Re:What we DON'T know about other life existing. .
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Lonely Planets
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· Score: 1
There are a lot of useful technologies which we've ignored, or that some societies harnessed while other's (who were as advanced or more) ignored, as well as innovations which were made obsolete before the widely caught on. Had Philo T. Farnsworth not thought up the idea of scanning images a line at a time with a cathode ray, we would all probably be using spinning disks for our video monitors, and people who reason along your lines would be assuming that an alien species would do it the same way.
Physics don't change for anybody, and it makes perfect sense that Calculus was realized by two people at once (even though there's evidence that archemedes beat them both to it by centuries), but how we have chosen to harness the forces around us is a matter of creativity, and choices made about which ideas to pursue, and which to abandon. I still say that, if there are aliens out there, there is every chance that converting sound and/or data into EM fluxuations might be something that never even occurred to them, and they solved their need to talk to each other some other way.
Re:Statistically
on
Lonely Planets
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Are you kidding? Do you really think we would ignore all that cheap labor!?
If we discovered a planet of Cro-Magnons, Dell would hire them to do tech support.
Given that all bodies of matter are finite state machines, an infinite univers would imply that there are not only other life forms, but there are more iterations of us, having this exact same argument on another Slashdot. In fact, there's an infinite number of us, having this exact same argument on other Slashdots, as well as every possible variation of who wins the debate, and there always will be, for as long as the Universe exists, which might be forever. (Read "The Physics of Immortality" for more head-tripping along these lines.)
Do you see the can of worms you open when you ignore Einstein's "finite yet unbounded" model?
Re:What we DON'T know about other life existing. .
on
Lonely Planets
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· Score: 1
For that matter, all unwired comm systems are technically the same
All of our unwired comm systems are about the same. Maybe the one other race out there does their communication by varying the spin of separated subatomic particles, and would consider our use of varied radio waves to be a novel application of a technology that had not even occurred to them. "Wow," they would say, "it seems so simple, it should have been obvious. On the other hand, you're communication method is limited by the speed of EM transmission, which makes it kind of useless for long-range chat like what we have. If only we knew you existed 14,000 years ago when you were sending this signal out. What an interesting species you were. Alas."
Re:We know other life exists
on
Lonely Planets
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· Score: 1
I was kind of lazy running the math in my head, but it looks like that formula, if we assume the most optimistic estimates you gave, results in 50,000 planets with civilization on them right now.
Unfortunately, those numbers are absurd, because assuming things like 5 life-sustaining planets per star ignores the fact that our own star system, which has a lot going for it, only has one. Nothing bigger than a dormant microbe can survive on any other body in the solar system.
Using the pessimist numbers (and being nice about it by substituting 1% in place of your "close to zero" estimates") we end up with one civilization per five galaxies.
Personally, I consider 1 to be a wildly optimistic estimate for value ne, and the "close to zero" estimates are probably so close to zero that, out of estimated 80 billion galxies, we are probably the only current civilization. It is not at all radical to conclude the value on N to be as low as 1/80,000,000,000.
Re:We know other life exists
on
Lonely Planets
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· Score: 2
Gotcha.
To repeat:
"Of course, it's possible that the only thing more nerdy than knowing something so obscure about Star Trek is correcting somebody else about it when they get it wrong."
Re:We know other life exists
on
Lonely Planets
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· Score: 1
If you were a real nerd, you would know that the Humans, Klingons, Romulan/Vulcans, etc. discovered evidence of common origins in a DS9 episode.
Of course, it's possible that the only thing more nerdy than knowing something so obscure about Star Trek is correcting somebody else about it when they get it wrong.
More often than not, I tend to see "Magic Eye" pictures in reverse. Instead of the 3D subject sticking out from the background, it looks like the background is close and the image is carved into it.
On the other hand, I have no color blindness, even though most of my family has at least a slight problem with color. It just goes to show you that people's eyes are different.
You've been suckered by his marketing. "His target" means that's only what he claims you might make by selling through his service. Kind of like how people running pyramid schemes tell you that you can earn "up to" $5000 a month working from home.
He's taking a 40% rake of gross sales for a service which you just pointed out is so darn cheap to run, and doing it with thousands of clients. Each of those clients makes a teeny, tiny fraction of the kind of money he makes, even though they are technically the ones doing the selling. You're only doing part of the math.
Alan Ralsky was not selling Viagra via spam. He was selling spam services to people who wanted to sell Viagra. You are just reinforcing my original point.
