you haven't climbed the rungs high enough to see the behavior. The first one makes you attentive, the second one gives you exposure.
"There should be some chemicals making the jump from amino acids to self replicators right now in some slime pond somewhere."
They also have to out-compete the already highly competitive life forms that natural selection has manufactured into being. Not to mention find some spare resources to do it with that are not already part of an existing lifeform.
"My point is simple. We assume any civ out there is attempting to get our attention. If they developed like ours, even starting the same day, we won't see them at all, UNLESS they are at the right distance. Otherwise, we won't see their signals, as it already passed us by, or the leading edge hasn't hit us yet."
Yes, this is a very good point. It's a bit like believing that Bill Gates is the richest man in the world, just because he happens to have the highest wealth that can be easily calculated by a journalist. Visible wealth and power creates both envy... and a target.
A species advanced enough to be sending out probes is also advanced enough to calculate the likely consequences of interfering with other planets. Imagine that they could send out a probe to earth, or even a scouting party. They risk several things.
Focusing preservation instincts from family and race, to species, genus, etc. Think of every kid's cartoon where they have that one episode where the two warring parties (autobots, deceptacons; he-man and skeletor) face an existential threat from a more powerful foe and work together to defeat it. Imagine all the funds of the Iraq war (and much, much more - think Medicare, social security, SUV production, etc) going towards Manhattan type projects - fusion, NASA, along with the increase in expendability of life. Guaranteed, you'd be surprised at the outcomes.
To consider it another way, it would be like the difference in productivity in your average student at the start of the semester and finals week.
Second, you have to consider the risk the aliens have in us reverse engineering their technology.
And third, if they make it obvious which planet they come from they also give us a destination to deliver the bombs to.
So it makes a good deal of sense that an alien race of sufficient intelligence to explore the galaxy (or universe) is also sufficiently discreet to avoid kicking over a hornet's nest.
"Thank you for making my point... they don't stop in the Amazonian jungle to meet the natives because they go to the "interesting" places."
Even so, what are the chances that those remote Amazonian tribes have never witnessed an aircraft or spy satellite flying overhead, or heard the rumble of an outboard motor as a boat travels up a nearby river? Or for that matter, have met their neighboring tribe?
A search in breadth is natural for any intelligent, expansionistic species. This search will often be noticed by less expansionistic species.
"It's quite possible that they're just waiting for us to stop shooting each other, and act like a single species for once. Which is when we'll be allowed to make contact."
The moment we start to act in this united and focused fashion is the moment we start being a threat. Until then, the greatest risk we'd pose to them would come from our single celled organisms.
Ah, the internet... where men are men, women are men, children are FBI agents and rich, successful, good looking guys with gorgeous wives spend their free time trolling on slashdot.
'Linux has to do more than just be as good as Windows once it's installed. It has to actively capture market share. To do that, the migration process must be no more complicated than a single click:"Ubuntu has detected Windows XP installed on this system. Do you want to install a Dual Boot System?" Yes. Click. Done. If it's not as easy as that, guess what? No market share for you. Not yours.'
That's setting the bar ridiculously high if capturing market share is all that's required. For a Windows power user, or Admin, Ubuntu as it currently stands is easy. And for the regular users, it is adequate if they can either buy a new computer with Ubuntu or they have a skilled friend.
Instead, there are two important metrics that will determine whether or not Ubuntu (or anything else) starts to take market share.
1) The rate of defection of Windows users to non-MS operating systems. 2) The rate of failed defections.
People leave MS for a variety of reasons. Some reasons include price, vendor lock in, dislike of MS business practices, limitations of MS operating systems in their area of interest, obsolescence of XP (and forced "upgrade" to Vista and associated drop in productivity as new methods are learned), idealogical reasons for open source, etc.
This rate is very likely to be a lot higher than the actual loss of MS market share to date would indicate. And the reason for that is because the rate of failed defections (#2) has been very high. It's a bit like a loser and an attractive girl stuck on a desert island. He thinks she's faithful, despite her markedly increased interest in boat building, long distance swimming and arranging every stone on the island to form a big "SOS". As soon as a boat comes anywhere near the island, she defects for good.
A drop in the rate of failed defections will spell disaster for MS. It's typically power users, admins, programmers and smart kids who will defect. If they stay in linux land, all sorts of wondrous network effects start happening. These people write howtos for others to lower the IQ bar. Others write GUI frontends to speed the process further. Others include these gui frontends in the default install. Many of these people will install some sort of non-MS on a friend's computer.
