That requires that aliens be easy to observe - we've barely looked, after all. That always seemed like a shaky assumption, and there's growing evidence that's it's false.
But on the other hand, 100% of planets in the habitable zone that we've closely observed have intelligent life. That's the data we have.
That's why it's a paradox: the evidence we have suggests alien life should be pretty common, but we don't see any, so what gives? The easy answer is "we haven't looked very hard".
There are megastructures that make a lot more sense than Ring Worlds and Dyson Spheres, that are stable, practical as an extension of known technology, and would serve the purpose of increased standard of living for a growing population. However, there are a lot of such approaches, and we only know how to look for a few of them, and we haven't looked very hard.
The underlying question of the Fermi Paradox is "why has no other species in our galaxy every created self-replicating machines to explore". The entire galaxy would be explored by that approach in 10s or 100s of millions of years, so we'd expect to see evidence of such in our own system.
The best answer is probably "we've only looked closely at a tiny percentage of our own system". If some random asteroid has been turned into a robotic manufacturing facility (and then shut down), it's pretty unlikely we've have discovered that yet.
There's no real reason to expect that we'd detect alien communication, or travel, or recognize advanced civilizations as something different from the natural working of the universe. What we can reasonably expect to find one day is any evidence that we were visited by self-replicating machines. We could also expect to find someone deliberately signalling us (or the galaxy as a whole), but it's hardly a paradox that we haven't seen that.
The rational position for star travel for "today's humans" is agnostic. We don't know a way to travel fast, but we're a long way from ruling out such mechanisms. However, it's worth keeping in mind that humans greatly extending our lifespan is a different approach to interstellar travel, and one that may be lower tech than other approaches.
To the bigger question of the Fermi Paradox, human-specific limitations aren't very satisfying as an answer.
The cost per item is still trivial, accounting for everything, as long as the plastic makes it to a dump. No problem there. The real world problems we're seeing are from people who lack the basic decency to throw their trash away in the trash, or to not simply dump garbage at sea instead of delivering it to a dump.
"Has been seen to work" is not the same as "always works". However, social pressure is much more effective than threat of violence for most people in most situations. The exceptions - people who are truly psychopathic or sociopath - are pretty rare. Even then, the threat historically seems to have been ejection from the tribe, not violence.
You can't really rule by threat of violence in small communal living situations anyhow - you have to sleep sometime. Other apes seem to have similar tribal situations - e.g. chimpanzees are quite violent in general, but leaders who try to rule by force get killed off pretty quick.
But of course, those kind of social enforcement mechanisms only work because they're actually social - people you spend time with every day. Impersonal socialism simply has no such mechanism to make it work, so there's only violence available.
Communism and socialism work. Just not on humans. Bees and ants do communism fine. Humans have that thing, "thought", that tends to mess with any dogma that it comes in contact with.
Socialism has been seen to work fine at the scale of "tribe" or "village". If you know everyone personally, and everyone can shame slackers, sharing can work OK. People still have an incentive to work hard, too, as everyone knows who's helping out. Probably not ideal, but it has worked for some.
It's the same reason charity works far better from a church or mutual aid society: people have a strong social incentive to stop needing that charity ASAP unless they're seriously disabled.
But all of that collapses as soon as it becomes impersonal. Then it becomes a system to be gamed, and the best at gaming it end up in charge and massively screwing everyone else.
Based on the water bottles I've seen recently (seriously conference venues: quit with the free plastic bottled water and just put out some glasses and a jug already!)
Glasses at a concert venue? The death toll would be massive. There's a reason most festivals ban any sort of glass container.
There is no such cost (at least, none worth measuring). There is a cost to not disposing of them, however - letting them litter the streets, dumping them at sea, and so on. Really hard to keep assholes from dumping trash at sea, though.
However the problem that I feel is most concerning is the lack of a cap in how much you are going to pay for it. Say an $80 fee (The cost of a good console game) where everything is unlocked, and you can use the game and stay current. But that isn't the case, because it is easy to nickle and dime your way into people paying much more. Often for just something fun at the moment.