Almost all APEX DVD player problems are related to poor heat management. The same hacking sites that explained how to chip it to be region-free also have some great suggestions for working around the heat issues. Some are remarkably simple. Happy reading!
P.S. When I needed a new DVD player recently, I went with a Sony instead of the APEX for this very reason. I'd rather spend a little extra for something that lasts, even if buying two APEX systems is cheaper than the one Sony. Life is too short to mess with such hassles if you can afford to avoid them.
I call bullshit. Nobody is making $314,000 per year selling fake viagra by e-mail. I would be stunned to discover that anybody is making $31,400 doing that.
You left out the added layer of expense it takes to promote your business while still hiding it from the anti-spammer crowd.
Also, you can forget about repeat business with something like herbal viagra, or any other quack medicine for that matter. If you actually had a cheap herb that could improve people's sex lives, you wouldn't need to spam anybody to sell it.
Still, a big honkin' ground-based telescope that you build in sections in a near-vacuum environment seems to me to be one of the more compelling reasons to finally get around to building a Lunar base.
I wonder why nobody is talking about a lunar-based telescope. It seems that would give you the best of both worlds: pretty much no atmospheric interference, but with a modicum of gravity so a human crew could be there for extended periods.
Monster Cable does not increase quality of your system by a noticable amount, it's a massive hoax that I can speak against from personal experience... This isn't a troll it's the truth. Just thought I'd share.
A little googling around of stereo and A/V equipment reviews will back up what the AC is saying here. Monster Cable has never proven any level of superiority over cheap, generic cable made with like materials in a third-party double-blind test, and they never will, because there really only are a handful of cable-pulling companies in the world, and Monster buys it all from those companies just like everybody else. If you paid money for anything from Monster, I'm very sorry, but you were ripped off.
I'm also a big fan of the M$-built X-Box. (That dollar sign instead of the S... always funny.)
The DOA games alone makes it worth owning. I like fighting games, and DOA3 is still more fun to me than SC II. The only PS2 game I was even a little jealous of was GTA3, and it has now been ported. Anybody who owns both a PS2 and an X-Box will usually want the X-Box version of anything cross-platform due to the superior hardware performance the X-Box offers.
I'm not slamming Nintendo or Sony here at all. Each console has its own strengths, but the X-Box is far from useless.
I hardly play PC games ever anymore, and once that became the case, I found no need for a Windows system in my house. If anything is "useless", it's a Windows PC.
My theory is that the whole industry is built of fraud.
I can't believe that anybody is actually making money selling "herbal viagra" via spam. There are only so many people suffering from E.D., and most of them care enough about their little soldier that they are not going to gamble on "alternative" treatments when the real stuff is perfectly affordable and readilly available at the pharmacy. There's just no money in this sort of scam for the person who's trying to do the selling...
However, the pyramid scheme that they joined and told them they would get rich doing this is making money off of their greed, as is the spamming company who said they could reach "millions of Internet users" with news of their product. Also, the people selling addresses to the spammers who sell the idea to the sucker at the bottom of the pyramid is making money selling fake addresses. ISPs who turn a blind eye towards abuse until they get blacklisted and start up a new ISP under a new name are making money off them too.
The problem is not the 0.01% of people who buy from spammers. Think about it. If you are selling a product that will only make you about $50 a year per customer, and have to spam 10,000 people (and go through all the additional trouble of hiding from the many anti-spam vigilaties out there like us who love nothing more than to ruin the day of a spammer) for each customer you get, there's no way you are actually turning a profit. However, if you are suckered into trying, you might spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on spam services in the attempt. You, the would-be Herbal Viagra King, are the real customer of the spam industry, and the one who is feeding the machine.
Why is this worth it ? playing devils advocate, if I wanted to market ThinkGeek-like toys, Slashdot readership would be squarely in my "target market". A bit of effort cleansing addresses would pay off (because presumably, a fair portion of the populace reading Slashdot have more disposable income to spend on toys and geeky appliances ? ) and thus the spam would be more "directed" ?
If your business model depends ot targetting spam at people who hate spam enough to obfuscate their e-mail address, you are not going to be in business very long.
Besides, the whole point of spam is that it's a cheap broad scattershot. If you were willing to go to the trouble of demographic research, you would probably be better off buying a banner ad at megatokyo.com or something.
Slashdot Mantra: USA != World Express free speech in China and expect to become a parking spot for a tank.
