TFA from Arstechnica says redtube is driven by advertising:
The undisputed evidence showed that Bright obtains most of the videos it shows on Redtube free of charge from advertisers who pay Bright to display their videos containing their ads. Fundamentally, there is no difference between Redtube and a radio station in the early 1900s that broadcasted records it obtained for free from a music store and, in return, told its listeners where the records could be purchased. (See www.oldradio.com/current/bc_spots.htm; last visited Dec. 7, 2010.) In both cases the broadcaster's purpose is not to destroy competition or a competitor but to attract patrons to its broadcast site where they will, hopefully, respond to its advertisers' messages
Well, my submission - which was just hurriedly copied and pasted from the first para. of the article - does say "Redtube.com". Umm, you mean that doesn't look like a url to you? I can't believe you can only point and click.
Solar power does not "generate" energy. Energy is liberated by conversion from mass through nuclear reactions in the Sun. Solar power collects and transforms radiant energy into heat and then into useful work, like burning something up.
Ummm. We don't have direct confirmation of the existence of any gravity waves yet, do we? So we don't know that these can be used for communication. Since in theory it takes massive energetic events to create gravity waves that could be detected at our scale these would be an expensive form of galactic scale communication.
I'm not saying it couldn't be the case or that there isn't another field that we don't know about that could be used for communication.
any interstellar craft is still on the highly speculative "if we get a fusion / anti-matter drive" level.
You mean 'based on our current physics', which we know is only a small part of the story of reality because of its critical fundamental problems in eg reconciling QM and Relativity or in, say, fully accounting for dark matter. So we know that there is a deeper physics, we just can't get hold of it yet. Who knows what technology that new physics will yield and what current precepts it will shatter.
Look how far physics and engineering have come in the last 100 years. We have accrued far more technology in that time than in the entire period from the dawn of humanity up to that point. I think it's not unreasonable to assume that a better physics exists and we will eventually find it.
Any alien civilization that has thousands or millions of years more scientific achievement than us will very likely have found this improved physics. Who knows what that might give them. It's naive to assume that an advanced civilization could not have cracked interstellar travel somehow.
This is why we have science fiction. Most technology has been imagined in some form before it was possible for it to exist. Much of it could not even be imagined beforehand. We need to use our imaginations when thinking about advanced aliens. Either: (a) they don't exist yet and we are the first; or (b) they are there but are only at about our level of development; or (c) they are hiding from us or haven't found us; or (d) any kind of interstellar travel is not practical and there just isn't any more powerful space technology to evolve.
Of these 4 options, I'd say (d) is the least likely based on our own astonishing development in the last 100 years.
Also: only a relatively tiny proportion of humanity actually cooperates to develop science and technology. The numbers required are not that large over a long period of time.
you can't achieve that type of technology if you're not a social species. If requires cooperation on a massive scale.
So we think, based on our limited "understanding" of potential alien life. What if the alien is not a society but a single massive intelligence or rogue societal element or pirate? Just because they/it have achieved cooperation does not mean they want to cooperate with us. We can't even cooperate with ourselves for God's sake.
As I've said elsewhere, chemical resources may be irrelevant. We have no way of knowing what aliens might value. Humans often assign value in illogical ways dues to cultural or historical factors. There is an overabundance of diamonds yet we place a high value of diamonds - in fact, we manipulate that value to keep it artificially high. We splatter paint on a canvas and sell it for $100m. We find a new drug in a rainforest and mass synthesize it. Humans trying to guess what might be interesting to far advanced beings is like an ant trying to understand what we do with that canvas or drug.
We don't know what power sources they might have evolved after millions more years of science than we have. It may not represent a large expenditure to them.
So we think. Based on our limited understanding of earth biology which may not extrapolate at all to beings based on some other biology altogether. The point is, we just don't know. So you want to bank the future of humanity on some educated guesses about alien life?