As the rate of failed defections reaches rock bottom, the rate of defection starts to rise, major PC manufacturers start shipping with default non-MS OS... and you can do the math from there.
There are numerous causes. Election time spans, political lifespans, the compound interest equation (time value of money, NPV, IRR etc). There is also mass immigration, ethnic cleansing and wealth redistribution to take into account. Is it rational of the conch to spend its entire life building a home for the hermit crab?
Yep. It is as if as a society we had suddenly decided that forks were just as good a cutting tool as a knife, encouraging every fork to be used as such, cherry picking history for tales of forks with exceptionally sharp edges and teaching every child that if only everyone used the fork as their primary cutting implement, it would clearly be recognized as the equal to the knife. Indeed, it would be misfurcanistic to even suggest otherwise.
But fortunately, in the last 50 years we have progressed beyond such backward ways, showing that the last 2000 years of the oppression of the fork to be extremely misguided. Of course, we must be ever on our guard for those sneering bigots who would exploit even the sharpest edged fork for the dull and uninspired task of spearing food, while it is ever yearning to cut! Evil must be confronted; wherever you see utensilist behavior you must have the courage to stand up and say "This... is WRONG!"
Slashdot Mirror
"Even though it took an embarrassingly long time Microsoft has finally gotten a handle on viruses/spyware etc. to the point where no one is running screaming from their platform anymore."
When did this happen? Viruses/spyware was one of the largest stimuli for me to finally suck it up and emigrate for good (I was under no circumstances going to reinstall XP or buy Vista). And I'm not alone. Now I've found that Ubuntu does everything I want it to do, my friends will be getting a taste too.
It would not surprise me in the slightest if we were to see Linux achieve double digit market penetration (i.e. 10%) within 2 years. It's kind of like being one of the first kids to play multiplayer Doom and then Quake. You think to yourself "Damn! This is fun! I wonder why everyone else isn't doing this?" And soon enough (given several years), everyone IS doing it. It spreads from person to person virally.
The phenomenon itself parallels atomic physics; as soon as you have on average every split atom triggering another atom to split, you get a chain reaction. This is the same with people and ideas, software (or human diseases). It's just that the chain reaction aspect seems less obvious to us because of the time scale. It might be 2 months before I get around to install Ubuntu on a friend's machine, whereas a neutron emitted from a nucleus will strike another atom on the other side of the bomb in much, much less than a second.
Ubuntu is mostly there. It is there enough that I believe if I installed it myself on a poweruser friend's computer, helped sort out some driver issues, he'd be able to take it from there with the occasional internet search. And it is better than MS in a lot of important areas: stability, security, efficiency (in Watts), ease of installing new software (Synaptic). Not having to worry about spyware or viruses is HUGE. And it's free, by emigrating you've permanently opted out of the eternal upgrade for $$$ cycle, along with acquiring a mental Unix toolkit that will enable further migrations if necessary (e.g. to BSD or other free ixes).
And it is the power users who are critical to this chain reaction. It's not grandma using mail and web who will be installing it on friend's computers. It is the power user. So by all means, get your grandma and girlfriend using it, but if you really care about adoption rates, find another power user and guide them through an installation. Note that something like Ubuntu is gold to a power user (someone who is doing free tech support for friends and family) because it has the potential of being much lower in maintenance. No finding new spyware removers, reinstalling, or any of that. Convert, done.
After that, it's just a matter of time before you have hardware manufacturers and gaming companies coming over too. Then it's over. Within a year you'll get everything of note imported or created. Be it photoshop or office, the bugs will be ironed out extremely quickly. Word will become like Wordperfect used to be. There will still be a few people whining "But word used to work so much better!", but they will be ignored.
"If open source is so great it should stand on its own merits, not need some political figures shoving its virtues down our throats."
If closed source is so great, why does Microsoft spend money on PR and advertising?
I'm amazed at how a person can take ten paragraphs to say essentially nothing but communicate a dreary pall of self-loathing. I shouldn't be; that is the primary skill that seems to be have been taught in most of the humanities and social sciences for the last half century.
That you (and Stross) can't seem to understand the genetic drive to colonize does nothing to absolve away its existence. If we understand that man as an instance of his genetic code, then such a drive makes perfect sense. It's not as if this is a new concept; The Selfish Gene was published in 1976.