You missed the grandparent post's point. A person in China does have the right to free speech. It's a natural right of mankind. The US government does not "grant" this right to Americans, rather the PRC government punishes the practice of this right by the Chinese.
It is the founding belief of the United States, largely inspired by various philosophers such as Voltaire, that our rights are ours. They are not priveleges granted by a government, but part of our humanity, endowed by our creator. The sole purpose of government is to protect those rights, and the extent to which it fails to do so is the extent to which it is a failed government.
They use whatever drive they can get cheapest from their supply chain at the moment which supports the -R standard they advertize, and if it happens to support +R, then groovy. If not, they never said it did.
am I the only one here who would honestly love to see microsoft improve their software and licensing rather than just failing and being consumed by GNU/Linux/FOSS?
You are not. I feel the same way. Just as, as an Apple fan, I was glad to see many of the Macintosh innovations show up in XP. All this "who wins" stuff is just a pissing contest between platform zealots. I want to see computing experiences improve for humanity. If Apple pushes UI improvements and Linux pushes openness and reasonable prices, and MS continues to desperately fend them both off by trying to keep up, it's good news all around.
As long as the MS conspiracy theories that guys like Cringely like to throw around never come to a head, things can only continue to get better, no matter what OS you prefer.
Is it written WORD right to left or letter right to left?
Everything is right to left, letter and word. Also, the big characters are consonants. Vowels look like tiny little ticks and checks between the main letters (and are sometimes even omitted.)
I happen to have a Jewish first name, and learned all this when I was shown how to write it in Hebrew, and then spent a little time chatting with the person who showed it to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Physics don't change for anybody, and it makes perfect sense that Calculus was realized by two people at once (even though there's evidence that archemedes beat them both to it by centuries), but how we have chosen to harness the forces around us is a matter of creativity, and choices made about which ideas to pursue, and which to abandon. I still say that, if there are aliens out there, there is every chance that converting sound and/or data into EM fluxuations might be something that never even occurred to them, and they solved their need to talk to each other some other way.
If we discovered a planet of Cro-Magnons, Dell would hire them to do tech support.
Do you see the can of worms you open when you ignore Einstein's "finite yet unbounded" model?
All of our unwired comm systems are about the same. Maybe the one other race out there does their communication by varying the spin of separated subatomic particles, and would consider our use of varied radio waves to be a novel application of a technology that had not even occurred to them. "Wow," they would say, "it seems so simple, it should have been obvious. On the other hand, you're communication method is limited by the speed of EM transmission, which makes it kind of useless for long-range chat like what we have. If only we knew you existed 14,000 years ago when you were sending this signal out. What an interesting species you were. Alas."
Unfortunately, those numbers are absurd, because assuming things like 5 life-sustaining planets per star ignores the fact that our own star system, which has a lot going for it, only has one. Nothing bigger than a dormant microbe can survive on any other body in the solar system.
Using the pessimist numbers (and being nice about it by substituting 1% in place of your "close to zero" estimates") we end up with one civilization per five galaxies.
Personally, I consider 1 to be a wildly optimistic estimate for value ne, and the "close to zero" estimates are probably so close to zero that, out of estimated 80 billion galxies, we are probably the only current civilization. It is not at all radical to conclude the value on N to be as low as 1/80,000,000,000.
To repeat:
"Of course, it's possible that the only thing more nerdy than knowing something so obscure about Star Trek is correcting somebody else about it when they get it wrong."
Of course, it's possible that the only thing more nerdy than knowing something so obscure about Star Trek is correcting somebody else about it when they get it wrong.
On the other hand, I have no color blindness, even though most of my family has at least a slight problem with color. It just goes to show you that people's eyes are different.
He's taking a 40% rake of gross sales for a service which you just pointed out is so darn cheap to run, and doing it with thousands of clients. Each of those clients makes a teeny, tiny fraction of the kind of money he makes, even though they are technically the ones doing the selling. You're only doing part of the math.
Alan Ralsky was not selling Viagra via spam. He was selling spam services to people who wanted to sell Viagra. You are just reinforcing my original point.
P.S. When I needed a new DVD player recently, I went with a Sony instead of the APEX for this very reason. I'd rather spend a little extra for something that lasts, even if buying two APEX systems is cheaper than the one Sony. Life is too short to mess with such hassles if you can afford to avoid them.
You left out the added layer of expense it takes to promote your business while still hiding it from the anti-spammer crowd.