If we are going to assume they're cuddly then we must also assume they could be prone to the same evils as us. I'm imagining the worst case scenarios and in that I am quite consistent. That is how you assess how bad the risk might be. It's called risk analysis. If the consequences are severe enough - I'd call human annihilation potentially severe - then even an outside risk means we should not be yelling out heads off at alien civilizations.
Worst case scenario: (1) they have no equivalent of 'compassion' or 'empathy' towards humans; (2) they have far advanced space travel or weaponry making hostility possible; (3) we have something they have some use for; (4) they see us and come hither.
By contrast, people who insist on yelling "we're here!" are in effect taking the "oh, naw, it *has* to be like this" best case optimistic scenario: (1) they're cuddly beings who'll just love us to bits and who'll want to link cultures and sing Kumbaya and who have no rogue elements; (2) over some thousands or millions of years they have not cracked deep physics any better than we have [certainly unlikely] and are stuck with sublight travel or chemical propulsion; (3) there could be absolutely nothing we have that they are interested in; and (4) they've seen us anyway so we should beam them messages.
The problem is that the costs associated with shutting up are zero and the risks greatly reduced. The risk associated with sending up beacons and flags, however, could just mean the annihilation of humanity.
When dealing with the totally unknown, paranoia is justified. We might think that there are good justifications to extrapolate the evolution of compassion etc to alien societies *based on our studies of earth biology*. Let's assume that is correct.
The problem is, as I pointed out, good 'ol cuddly humanity's own horrific record of genocide, species annihilation and environmental degradation should give us pause. Slavery has existed throughout human history. We have been unsuccessful in stamping out genocide and torture and are unlikely to ever be at this rate.
So, even if we insist on using an earth/human model for aliens in this regard and claim that they must have evolved compassion, we also have to remember that the same logic implies they may have similar problems to us. Or that, when we make contact, we may be contacting a rogue or pirate element of an alien society that does not play by any rules. Just like our own rogue elements.
We can only speculate and cannot imagine with certainty how aliens might have evolved - in fact as you say we cannot imagine through other than the parochial lens of our earth consciousness and biology which could be drastically different to theirs. Even assuming they have compassion as we know it and are not so far advanced that we appear insignificant, like ants, we better hope that they are NOT like flawed humanity with our penchant for species annihilation and cruelty.
Ergo: sending messages is really, really stupid no matter how you look at it. We should shut up and keep listening.
A major usability fuck up is this: a collapsed thread only lists the number of hidden comments one level down. So it looks like no-one has replied to a reply. Big bad. I want to know where the replies are at all levels down or that there are more to look for.
I agree with Stephen Hawking. Blasting messages willy-nilly at possible alien civilizations is foolhardy in the extreme. I have taken the liberty of anticipating and responding to the usual criticisms of this risk management approach below.
We have absolutely no reason to assume that contact with an advanced alien intelligence will be beneficial or that such aliens will be benign. Human history has taught us that, in contact between civilizations where one is technologically advanced compared to the other, the less advanced civilization always comes off worse. Our cuddly CE3K fantasies are just anthropomorphic projections. We have no reason to assume that the contacted aliens will possess human traits like compassion or altruism - in any case, many humans suspend or don't exhibit these. Think wartime atrocities. And we have treated other species on our own planet appallingly. Why should aliens be any nicer than us? The old chestnut "oh but they wouldn't have survived technological adolescence without destroying themselves if they weren't cuddly and nice" is just bollocks and is another anthropomorphic projection.
"Oh but they can't visit us via interstellar travel because it's impractical and too slow". Only according to our limited physics, which can't even reconcile QM with Relativity yet. It's likely there is a better physics and we don't have it yet but they do. Who knows what technology that might allow. Even our own scifi has more imagination that this.
"And our planet/system has nothing they need. It's not economic for them". Another supposition based on - what, exactly? How do we know what they value or what power sources they have? Humans as slaves or pets or pet food or as petri dishes for biological war experiments? How do we know? Humans place high values on some quite low value things. Diamonds are in abundance but we stockpile these to keep the value high.