The norm for free to pay games is that most of their revenue come from a few "whales". Beyond the normal 80/20, some games get 95% of revenue from 5% of players, or even 99% from 1% of players. Kudos to Fortnight for not being pay-to-win, as it leads to that sort of imbalance. There are seriously people who pay $30,000 for this sort of shit, and many games that exist only to harvest those whales.
It's awesome to have such vivid proof that you can make more money with a level playing field than the normal model where free players are only there to be targets for those who pay to win.
Doesn't change the fact that most malware is actually installed by its users, voluntarily.
Wow, I remember the 1990s. Good times.
Meanwhile, in this decade, malware is almost entirely browser-focused, and installs via malicious ads. I guess you could claim that users "voluntarily" had javascript enabled, if you were a silly person.
And as long as the festival is clear about its un-officialness, that's fine. This is why it's so rare to get trademarks around fictional IP. Trademarks are mostly there to protect action figures, costumes, and similar physical goods where traditional branding applies.
You don't in any way violate trademark by making your own Spider-Man costume for Halloween. You would if you sold that costume, however.
You're confusing trademark and copyright. Derivative use isn't a concept that applies to trademarks in the first place. As long as nothing is misrepresented as official or endorsed, there's no trademark relevance. Copyright OTOH is what they're running afoul of.
You missed his point: you don't dilute a trademark by using it for the trademarked product. Calling Kleenex "Kleenex" does not in any way dilute that trademark, authorized or not, and requires no defense. Calling Puffs "Kleenex" is what you need to sue over.
But it's irreverent anyhow, this is all copyright-related.
It's a class thing. Waiters are traditionally supposed to act like serving staff. Keep your drink full and deliver your food with minimal visibility and maximum efficiency, and, like any good servant, give every appearance of not only reading your mind, but doing so 5 minutes before you think you want something so it appears like magic.
Some people are made uncomfortable by that. They want a waiter who's their peer and buddy, not their staff. It's a class thing.
When it hurts the restaurant is when they miss-judge their customers. Which kind of service is likely to please as a BBQ place with picnic tables is different from an expensive steak house.
I didn't say a pick gun works on everything, only that for locks which can be picked in any reasonable amount of time, a pick gun will get them in seconds. And if you're going to bash the lock in, again if you brought a big enough hammer, it's going to open in seconds, or you need to go back for a bigger hammer. 15 minutes seems a very strange amount of time here.
I've never seen a lock last more than a few seconds against a pick gun, without being immune to picking. And if you're willing to damage the door, just back a truck through it. Either way, nothing takes 15 minutes (unless we're talking about a safe or something).
Do you think anyone in his administration has mentioned to Trump that the United States is bound by a treaty, ratified in 1967, which specifically forbids militarization of space?
No one has ever respected that treaty. The US and USSR put weapons into orbit as soon as they practically could. There don't seem to be any nukes (or, at least, none that have leaked, and they likely would by now), but simple kinetic-kill anti-satellite weapons in orbit? You bet. Heck, the USSR had an "armored" sat (presumably slightly thicker tin foil) to smash into other sats as a low tech cheap weapon.
but does he really think anyone but the most dedicated MAGA chud is going to think the SPACE FORCE is anything but the butt of future jokes?
Russia used the same name for years. The Russian Space Forces used to be a separate armed service, now it's a branch of the Aerospace Defense Forces. I've worked with a Space Forces veteran, and I think there's one who posts to Slashdot occasionally.
High-end consumer TVs also have a ton of "smarts" around making the picture look "better". There's no simple switch to turn all that stuff off, either. High-end consumer audio got to the point where it's now a selling point to have a simple "make it dumb" button - I won't buy a receiver without it. TVs need to catch up.
Of course "HDR" is such a mess of competing standards that there isn't even an obvious way to send an accurate, full color gamut, HDR signal over an HDMI cable, so it may be a while.
If the read-only media doesn't already have a thumbs.db, then there's no cache. Simple and secure. You can also just turn off thumbnails, if you don't like them.
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That requires that aliens be easy to observe - we've barely looked, after all. That always seemed like a shaky assumption, and there's growing evidence that's it's false.
But on the other hand, 100% of planets in the habitable zone that we've closely observed have intelligent life. That's the data we have.