Also, you can forget about repeat business with something like herbal viagra, or any other quack medicine for that matter. If you actually had a cheap herb that could improve people's sex lives, you wouldn't need to spam anybody to sell it.
If all I wanted was Jiggle, SC II would have been more than good enough for me.
Still, a big honkin' ground-based telescope that you build in sections in a near-vacuum environment seems to me to be one of the more compelling reasons to finally get around to building a Lunar base.
-- The late Sen. Everett Dirksen (IL)
Am I just crazy to suggest such a thing?
A little googling around of stereo and A/V equipment reviews will back up what the AC is saying here. Monster Cable has never proven any level of superiority over cheap, generic cable made with like materials in a third-party double-blind test, and they never will, because there really only are a handful of cable-pulling companies in the world, and Monster buys it all from those companies just like everybody else. If you paid money for anything from Monster, I'm very sorry, but you were ripped off.
The DOA games alone makes it worth owning. I like fighting games, and DOA3 is still more fun to me than SC II. The only PS2 game I was even a little jealous of was GTA3, and it has now been ported. Anybody who owns both a PS2 and an X-Box will usually want the X-Box version of anything cross-platform due to the superior hardware performance the X-Box offers.
I'm not slamming Nintendo or Sony here at all. Each console has its own strengths, but the X-Box is far from useless.
I hardly play PC games ever anymore, and once that became the case, I found no need for a Windows system in my house. If anything is "useless", it's a Windows PC.
Does Norway's "opt-in" list actually work? If so, I think I'm going to be registering a ".no" e-mail address at the earliest opportunity!
I can't believe that anybody is actually making money selling "herbal viagra" via spam. There are only so many people suffering from E.D., and most of them care enough about their little soldier that they are not going to gamble on "alternative" treatments when the real stuff is perfectly affordable and readilly available at the pharmacy. There's just no money in this sort of scam for the person who's trying to do the selling...
However, the pyramid scheme that they joined and told them they would get rich doing this is making money off of their greed, as is the spamming company who said they could reach "millions of Internet users" with news of their product. Also, the people selling addresses to the spammers who sell the idea to the sucker at the bottom of the pyramid is making money selling fake addresses. ISPs who turn a blind eye towards abuse until they get blacklisted and start up a new ISP under a new name are making money off them too.
The problem is not the 0.01% of people who buy from spammers. Think about it. If you are selling a product that will only make you about $50 a year per customer, and have to spam 10,000 people (and go through all the additional trouble of hiding from the many anti-spam vigilaties out there like us who love nothing more than to ruin the day of a spammer) for each customer you get, there's no way you are actually turning a profit. However, if you are suckered into trying, you might spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on spam services in the attempt. You, the would-be Herbal Viagra King, are the real customer of the spam industry, and the one who is feeding the machine.
If your business model depends ot targetting spam at people who hate spam enough to obfuscate their e-mail address, you are not going to be in business very long.
Besides, the whole point of spam is that it's a cheap broad scattershot. If you were willing to go to the trouble of demographic research, you would probably be better off buying a banner ad at megatokyo.com or something.
Express free speech in China and expect to become a parking spot for a tank.
You missed the grandparent post's point. A person in China does have the right to free speech. It's a natural right of mankind. The US government does not "grant" this right to Americans, rather the PRC government punishes the practice of this right by the Chinese.
It is the founding belief of the United States, largely inspired by various philosophers such as Voltaire, that our rights are ours. They are not priveleges granted by a government, but part of our humanity, endowed by our creator. The sole purpose of government is to protect those rights, and the extent to which it fails to do so is the extent to which it is a failed government.
They use whatever drive they can get cheapest from their supply chain at the moment which supports the -R standard they advertize, and if it happens to support +R, then groovy. If not, they never said it did.
You are not. I feel the same way. Just as, as an Apple fan, I was glad to see many of the Macintosh innovations show up in XP. All this "who wins" stuff is just a pissing contest between platform zealots. I want to see computing experiences improve for humanity. If Apple pushes UI improvements and Linux pushes openness and reasonable prices, and MS continues to desperately fend them both off by trying to keep up, it's good news all around.
As long as the MS conspiracy theories that guys like Cringely like to throw around never come to a head, things can only continue to get better, no matter what OS you prefer.
Everything is right to left, letter and word. Also, the big characters are consonants. Vowels look like tiny little ticks and checks between the main letters (and are sometimes even omitted.)
I happen to have a Jewish first name, and learned all this when I was shown how to write it in Hebrew, and then spent a little time chatting with the person who showed it to me.