Not much to disagree on here (damn you!), especially that last sentence. One of the reasons I support the idea of space settlement. But I do think we kind of have a default record of the likelihood of sterilisation events... our existence, along with our observation of the greater universe. For example, hypernova aren't common, nearby contender-stars even less common. (There's a couple of regular supernova candidates within worry-distance, IIRC, but even that's not a sterilisation event. It's not even an end of humanity event. It won't be fun, and may kill off a major chunk of the population, end civilisation, etc, but it's not going to cause our extinction.)
I doubt there's much that you could do that was temporary (where Earth returned to some kind of normality, air/liquid water, etc) that would successfully "sterilise" the planet. A full blown resurfacing event would be the closest, such as the hypothetical Theian impact that formed the moon, even then there'd be enough bacteria in the upper atmosphere to continue life. So provided you had liquid water returning within a few thousand years, you should see things return to "normal", if somewhat reset to the late Archeon era.
Easier to ruin the day for multi-cellular life, of course. But even there, nothing that is likely to occur in the next million years or so (asteroid/comet/super-volcano/solar-CME/etc) is going to kill all multi-cellular life. And even humans, being a particularly adaptable animal even without technology, will likely survive - if not happily.
And if, after a few million years, something does cause a unprecedented event wiping out all multi-cellular life... well, if we aren't off the planet in a million years, we don't deserve to live. But I see nothing in the next thousand years that can seriously threaten the survival of humanity, only reduce our ability to continue to progress by setting us back technologically at a time when we've nearly used up all the easily accessed fossil energy (which may be what Hawking meant.)
[If Earth is "lucky", it's been systematically lucky for 4.5 billion years. The odds of it becoming "unlucky" in the next thousand years seems remote.]
No you can't. There is no unclaimed land on Earth. You are talking about doing a greenhouse experiment for a couple of years. I'm talking about hundreds, thousands of politically independent settlements in a truly new "land", developing over the coming centuries.
It's the difference between a redevelopment and a "greenfield" development.
In order to experiment with new ways of doing things on Earth, you must displace something or someone else. With space settlements, each one will be an ecological and sociological experiment. Then you can apply what you learned back into established areas on Earth.
Humans aren't delicate, we're a pest species. We adapt. With stone age tools we occupied every environment on Earth from desert to the Arctic. Antarctica was the only one that defeated us, and I suspect the Inuit could handle it if given half a chance (and pre-industrial populations of whales/seals).
Using the classic expansion into the Americas as an example: we evolved in southern Africa, adapted to northern Africa and the Middle East, crossed through west Asia into central and northern Asia (adapting to deserts, mountains, grasslands), then adapted to the arctic circle, crossed the Baring Sea, re-adapted to temperate climates, then to dry regions in the southern US, then to the wet equatorial regions through central America and northern South America, adapted to the Andes highlands and finally to the cold of Tierra Del Fuego.
The idea that we are "delicate" is silly. A given population might be killed off, modern civilisation might fail, but humans can adapt to anything short of boiling oceans.
The Earth is one collision or one solar event away from complete sterilization
Earth has been sterilised only once in about 5 billion years. And that was a collision in the first half billion years when the whole solar system was still chaotic. It's not something that happens often. Even a CME aimed right at Earth won't "sterilise" it (will cause fun with the grid, though.) A nearby GRB would kill a hell of a lot of life on the exposed side, and expose the rest to unshielded solar-UV. But even then, it still wouldn't sterilise the planet.
Most WYSIWYG word processors today show you only the document - the markup is invisible. The old Word Perfect approach, where you could see the markup characters, or the HTML source approach, is too clunky. But Interleaf showed the output text alongside a column of annotation information. So you could see the difference between a tab indent and a paragraph indent, for example. That would be an appropriate way to present fine formatting controls.