That's why it's a paradox: the evidence we have suggests alien life should be pretty common, but we don't see any, so what gives? The easy answer is "we haven't looked very hard".
There are megastructures that make a lot more sense than Ring Worlds and Dyson Spheres, that are stable, practical as an extension of known technology, and would serve the purpose of increased standard of living for a growing population. However, there are a lot of such approaches, and we only know how to look for a few of them, and we haven't looked very hard.
The underlying question of the Fermi Paradox is "why has no other species in our galaxy every created self-replicating machines to explore". The entire galaxy would be explored by that approach in 10s or 100s of millions of years, so we'd expect to see evidence of such in our own system.
The best answer is probably "we've only looked closely at a tiny percentage of our own system". If some random asteroid has been turned into a robotic manufacturing facility (and then shut down), it's pretty unlikely we've have discovered that yet.
There's no real reason to expect that we'd detect alien communication, or travel, or recognize advanced civilizations as something different from the natural working of the universe. What we can reasonably expect to find one day is any evidence that we were visited by self-replicating machines. We could also expect to find someone deliberately signalling us (or the galaxy as a whole), but it's hardly a paradox that we haven't seen that.
The rational position for star travel for "today's humans" is agnostic. We don't know a way to travel fast, but we're a long way from ruling out such mechanisms. However, it's worth keeping in mind that humans greatly extending our lifespan is a different approach to interstellar travel, and one that may be lower tech than other approaches.
To the bigger question of the Fermi Paradox, human-specific limitations aren't very satisfying as an answer.
The cost per item is still trivial, accounting for everything, as long as the plastic makes it to a dump. No problem there. The real world problems we're seeing are from people who lack the basic decency to throw their trash away in the trash, or to not simply dump garbage at sea instead of delivering it to a dump.
"Has been seen to work" is not the same as "always works". However, social pressure is much more effective than threat of violence for most people in most situations. The exceptions - people who are truly psychopathic or sociopath - are pretty rare. Even then, the threat historically seems to have been ejection from the tribe, not violence.
You can't really rule by threat of violence in small communal living situations anyhow - you have to sleep sometime. Other apes seem to have similar tribal situations - e.g. chimpanzees are quite violent in general, but leaders who try to rule by force get killed off pretty quick.
But of course, those kind of social enforcement mechanisms only work because they're actually social - people you spend time with every day. Impersonal socialism simply has no such mechanism to make it work, so there's only violence available.
Communism and socialism work. Just not on humans. Bees and ants do communism fine. Humans have that thing, "thought", that tends to mess with any dogma that it comes in contact with.
Socialism has been seen to work fine at the scale of "tribe" or "village". If you know everyone personally, and everyone can shame slackers, sharing can work OK. People still have an incentive to work hard, too, as everyone knows who's helping out. Probably not ideal, but it has worked for some.
It's the same reason charity works far better from a church or mutual aid society: people have a strong social incentive to stop needing that charity ASAP unless they're seriously disabled.
But all of that collapses as soon as it becomes impersonal. Then it becomes a system to be gamed, and the best at gaming it end up in charge and massively screwing everyone else.
Based on the water bottles I've seen recently (seriously conference venues: quit with the free plastic bottled water and just put out some glasses and a jug already!)
Glasses at a concert venue? The death toll would be massive. There's a reason most festivals ban any sort of glass container.
There is no such cost (at least, none worth measuring). There is a cost to not disposing of them, however - letting them litter the streets, dumping them at sea, and so on. Really hard to keep assholes from dumping trash at sea, though.
If someone else pays money for that, how does it infringe on you?
Are you asking "how does pay-to-win hurt a competitive multi-player game"? Because that's a foolish question.
However the problem that I feel is most concerning is the lack of a cap in how much you are going to pay for it. Say an $80 fee (The cost of a good console game) where everything is unlocked, and you can use the game and stay current. But that isn't the case, because it is easy to nickle and dime your way into people paying much more. Often for just something fun at the moment.
The norm for free to pay games is that most of their revenue come from a few "whales". Beyond the normal 80/20, some games get 95% of revenue from 5% of players, or even 99% from 1% of players. Kudos to Fortnight for not being pay-to-win, as it leads to that sort of imbalance. There are seriously people who pay $30,000 for this sort of shit, and many games that exist only to harvest those whales.