And this urge to colonize is truly something that transcends race and ethnicity, simply because of the magnitude of such a task. You have everyone contributing in some way, from Jules Verne (French) to Von Braun (German), to Asimov (Jewish). Although I can't name individuals off the top of my head, I do know that the Japanese, Chinese and Indians all have active space programs.
I'd be glad if any of mankind's nations managed to form a self-sufficient outpost somewhere else in our solar system. I'd be ecstatic if they made an attempt to colonize a distant star system, even if we'd never hear back from them. And they can wave their flag proudly if they so desire. Good for them, and us.
Is the 640k analogy fair? I don't know. What I do know is that when most of the world's geniuses are working feverishly on a problem with a massive budget, they often find ways to do things. Often because you have n different problems in order to meet your goal, and this is the only chance you'd get where you have the number of world experts who can communicate and say "Well, I know how to do 'a', if you can do 'b', then do you have an idea how to implement 'c'? Well, it was classified, but I guess now we can access that if it will help the mission. Good, any ideas on 'd'?... Well, we could solve that with brute force, but that would take roughly 200 billion dollars. Well, if that's the only way, it's on the table. What else do we need to do?" etc.
You raise some very good points. Of course, the built in assumption with the thousand year voyage scenario is that there will be a thousand years of technological progress at exponential rates, with no dark ages for any possible reason (asteroid, nuclear war, epidemic, etc). And also that spacefaring technology won't hit a wall like economical jet transport speeds did. Maybe there are physical limits that a multi-trillion dollar effort 300 years from now will hit just the same as if they had started today.
The point being that it is impossible to really know unless you have tried.
Is it worth it? Well, it would be better than a trillion dollar Iraq excursion. Is it possible? I can't say for certain, but it's certainly more noble than "bringing democracy to the Middle East" or "creating a terrorist honeypot" or "finding WMD" or whatever the excuse du jour is.
"yet no one is asking whether it is even physically possible. It's not."
e ndix5.htm
Who are you to declare that interstellar travel is impossible? I could accept an "agnostic" or "weak atheist" type position, but to boldly declare that based on 2007 technology we will never colonize space is myopic. I'd use the example of the US Patent clerk closing the office because everything had already been invented, but that's a myth, along with Bill Gates and "640k ought to be enough for anyone". http://inventors.about.com/library/lessons/bl_app
I'm skeptical of Kurzweilists who see never-ending exponential curves and don't bear in mind that past performance is no guarantee of future results. But counting us out is premature. I read your prior post. Your arguments are
1) We can't construct a biosphere.
2) A journey to the nearest star would take 40k years WITH CURRENT TECHNOLOGY, and energy sources would burn out.
I'm not sure if you understand the huge and latent capability humanity has. If you want to get an idea, compare the state of technology at 1939 with that of 1945. Jets, radar, impossible codes cracked, atomic bombs developed, tested, dropped. You are saying that a $200 million failed experiment and our current hundredth-assed effort at space exploration is all we are capable of, all we have in the tank.
"If we were actually going to do that cool stuff in a transparent way, I'd be all for it. But we're not. We're going to lob satellites into orbit to support networked weapons systems, and to spy on people, and all the rest."
That stuff is already there and will be funded no matter who is in charge. So that argument is a red herring.
I'm naive enough to think that if we push for space exploration hard enough, it might just happen. At the very least, it's in our nature to explore and to colonize.
"I oppose the RIAA on privacy grounds, and because the logic used (downloading is NOT piracy, if you own it, I believe), but if peoples attitudes really now is that they should pirate rather than buy, then I think the RIAA is between a rock and a hard place, and they can't simply ignore that."
They can cry me a river. I have as much sorrow for the RIAA as I have sorrow for the Catholic Church's monopoly on bible printing being broken by new technology. And sure, the Church fought that as well. They couldn't simply ignore it.
So next time when you are in a hotel room, open up the drawer next to the bed, pull out the free Gideons and ponder the fate of the RIAA.
You ruined his build up!
It's not just in the top thousand OSS projects. It's not only in the top hundred. It's not even just in the top ten OSS projects. It's in the TOP FIVE! Not only does it have ls, cat, grep and sed, if you order within the next 5 minutes we'll even throw in openssh free!