Since we're all comfortable with using tabs (and MS's "Ribbon" is training office-types in tabbed toolbars) perhaps it would make sense to split content-creation and content-design into a separate workspaces? Ie, instead of just tabbed tool-bars, you have tabbed document views. If the Write tab is a WYSIWYG workspace, the design/format tab is then free to not only show formatting, but do so in an intuitive n00b-friendly GUI style. With colours, frames, controls/handles around parts of the document to show formatting and behaviours for easy manipulation.
[Likewise, a separate tab for printing/publishing (preview + page and printer settings), another for the document-as-a-file (directory + metadata + versioning/changes), etc. Maybe a combined help/tools/preferences tab....]
The weird thing is they got it right with Xbox. They didn't try to shoe-horn Windows onto it, nor poison desktop Windows by trying to unify it with Xbox. But when it came to their phone/tablet OS they went full retard.
The really weird part is that the Phone/Tablet OS is actually a separate non-binary-compatible OS, WinRT. So if they had just called it something else, like... oh I don't know... "Metro"... then they could have kept Win8 focused on being as rock-solid as possible, industry types would have raved over the clever new deep core features in Win8 (faster boot, modular configuration, etc) instead of fixating on the failed UI... and raved over the new touch-device UI of Microsoft's new completely separate tablet OS, "Metro".
[Add in clever secure integration with the Phone/Tablet OS, particularly for BYOD corporate networks. Plug'n'play idiot-proof networking between a media-centre/NAS, desktop, xbox, tablet and phone for home users. And introduce a few optional features in Win8 that casually invoke the tablet OS (4eg Metro-fying Win7's existing desktop Gadgets and adding them to IE) without forcing it. Hell, throw in a full emulator/sandbox that can run any of the Tablet apps. And a cloudy version that works in reverse, use your tablet to remote access your desktop apps, ie without needing to be able to run the desktop software on the tablet. And a standard way for touch devices to work as a secondary-screen and third-level input device (independent of mouse and keyboard) for desktops. Minor variation to allow phone/tablet as an extra display/controller for xbox's and media-centres.... So many gaps they could have filled.]
I'm not sure that's a bad thing. There was a healthy PC industry back when only a small percentage of people bought computers.
Moving consumers onto simple consumer devices like tablets means that the PC becomes a market for people who actually want a "real computer". A niche technical market. They'll be happier, and we'll be happier.
I often wonder what will happen first: Microsoft/Apple realising the error of their ways and making a useful UI, or users collectively sighing and sucking up the crap they are given.
Put it this way, how many corporations have dumped their awful flash-sites? How many websites have you seen give up those hateful JS pop-ups, slide-outs, rolling banners, jiggly follow-me sidebars...? Or the "HEY WOULD YOU LIKE TO SUBSCRIBE INSTEAD OF ACTUALLY READING THE PAGE YOU CLICKED ON?!!! [Yes] [No but please ask me every fucking time]" pop-overs? Or "links" that are JS triggers that don't work like links, even though there's perfectly standard coding for JS pseudo-links? Or...
How many websites of major newspapers don't use third-party ad-hosting because they have an entire fucking in-house marketing department for their print edition, thus solving 95% of the problem with people using ad-blocking software?
How many major game companies stop requiring always-on net connections, or other obnoxious DRM, after having yet another first-week horrorshow on the authentication servers, which didn't stop pirates anyway, and instead decide to stop treating gamers who actually paid for the software as criminals?
How many....
Well, you get the idea. There's something about the corporate mindset that tends to just double-down on stupidity.
You misunderstand. Whoever in the French military gave the take-down order pretty much confirmed that the information is genuine, and important. Foreign intelligence agencies don't often get a free kick like that.
Weird thing is, intelligence agency have tried and true methods for casting subtle doubt on compromised information. And not one of those methods involves bursting into a room, pointing at the thing and yelling "Hey! Everyone! I'm from the French military and this thing, this thing right here, which I'm pointing at, this thing is very important to us!" [Except in all-caps. And purple blink font.]
Honestly, splitting consumer and technical versions makes more sense than Ubuntu's attempt to straddle the communities.
Leave the real "Linux" for those who want to understand what's happening under the hood, making no attempt to mainstream it.