It's awesome to have such vivid proof that you can make more money with a level playing field than the normal model where free players are only there to be targets for those who pay to win.
Doesn't change the fact that most malware is actually installed by its users, voluntarily.
Wow, I remember the 1990s. Good times.
Meanwhile, in this decade, malware is almost entirely browser-focused, and installs via malicious ads. I guess you could claim that users "voluntarily" had javascript enabled, if you were a silly person.
Some people are very comfortable with the idea that others are lessor
Anywhere there's a lessee there's a lessor.
Customer service is a job, not a difference in species. And we need jobs.
And as long as the festival is clear about its un-officialness, that's fine. This is why it's so rare to get trademarks around fictional IP. Trademarks are mostly there to protect action figures, costumes, and similar physical goods where traditional branding applies.
You don't in any way violate trademark by making your own Spider-Man costume for Halloween. You would if you sold that costume, however.
You're confusing trademark and copyright. Derivative use isn't a concept that applies to trademarks in the first place. As long as nothing is misrepresented as official or endorsed, there's no trademark relevance. Copyright OTOH is what they're running afoul of.
You missed his point: you don't dilute a trademark by using it for the trademarked product. Calling Kleenex "Kleenex" does not in any way dilute that trademark, authorized or not, and requires no defense. Calling Puffs "Kleenex" is what you need to sue over.
But it's irreverent anyhow, this is all copyright-related.
It's a class thing. Waiters are traditionally supposed to act like serving staff. Keep your drink full and deliver your food with minimal visibility and maximum efficiency, and, like any good servant, give every appearance of not only reading your mind, but doing so 5 minutes before you think you want something so it appears like magic.
Some people are made uncomfortable by that. They want a waiter who's their peer and buddy, not their staff. It's a class thing.
When it hurts the restaurant is when they miss-judge their customers. Which kind of service is likely to please as a BBQ place with picnic tables is different from an expensive steak house.
I didn't say a pick gun works on everything, only that for locks which can be picked in any reasonable amount of time, a pick gun will get them in seconds. And if you're going to bash the lock in, again if you brought a big enough hammer, it's going to open in seconds, or you need to go back for a bigger hammer. 15 minutes seems a very strange amount of time here.
I've never seen a lock last more than a few seconds against a pick gun, without being immune to picking. And if you're willing to damage the door, just back a truck through it. Either way, nothing takes 15 minutes (unless we're talking about a safe or something).
Well, the insignia are red, white, and blue. And they look vaguely like the old Star Trek insignia, so we could work with it.
Do you think anyone in his administration has mentioned to Trump that the United States is bound by a treaty, ratified in 1967, which specifically forbids militarization of space?
No one has ever respected that treaty. The US and USSR put weapons into orbit as soon as they practically could. There don't seem to be any nukes (or, at least, none that have leaked, and they likely would by now), but simple kinetic-kill anti-satellite weapons in orbit? You bet. Heck, the USSR had an "armored" sat (presumably slightly thicker tin foil) to smash into other sats as a low tech cheap weapon.
but does he really think anyone but the most dedicated MAGA chud is going to think the SPACE FORCE is anything but the butt of future jokes?
Russia used the same name for years. The Russian Space Forces used to be a separate armed service, now it's a branch of the Aerospace Defense Forces. I've worked with a Space Forces veteran, and I think there's one who posts to Slashdot occasionally.
High-end consumer TVs also have a ton of "smarts" around making the picture look "better". There's no simple switch to turn all that stuff off, either. High-end consumer audio got to the point where it's now a selling point to have a simple "make it dumb" button - I won't buy a receiver without it. TVs need to catch up.
Of course "HDR" is such a mess of competing standards that there isn't even an obvious way to send an accurate, full color gamut, HDR signal over an HDMI cable, so it may be a while.
If the read-only media doesn't already have a thumbs.db, then there's no cache. Simple and secure. You can also just turn off thumbnails, if you don't like them.
Or, you know, rather than going with your guess, you could do actual statistical studies. Science and all that.
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