If we must project onto aliens from our own psyches and earthly experiences, then to be safe we should project from the very worst of these. Our Independence Day, Twilight Zone and Borg/Dalek nightmares need to be considered seriously if we are to adopt a risk management approach. And a risk management approach is wise. It says don't contact them until we know who/what they are.
"They can see us anyway". According to http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/1427054 background noise in space might limit the extent our radio transmissions have travelled to a 2 light year radius. Admittedly a better reference than 'Answerbag' might be good.
It is highly possible that most of our transmission are scattered or disrupted or all but destroyed at or around 2 light years out from us.Signal strength drops - at twice a distance away you are talking about 1/4 of the power - at ten times the distance the strength of the signal would only be one hundredth as great.
Even if this is not the case there is a very good chance we have not been spotted.
Banking transactions don't normally go via a known anonymizing darknet do they? And I didn't say they'd make SSL illegal which would be ridiculous.
They don't need to enforce the law consistently especially in civil law countries (Europe) where case law does not have the weight it has in the US/UK. They can just enforce it upon whomsoever they feel like enforcing it on who happens to be running a Tor node for example. The list of tor nodes can't be hidden. Maybe they'd be in conflict with laws designed to protect privacy though.
Perhaps there is a legal impediment to this though, because I tend to think if they could ban running Tor, Freenet etc nodes and client software, then they would have already.
Don't they just have to outlaw any connection to a Tor node on the right port that looks like Tor traffic? I didn't say they needed to catch everybody - just catch enough. Set up a sting node and track IP addresses of those who connect. Busted.
Or make it illegal to download or possess Tor or Freenet client software. Easily flouted but that's not the point.
There's a legal difference between distributing apps from an apps store and conventional local software downloaded from some other place. The app store becomes the *distributor* of many thousands of apps and as such will want the ability to kill a bad or potentially damaging app after it goes live. It is risk management.
Just had a look at the online Playboy Archive. It's a little clumsy to navigate - no doubt deliberately so people buy the full archive. And yes I was using both hands....:=)
A strange flashback moment seeing stuff from a 1970s edition I used to have. Gauze lens shots. Thick pubic hair. Some top notch interviews (getting the order of importance right here).
But to really see how times have changed: Feb 01, 1973 has an inset thumbnail of a model when she was 3yo, naked from behind. Completely innocent and cute of course. But can you imagine some girly magazine doing that today? No way.
In some circles. I *like* Perl. I work non-coding with experienced C/C++/Javascript/OoP developers. These are desktop/UI programmers mainly with some server side. They use and expect fluency in Python, which I don't know much. Perl OTOH I know quite well. The head programmer knows no Perl. Mentioning that I like and know Perl is like... well it's just totally irrelevant. Those on the team that know Perl keep quiet about it. Perl seems to be politically incorrect and by default and without trial held to be wrong for it "unreadability". Besides it's not Python is it.
The EU is a good idea on theory. It's the implementation that is worrying. The erstwhile EU constitution was clearly struck down by the People when a few governments did the right thing and required referenda on what was in actual fact an enormous centralization of power and huge change in governance. Undeterred, the bureaucrats simply resurfaced this as the Lisbon Treaty and now Europe is stuck with it. Few educated professionals let alone ordinary people understood what was in this massive, turgid, game-changing document. That is not democracy.
Kind of eerily fascinating this: America's two extreme moral panics of the last 30 years - the fear of terrorism and the dread of pedophiles - in direct collision! All driven by an irrational belief that we can be completely safe if we can just get safe enough - and that all rights are subordinate to this goal.
... a law that required everyone (except parents) to keep at least 200m distance from a kid or even better - go inside until the kid passes.
You mean this isn't already law in the UK? I'm shocked. Isn't there a mandatory 50 year prison term for being within 200m of a minor?! Someone told me they once talked to someone who had watched Oprah who said that numerous social workers have stated without citing any references or criticism - so therefore the research must be 100% conclusive - that children are irrevocably damaged and mentally scarred by being within 200m of a typical male adult! It's true!