Then create a Linux-based, but completely stand-alone, locked-down consumer OS under a new brandname like Tux or Penguin or something equally happy-friendly. Something you can safely put on your grandparent's or child's netbook, notebook, tablet, or desktop and never hear from them again. No attempt to retain Linux binary-compatibility, and no attempt to appeal to the Linux user-base.
It doesn't matter if "Linux" has a 1% market share, because that's the percentage of users who know what they're doing. For about 60-80% of the rest, a simple safe consumer OS that doesn't try to be a "real" OS would be ideal.
They used to. Studying the Bible as the written Word Of God and studying the world as the manifest Word Of God were seen as complementary. As the results drifted apart, so did the natural philosophers and the theological philosophers.
The thread's dead, but I just wanted to mention to you that setting the terms of the bet would be an interesting exercise.
No one is going to accept terms where Mastropaolo can unilaterally choose the "third-party" judge. Or set the burden of proof so arbitrarily high that even God could not surmount it.
So it first means a mutually acceptable judge, otherwise no one would accept the challenge. Then in front of that judge, Mastropaolo and the challenger must agree on terms. What the challenger must disprove. Starting with "which version of bible", then "which interpretation of..." and that's where it gets interesting. See the debates at the top of the thread over interpretations of the order of creation in Gen 1 and 2. Now add the ambiguities in every chapter. Mastropaolo will need to pin this down exactly, so the judge can know what s/he is judging, and the challenger can know what s/he is challenging. It may turn out to be the first time that Mastropaolo (or the judge for that matter) has ever had to really define what he believes, the first time he has ever really had to face those internal contradictions, the first time he has ever really stepped outside the protective bubble of his fellow believers.
you don't see mathematicians trying to disprove Shakespeare.
Actually, there have been attempts to prove/disprove authorship using mathematical analysis. Word use, rates of novel word introduction, etc. Both to prove that a new work is by Shakespeare, and, more controversially, to prove that the true author of Shakespeare's work was another known author/playwright (usually Marlowe.)
One day you might want to look up what "secular" actually means. Oh how you'll laugh.
-- Spoiler --
"Separated from religion", " things that have no religious or spiritual basis", etc. (Locally, the "Secular Society" is the name of a national atheist lobby group.)
The Hermit Kingdom's obsession with propaganda and rewriting history, and common language and history with South Korea, seems to make it ideal for a "backdoor" cultural attack.
The modern equivalent of a propaganda leaflet drop. Smuggle, or even airdrop, OLPC-style satellite receivers into North Korea, able to receive dedicated Korean language info dumps from suitable satellites, as well as rebroadcasted live radio and (power willing) TV channels. News, music, live weather, etc. (And dedicated counter-propaganda channels.) And encyclopedias, text books, banned poetry/history/music, stored on the devices. Modular, repairable, with solar panels and crank-generators repurposeable to reduce the number of units turned in or destroyed.
Designed in South Korea, manufactured in China, a few hundred thousand units per year. Bargain.
[Designed well, they could be more generally suited to the poorest parts of the world. Charities might buy them, increasing the production size, reducing the per-unit costs.]
That's what bugged me about the FTS, people aren't "lying about how they feel". They've been lied to, now they are quite honestly experiencing the classic and very real symptoms of stress/fear/anxiety, which reinforces the original lie in others.
The treatment is anti-anxiety meds and a placebo device. The anti-anxiety meds treat the symptoms, providing relief, the placebo device "treats" the cause.
if people are really getting more intelligent, how do you explain Fox News?
Spend an hour on google looking up olden-days propaganda. Have a look at actual Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda posters from as recently as the 1930s and '40s. Compare that to the subtlety of Fox News. Yeah, people are smarter.
(Similarly, look at the standard of propaganda from less developed countries, compare that with western propaganda.)
Slashdot Mirror
That's the new <smell> tag.
One, two, three, four.
I declare a shill war.
A few have criticized me that with my age and position it is not fit for me.
Have you noted that those people should not be trusted with anything important?