"The US dollar is unique amongst currencies as it is close to being a global currency."
Yes, this is worthy of discussion. Other governments are always more skeptical than J Random Citizen. And Russia doesn't care much if it can pay US taxes. Thus, a global (paper or digital) currency will be backed by either gold or whatever is the most critical commodity of the day. Gold, for a confluence of reasons (divisible, fungible, rare, unique color, nearly impossible to destroy, impossible to counterfeit economically, easy to test) makes a good world currency.
The US dollar is no longer backed by gold, but it is backed by oil. Even though the US dollar has been massively inflated over the years, so long as the world's oil changes hands at the supply for US dollars, the US dollars have value.
In a particular country, if you don't pay tax, you go to jail. In (most of) the world at large, if you don't buy crude oil, your economy stops functioning.
Looks like the last chink in the magical "Do No Evil" marketing armor has been patched. Breathe easy, sheeple!
Meh. Wake me when my ubuntu install stops working.
"After 10 years of driving an Open I am now driving a Nissan. I am pleasing with it, but I be damned if i care if Nissan is worldwide being adopted as the cure of cancer or not. I just drive my damn Nissan and don't care if my neighbor drive a Volvo or hate japanese cars...."
I suppose you are fine with being locked into a never ending upgrade cycle with a car that has plastic bits that will break in 10 years time, has a worse drag coefficient than some production cars invented in the 1920s and 1930s because stylistic obsolescence dictates that cars can't look the same every year, uses more fuel than necessary as a result, and as an industry destroys competing models such as electric cars that would be cheaper for you but less profitable for them.
Linux/BSD is not the equivalent of just another Volvo or Toyota. It's like thousands of mechanical engineers spent their spare time improving a free design that would fix all of the above problems, that could somehow be manufactured for free.
"(Vista) has been driving people away from Windows..."
Absolutely. And the beauty is that this is an unintended consequence of their business model. New version, new quirks to get used to, all because MS needs the regular revenue stream.
It's that and malware rendering systems slow, difficult to use and untrustworthy.
The Windows market share is in dynamic equilibrium. There are a reasonable number of people who leave, and similar numbers coming back. The MS business model in large part causes the first scenario. Whether their former users return from a flirtation with another OS is a function of that OS's utility compared to MS.
I've attempted to make the leap 5 times or so in the last 10 years. I switched again a few weeks back. It's only now that I'm finding linux to be livable. It's taken quite a bit of work to get it to that point, but so does getting a vanilla windows install to where I want it.
"I'd love to know where all these managers who get taken out for fancy lunches are exactly because I've never seen any real evidence for it in 5 years - and 2 of those as a manager."
In many countries the kickback is part and parcel of doing business. So far in a similar time period to yours, I've seen employees bribed, managers contracting or employing relatives for expensive and unnecessary services, and managers caught making sweetheart deals.
I'm guessing you have no ownership in the company you work for, or you haven't climbed the rungs high enough to see the behavior. The first one makes you attentive, the second one gives you exposure.
"There should be some chemicals making the jump from amino acids to self replicators right now in some slime pond somewhere."
They also have to out-compete the already highly competitive life forms that natural selection has manufactured into being. Not to mention find some spare resources to do it with that are not already part of an existing lifeform.
"My point is simple. We assume any civ out there is attempting to get our attention. If they developed like ours, even starting the same day, we won't see them at all, UNLESS they are at the right distance. Otherwise, we won't see their signals, as it already passed us by, or the leading edge hasn't hit us yet."
Yes, this is a very good point. It's a bit like believing that Bill Gates is the richest man in the world, just because he happens to have the highest wealth that can be easily calculated by a journalist. Visible wealth and power creates both envy... and a target.
A species advanced enough to be sending out probes is also advanced enough to calculate the likely consequences of interfering with other planets. Imagine that they could send out a probe to earth, or even a scouting party. They risk several things.
Focusing preservation instincts from family and race, to species, genus, etc. Think of every kid's cartoon where they have that one episode where the two warring parties (autobots, deceptacons; he-man and skeletor) face an existential threat from a more powerful foe and work together to defeat it. Imagine all the funds of the Iraq war (and much, much more - think Medicare, social security, SUV production, etc) going towards Manhattan type projects - fusion, NASA, along with the increase in expendability of life. Guaranteed, you'd be surprised at the outcomes.