Slashdot Mirror
The undisputed evidence showed that Bright obtains most of the videos it shows on Redtube free of charge from advertisers who pay Bright to display their videos containing their ads. Fundamentally, there is no difference between Redtube and a radio station in the early 1900s that broadcasted records it obtained for free from a music store and, in return, told its listeners where the records could be purchased. (See www.oldradio.com/current/bc_spots.htm; last visited Dec. 7, 2010.) In both cases the broadcaster's purpose is not to destroy competition or a competitor but to attract patrons to its broadcast site where they will, hopefully, respond to its advertisers' messages
Well, my submission - which was just hurriedly copied and pasted from the first para. of the article - does say "Redtube.com". Umm, you mean that doesn't look like a url to you? I can't believe you can only point and click.
Solar power does not "generate" energy. Energy is liberated by conversion from mass through nuclear reactions in the Sun. Solar power collects and transforms radiant energy into heat and then into useful work, like burning something up.
Well I did warn you, you didn't have to read it!
Ummm. We don't have direct confirmation of the existence of any gravity waves yet, do we? So we don't know that these can be used for communication. Since in theory it takes massive energetic events to create gravity waves that could be detected at our scale these would be an expensive form of galactic scale communication.
I'm not saying it couldn't be the case or that there isn't another field that we don't know about that could be used for communication.
any interstellar craft is still on the highly speculative "if we get a fusion / anti-matter drive" level.
You mean 'based on our current physics', which we know is only a small part of the story of reality because of its critical fundamental problems in eg reconciling QM and Relativity or in, say, fully accounting for dark matter. So we know that there is a deeper physics, we just can't get hold of it yet. Who knows what technology that new physics will yield and what current precepts it will shatter.
Look how far physics and engineering have come in the last 100 years. We have accrued far more technology in that time than in the entire period from the dawn of humanity up to that point. I think it's not unreasonable to assume that a better physics exists and we will eventually find it.
Any alien civilization that has thousands or millions of years more scientific achievement than us will very likely have found this improved physics. Who knows what that might give them. It's naive to assume that an advanced civilization could not have cracked interstellar travel somehow.
This is why we have science fiction. Most technology has been imagined in some form before it was possible for it to exist. Much of it could not even be imagined beforehand. We need to use our imaginations when thinking about advanced aliens. Either: (a) they don't exist yet and we are the first; or (b) they are there but are only at about our level of development; or (c) they are hiding from us or haven't found us; or (d) any kind of interstellar travel is not practical and there just isn't any more powerful space technology to evolve.
Of these 4 options, I'd say (d) is the least likely based on our own astonishing development in the last 100 years.
All that is irrelevant if an alien intelligence is not an aggregation of individuals in the sense that we think we know it.
Also: only a relatively tiny proportion of humanity actually cooperates to develop science and technology. The numbers required are not that large over a long period of time.
you can't achieve that type of technology if you're not a social species. If requires cooperation on a massive scale.
So we think, based on our limited "understanding" of potential alien life. What if the alien is not a society but a single massive intelligence or rogue societal element or pirate? Just because they/it have achieved cooperation does not mean they want to cooperate with us. We can't even cooperate with ourselves for God's sake.
As I've said elsewhere, chemical resources may be irrelevant. We have no way of knowing what aliens might value. Humans often assign value in illogical ways dues to cultural or historical factors. There is an overabundance of diamonds yet we place a high value of diamonds - in fact, we manipulate that value to keep it artificially high. We splatter paint on a canvas and sell it for $100m. We find a new drug in a rainforest and mass synthesize it. Humans trying to guess what might be interesting to far advanced beings is like an ant trying to understand what we do with that canvas or drug.
We don't know what they might value, where they are or what technology they have evolved. Enough said.
We don't know what power sources they might have evolved after millions more years of science than we have. It may not represent a large expenditure to them.
So we think. Based on our limited understanding of earth biology which may not extrapolate at all to beings based on some other biology altogether. The point is, we just don't know. So you want to bank the future of humanity on some educated guesses about alien life?