Microsoft doesn't just copy Apple, they can also copy what Apple is copying.
Not much to disagree on here (damn you!), especially that last sentence. One of the reasons I support the idea of space settlement. But I do think we kind of have a default record of the likelihood of sterilisation events... our existence, along with our observation of the greater universe. For example, hypernova aren't common, nearby contender-stars even less common. (There's a couple of regular supernova candidates within worry-distance, IIRC, but even that's not a sterilisation event. It's not even an end of humanity event. It won't be fun, and may kill off a major chunk of the population, end civilisation, etc, but it's not going to cause our extinction.)
I doubt there's much that you could do that was temporary (where Earth returned to some kind of normality, air/liquid water, etc) that would successfully "sterilise" the planet. A full blown resurfacing event would be the closest, such as the hypothetical Theian impact that formed the moon, even then there'd be enough bacteria in the upper atmosphere to continue life. So provided you had liquid water returning within a few thousand years, you should see things return to "normal", if somewhat reset to the late Archeon era.
Easier to ruin the day for multi-cellular life, of course. But even there, nothing that is likely to occur in the next million years or so (asteroid/comet/super-volcano/solar-CME/etc) is going to kill all multi-cellular life. And even humans, being a particularly adaptable animal even without technology, will likely survive - if not happily.
And if, after a few million years, something does cause a unprecedented event wiping out all multi-cellular life... well, if we aren't off the planet in a million years, we don't deserve to live. But I see nothing in the next thousand years that can seriously threaten the survival of humanity, only reduce our ability to continue to progress by setting us back technologically at a time when we've nearly used up all the easily accessed fossil energy (which may be what Hawking meant.)
[If Earth is "lucky", it's been systematically lucky for 4.5 billion years. The odds of it becoming "unlucky" in the next thousand years seems remote.]
No you can't. There is no unclaimed land on Earth. You are talking about doing a greenhouse experiment for a couple of years. I'm talking about hundreds, thousands of politically independent settlements in a truly new "land", developing over the coming centuries.
It's the difference between a redevelopment and a "greenfield" development.
In order to experiment with new ways of doing things on Earth, you must displace something or someone else. With space settlements, each one will be an ecological and sociological experiment. Then you can apply what you learned back into established areas on Earth.
Earth isn't delicate, Humans are.
Humans aren't delicate, we're a pest species. We adapt. With stone age tools we occupied every environment on Earth from desert to the Arctic. Antarctica was the only one that defeated us, and I suspect the Inuit could handle it if given half a chance (and pre-industrial populations of whales/seals).
Using the classic expansion into the Americas as an example: we evolved in southern Africa, adapted to northern Africa and the Middle East, crossed through west Asia into central and northern Asia (adapting to deserts, mountains, grasslands), then adapted to the arctic circle, crossed the Baring Sea, re-adapted to temperate climates, then to dry regions in the southern US, then to the wet equatorial regions through central America and northern South America, adapted to the Andes highlands and finally to the cold of Tierra Del Fuego.
The idea that we are "delicate" is silly. A given population might be killed off, modern civilisation might fail, but humans can adapt to anything short of boiling oceans.
The Earth is one collision or one solar event away from complete sterilization
Earth has been sterilised only once in about 5 billion years. And that was a collision in the first half billion years when the whole solar system was still chaotic. It's not something that happens often. Even a CME aimed right at Earth won't "sterilise" it (will cause fun with the grid, though.) A nearby GRB would kill a hell of a lot of life on the exposed side, and expose the rest to unshielded solar-UV. But even then, it still wouldn't sterilise the planet.
Most WYSIWYG word processors today show you only the document - the markup is invisible. The old Word Perfect approach, where you could see the markup characters, or the HTML source approach, is too clunky. But Interleaf showed the output text alongside a column of annotation information. So you could see the difference between a tab indent and a paragraph indent, for example. That would be an appropriate way to present fine formatting controls.