To consider it another way, it would be like the difference in productivity in your average student at the start of the semester and finals week.
Second, you have to consider the risk the aliens have in us reverse engineering their technology.
And third, if they make it obvious which planet they come from they also give us a destination to deliver the bombs to.
So it makes a good deal of sense that an alien race of sufficient intelligence to explore the galaxy (or universe) is also sufficiently discreet to avoid kicking over a hornet's nest.
"Thank you for making my point... they don't stop in the Amazonian jungle to meet the natives because they go to the "interesting" places."
Even so, what are the chances that those remote Amazonian tribes have never witnessed an aircraft or spy satellite flying overhead, or heard the rumble of an outboard motor as a boat travels up a nearby river? Or for that matter, have met their neighboring tribe?
A search in breadth is natural for any intelligent, expansionistic species. This search will often be noticed by less expansionistic species.
"It's quite possible that they're just waiting for us to stop shooting each other, and act like a single species for once. Which is when we'll be allowed to make contact."
The moment we start to act in this united and focused fashion is the moment we start being a threat. Until then, the greatest risk we'd pose to them would come from our single celled organisms.
That's an excellent idea. Teach a man to fish...
Ah, the internet... where men are men, women are men, children are FBI agents and rich, successful, good looking guys with gorgeous wives spend their free time trolling on slashdot.
'Linux has to do more than just be as good as Windows once it's installed. It has to actively capture market share. To do that, the migration process must be no more complicated than a single click:"Ubuntu has detected Windows XP installed on this system. Do you want to install a Dual Boot System?" Yes. Click. Done. If it's not as easy as that, guess what? No market share for you. Not yours.'
That's setting the bar ridiculously high if capturing market share is all that's required. For a Windows power user, or Admin, Ubuntu as it currently stands is easy. And for the regular users, it is adequate if they can either buy a new computer with Ubuntu or they have a skilled friend.
Instead, there are two important metrics that will determine whether or not Ubuntu (or anything else) starts to take market share.
1) The rate of defection of Windows users to non-MS operating systems.
2) The rate of failed defections.
People leave MS for a variety of reasons. Some reasons include price, vendor lock in, dislike of MS business practices, limitations of MS operating systems in their area of interest, obsolescence of XP (and forced "upgrade" to Vista and associated drop in productivity as new methods are learned), idealogical reasons for open source, etc.
This rate is very likely to be a lot higher than the actual loss of MS market share to date would indicate. And the reason for that is because the rate of failed defections (#2) has been very high. It's a bit like a loser and an attractive girl stuck on a desert island. He thinks she's faithful, despite her markedly increased interest in boat building, long distance swimming and arranging every stone on the island to form a big "SOS". As soon as a boat comes anywhere near the island, she defects for good.
A drop in the rate of failed defections will spell disaster for MS. It's typically power users, admins, programmers and smart kids who will defect. If they stay in linux land, all sorts of wondrous network effects start happening. These people write howtos for others to lower the IQ bar. Others write GUI frontends to speed the process further. Others include these gui frontends in the default install. Many of these people will install some sort of non-MS on a friend's computer.
As the rate of failed defections reaches rock bottom, the rate of defection starts to rise, major PC manufacturers start shipping with default non-MS OS... and you can do the math from there.
There are numerous causes. Election time spans, political lifespans, the compound interest equation (time value of money, NPV, IRR etc). There is also mass immigration, ethnic cleansing and wealth redistribution to take into account. Is it rational of the conch to spend its entire life building a home for the hermit crab?
Yep. It is as if as a society we had suddenly decided that forks were just as good a cutting tool as a knife, encouraging every fork to be used as such, cherry picking history for tales of forks with exceptionally sharp edges and teaching every child that if only everyone used the fork as their primary cutting implement, it would clearly be recognized as the equal to the knife. Indeed, it would be misfurcanistic to even suggest otherwise.
But fortunately, in the last 50 years we have progressed beyond such backward ways, showing that the last 2000 years of the oppression of the fork to be extremely misguided. Of course, we must be ever on our guard for those sneering bigots who would exploit even the sharpest edged fork for the dull and uninspired task of spearing food, while it is ever yearning to cut! Evil must be confronted; wherever you see utensilist behavior you must have the courage to stand up and say "This... is WRONG!"
I think that's the funniest thing I've read on slashdot. Thank you.