If we are going to assume they're cuddly then we must also assume they could be prone to the same evils as us. I'm imagining the worst case scenarios and in that I am quite consistent. That is how you assess how bad the risk might be. It's called risk analysis. If the consequences are severe enough - I'd call human annihilation potentially severe - then even an outside risk means we should not be yelling out heads off at alien civilizations.
Worst case scenario: (1) they have no equivalent of 'compassion' or 'empathy' towards humans; (2) they have far advanced space travel or weaponry making hostility possible; (3) we have something they have some use for; (4) they see us and come hither.
By contrast, people who insist on yelling "we're here!" are in effect taking the "oh, naw, it *has* to be like this" best case optimistic scenario: (1) they're cuddly beings who'll just love us to bits and who'll want to link cultures and sing Kumbaya and who have no rogue elements; (2) over some thousands or millions of years they have not cracked deep physics any better than we have [certainly unlikely] and are stuck with sublight travel or chemical propulsion; (3) there could be absolutely nothing we have that they are interested in; and (4) they've seen us anyway so we should beam them messages.
The problem is that the costs associated with shutting up are zero and the risks greatly reduced. The risk associated with sending up beacons and flags, however, could just mean the annihilation of humanity.
It's a no brainer. We should shut the f*ck up
When dealing with the totally unknown, paranoia is justified. We might think that there are good justifications to extrapolate the evolution of compassion etc to alien societies *based on our studies of earth biology*. Let's assume that is correct.
The problem is, as I pointed out, good 'ol cuddly humanity's own horrific record of genocide, species annihilation and environmental degradation should give us pause. Slavery has existed throughout human history. We have been unsuccessful in stamping out genocide and torture and are unlikely to ever be at this rate.
So, even if we insist on using an earth/human model for aliens in this regard and claim that they must have evolved compassion, we also have to remember that the same logic implies they may have similar problems to us. Or that, when we make contact, we may be contacting a rogue or pirate element of an alien society that does not play by any rules. Just like our own rogue elements.
We can only speculate and cannot imagine with certainty how aliens might have evolved - in fact as you say we cannot imagine through other than the parochial lens of our earth consciousness and biology which could be drastically different to theirs. Even assuming they have compassion as we know it and are not so far advanced that we appear insignificant, like ants, we better hope that they are NOT like flawed humanity with our penchant for species annihilation and cruelty.
Ergo: sending messages is really, really stupid no matter how you look at it. We should shut up and keep listening.
A major usability fuck up is this: a collapsed thread only lists the number of hidden comments one level down. So it looks like no-one has replied to a reply. Big bad. I want to know where the replies are at all levels down or that there are more to look for.
I agree with Stephen Hawking. Blasting messages willy-nilly at possible alien civilizations is foolhardy in the extreme. I have taken the liberty of anticipating and responding to the usual criticisms of this risk management approach below.
We have absolutely no reason to assume that contact with an advanced alien intelligence will be beneficial or that such aliens will be benign. Human history has taught us that, in contact between civilizations where one is technologically advanced compared to the other, the less advanced civilization always comes off worse. Our cuddly CE3K fantasies are just anthropomorphic projections. We have no reason to assume that the contacted aliens will possess human traits like compassion or altruism - in any case, many humans suspend or don't exhibit these. Think wartime atrocities. And we have treated other species on our own planet appallingly. Why should aliens be any nicer than us? The old chestnut "oh but they wouldn't have survived technological adolescence without destroying themselves if they weren't cuddly and nice" is just bollocks and is another anthropomorphic projection.
"Oh but they can't visit us via interstellar travel because it's impractical and too slow". Only according to our limited physics, which can't even reconcile QM with Relativity yet. It's likely there is a better physics and we don't have it yet but they do. Who knows what technology that might allow. Even our own scifi has more imagination that this.
"And our planet/system has nothing they need. It's not economic for them". Another supposition based on - what, exactly? How do we know what they value or what power sources they have? Humans as slaves or pets or pet food or as petri dishes for biological war experiments? How do we know? Humans place high values on some quite low value things. Diamonds are in abundance but we stockpile these to keep the value high.