Since we're all comfortable with using tabs (and MS's "Ribbon" is training office-types in tabbed toolbars) perhaps it would make sense to split content-creation and content-design into a separate workspaces? Ie, instead of just tabbed tool-bars, you have tabbed document views. If the Write tab is a WYSIWYG workspace, the design/format tab is then free to not only show formatting, but do so in an intuitive n00b-friendly GUI style. With colours, frames, controls/handles around parts of the document to show formatting and behaviours for easy manipulation.
[Likewise, a separate tab for printing/publishing (preview + page and printer settings), another for the document-as-a-file (directory + metadata + versioning/changes), etc. Maybe a combined help/tools/preferences tab....]
The weird thing is they got it right with Xbox. They didn't try to shoe-horn Windows onto it, nor poison desktop Windows by trying to unify it with Xbox. But when it came to their phone/tablet OS they went full retard.
The really weird part is that the Phone/Tablet OS is actually a separate non-binary-compatible OS, WinRT. So if they had just called it something else, like... oh I don't know... "Metro"... then they could have kept Win8 focused on being as rock-solid as possible, industry types would have raved over the clever new deep core features in Win8 (faster boot, modular configuration, etc) instead of fixating on the failed UI... and raved over the new touch-device UI of Microsoft's new completely separate tablet OS, "Metro".
[Add in clever secure integration with the Phone/Tablet OS, particularly for BYOD corporate networks. Plug'n'play idiot-proof networking between a media-centre/NAS, desktop, xbox, tablet and phone for home users. And introduce a few optional features in Win8 that casually invoke the tablet OS (4eg Metro-fying Win7's existing desktop Gadgets and adding them to IE) without forcing it. Hell, throw in a full emulator/sandbox that can run any of the Tablet apps. And a cloudy version that works in reverse, use your tablet to remote access your desktop apps, ie without needing to be able to run the desktop software on the tablet. And a standard way for touch devices to work as a secondary-screen and third-level input device (independent of mouse and keyboard) for desktops. Minor variation to allow phone/tablet as an extra display/controller for xbox's and media-centres. ... So many gaps they could have filled.]
I'm not sure that's a bad thing. There was a healthy PC industry back when only a small percentage of people bought computers.
Moving consumers onto simple consumer devices like tablets means that the PC becomes a market for people who actually want a "real computer". A niche technical market. They'll be happier, and we'll be happier.
I often wonder what will happen first: Microsoft/Apple realising the error of their ways and making a useful UI, or users collectively sighing and sucking up the crap they are given.
Put it this way, how many corporations have dumped their awful flash-sites? How many websites have you seen give up those hateful JS pop-ups, slide-outs, rolling banners, jiggly follow-me sidebars...? Or the "HEY WOULD YOU LIKE TO SUBSCRIBE INSTEAD OF ACTUALLY READING THE PAGE YOU CLICKED ON?!!! [Yes] [No but please ask me every fucking time]" pop-overs? Or "links" that are JS triggers that don't work like links, even though there's perfectly standard coding for JS pseudo-links? Or...
How many websites of major newspapers don't use third-party ad-hosting because they have an entire fucking in-house marketing department for their print edition, thus solving 95% of the problem with people using ad-blocking software?
How many major game companies stop requiring always-on net connections, or other obnoxious DRM, after having yet another first-week horrorshow on the authentication servers, which didn't stop pirates anyway, and instead decide to stop treating gamers who actually paid for the software as criminals?
How many....
Well, you get the idea. There's something about the corporate mindset that tends to just double-down on stupidity.
Do they... allow... Chuck Norris? {boggles}
You misunderstand. Whoever in the French military gave the take-down order pretty much confirmed that the information is genuine, and important. Foreign intelligence agencies don't often get a free kick like that.
Weird thing is, intelligence agency have tried and true methods for casting subtle doubt on compromised information. And not one of those methods involves bursting into a room, pointing at the thing and yelling "Hey! Everyone! I'm from the French military and this thing, this thing right here, which I'm pointing at, this thing is very important to us!" [Except in all-caps. And purple blink font.]
Honestly, splitting consumer and technical versions makes more sense than Ubuntu's attempt to straddle the communities.