If we must project onto aliens from our own psyches and earthly experiences, then to be safe we should project from the very worst of these. Our Independence Day, Twilight Zone and Borg/Dalek nightmares need to be considered seriously if we are to adopt a risk management approach. And a risk management approach is wise. It says don't contact them until we know who/what they are.
"They can see us anyway". According to http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/1427054 background noise in space might limit the extent our radio transmissions have travelled to a 2 light year radius. Admittedly a better reference than 'Answerbag' might be good.
It is highly possible that most of our transmission are scattered or disrupted or all but destroyed at or around 2 light years out from us.Signal strength drops - at twice a distance away you are talking about 1/4 of the power - at ten times the distance the strength of the signal would only be one hundredth as great.
Even if this is not the case there is a very good chance we have not been spotted.
Banking transactions don't normally go via a known anonymizing darknet do they? And I didn't say they'd make SSL illegal which would be ridiculous. They don't need to enforce the law consistently especially in civil law countries (Europe) where case law does not have the weight it has in the US/UK. They can just enforce it upon whomsoever they feel like enforcing it on who happens to be running a Tor node for example. The list of tor nodes can't be hidden. Maybe they'd be in conflict with laws designed to protect privacy though. Perhaps there is a legal impediment to this though, because I tend to think if they could ban running Tor, Freenet etc nodes and client software, then they would have already.
Don't they just have to outlaw any connection to a Tor node on the right port that looks like Tor traffic? I didn't say they needed to catch everybody - just catch enough. Set up a sting node and track IP addresses of those who connect. Busted. Or make it illegal to download or possess Tor or Freenet client software. Easily flouted but that's not the point.
If they can. And how long will it be before routing traffic through Tor or any darknet becomes illegal?
There's a legal difference between distributing apps from an apps store and conventional local software downloaded from some other place. The app store becomes the *distributor* of many thousands of apps and as such will want the ability to kill a bad or potentially damaging app after it goes live. It is risk management.
Just had a look at the online Playboy Archive. It's a little clumsy to navigate - no doubt deliberately so people buy the full archive. And yes I was using both hands .... :=)
A strange flashback moment seeing stuff from a 1970s edition I used to have. Gauze lens shots. Thick pubic hair. Some top notch interviews (getting the order of importance right here).
But to really see how times have changed: Feb 01, 1973 has an inset thumbnail of a model when she was 3yo, naked from behind. Completely innocent and cute of course. But can you imagine some girly magazine doing that today? No way.
In some circles. I *like* Perl. I work non-coding with experienced C/C++/Javascript/OoP developers. These are desktop/UI programmers mainly with some server side. They use and expect fluency in Python, which I don't know much. Perl OTOH I know quite well. The head programmer knows no Perl. Mentioning that I like and know Perl is like ... well it's just totally irrelevant. Those on the team that know Perl keep quiet about it. Perl seems to be politically incorrect and by default and without trial held to be wrong for it "unreadability". Besides it's not Python is it.
The EU is a good idea on theory. It's the implementation that is worrying. The erstwhile EU constitution was clearly struck down by the People when a few governments did the right thing and required referenda on what was in actual fact an enormous centralization of power and huge change in governance. Undeterred, the bureaucrats simply resurfaced this as the Lisbon Treaty and now Europe is stuck with it. Few educated professionals let alone ordinary people understood what was in this massive, turgid, game-changing document. That is not democracy.
Kind of eerily fascinating this: America's two extreme moral panics of the last 30 years - the fear of terrorism and the dread of pedophiles - in direct collision! All driven by an irrational belief that we can be completely safe if we can just get safe enough - and that all rights are subordinate to this goal.
You mean this isn't already law in the UK? I'm shocked. Isn't there a mandatory 50 year prison term for being within 200m of a minor?! Someone told me they once talked to someone who had watched Oprah who said that numerous social workers have stated without citing any references or criticism - so therefore the research must be 100% conclusive - that children are irrevocably damaged and mentally scarred by being within 200m of a typical male adult! It's true!