Leave the real "Linux" for those who want to understand what's happening under the hood, making no attempt to mainstream it.
Then create a Linux-based, but completely stand-alone, locked-down consumer OS under a new brandname like Tux or Penguin or something equally happy-friendly. Something you can safely put on your grandparent's or child's netbook, notebook, tablet, or desktop and never hear from them again. No attempt to retain Linux binary-compatibility, and no attempt to appeal to the Linux user-base.
It doesn't matter if "Linux" has a 1% market share, because that's the percentage of users who know what they're doing. For about 60-80% of the rest, a simple safe consumer OS that doesn't try to be a "real" OS would be ideal.
Wait, are we talking about the planet or the element now?
They used to. Studying the Bible as the written Word Of God and studying the world as the manifest Word Of God were seen as complementary. As the results drifted apart, so did the natural philosophers and the theological philosophers.
The thread's dead, but I just wanted to mention to you that setting the terms of the bet would be an interesting exercise.
No one is going to accept terms where Mastropaolo can unilaterally choose the "third-party" judge. Or set the burden of proof so arbitrarily high that even God could not surmount it.
So it first means a mutually acceptable judge, otherwise no one would accept the challenge. Then in front of that judge, Mastropaolo and the challenger must agree on terms. What the challenger must disprove. Starting with "which version of bible", then "which interpretation of..." and that's where it gets interesting. See the debates at the top of the thread over interpretations of the order of creation in Gen 1 and 2. Now add the ambiguities in every chapter. Mastropaolo will need to pin this down exactly, so the judge can know what s/he is judging, and the challenger can know what s/he is challenging. It may turn out to be the first time that Mastropaolo (or the judge for that matter) has ever had to really define what he believes, the first time he has ever really had to face those internal contradictions, the first time he has ever really stepped outside the protective bubble of his fellow believers.
Since this is Slashdot...
you don't see mathematicians trying to disprove Shakespeare.
Actually, there have been attempts to prove/disprove authorship using mathematical analysis. Word use, rates of novel word introduction, etc. Both to prove that a new work is by Shakespeare, and, more controversially, to prove that the true author of Shakespeare's work was another known author/playwright (usually Marlowe.)
One day you might want to look up what "secular" actually means. Oh how you'll laugh.
-- Spoiler --
"Separated from religion", " things that have no religious or spiritual basis", etc. (Locally, the "Secular Society" is the name of a national atheist lobby group.)
The Hermit Kingdom's obsession with propaganda and rewriting history, and common language and history with South Korea, seems to make it ideal for a "backdoor" cultural attack.
The modern equivalent of a propaganda leaflet drop. Smuggle, or even airdrop, OLPC-style satellite receivers into North Korea, able to receive dedicated Korean language info dumps from suitable satellites, as well as rebroadcasted live radio and (power willing) TV channels. News, music, live weather, etc. (And dedicated counter-propaganda channels.) And encyclopedias, text books, banned poetry/history/music, stored on the devices. Modular, repairable, with solar panels and crank-generators repurposeable to reduce the number of units turned in or destroyed.
Designed in South Korea, manufactured in China, a few hundred thousand units per year. Bargain.
[Designed well, they could be more generally suited to the poorest parts of the world. Charities might buy them, increasing the production size, reducing the per-unit costs.]
Your mind can actually make you sick.
That's what bugged me about the FTS, people aren't "lying about how they feel". They've been lied to, now they are quite honestly experiencing the classic and very real symptoms of stress/fear/anxiety, which reinforces the original lie in others.
The treatment is anti-anxiety meds and a placebo device. The anti-anxiety meds treat the symptoms, providing relief, the placebo device "treats" the cause.
if people are really getting more intelligent, how do you explain Fox News?
Spend an hour on google looking up olden-days propaganda. Have a look at actual Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda posters from as recently as the 1930s and '40s. Compare that to the subtlety of Fox News. Yeah, people are smarter.
(Similarly, look at the standard of propaganda from less developed countries, compare that with western propaganda.)