Re:Would we know it if we saw it?
on
Explaining SETI
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· Score: 1
Ultimately I think there are just so many scenarios that allow for intelligent life to exist in our galaxy without our having discovered them as of yet.
True, but the point is that it only takes 1 space travelling civilization with an expansion desire to dominate the galaxy. If self-aware intelligent life is relatively common, then it would be likely that we would see at least 1 in multiple billion years that meets that simple requirement. It seems unlikely that if the galaxy were teeming with intelligence that every single one of them would be "homebodies" or would have some show-stopping problem.
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Re:Would we know it if we saw it?
on
Explaining SETI
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· Score: 1
That's a reasonable point, but it still only holds off the inevitable. What would make people want to colonize another world, other than adventure? Probably for more room, because of overpopulation. How long will it take for the solar system to become crowded enough for people to want a whole new world.
Also, colonizing an asteroid is not the same as living on a whole new world. It's possible we might get the technology to create whole new planets out of stray matter (or blasting off a chunk of jupiter or something), but I have a feeling it will be a lot easier to move to other planets.
I think there are always going to be those people who just want to just create a whole new world. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of them are religious cults wanting to start a whole new civilization. That's how the pilgrims got started!
But still the point remains: if intelligent life were common, then it seems likely that one would have arisin in 12 billion years that had a trait that they like to travel and populate other places.
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Re:Would we know it if we saw it?
on
Explaining SETI
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· Score: 1
we haven't filled the Galaxy yet and there's no reason to assume that other life forms like us would necessarily be significantly more advanced than we are.
You're thinking on too small a time scale. Remember, the galaxy is about 12 billion years old. We are about 2-300,000 years old. We've only had technology for about 4-10,000 years, advanced technology only a few hundred, and space travel for 40 years. That's nothing! The odds of two species evolving at precisely the same time is vanishingly small, given the time scale.
I guarantee that in the next 1000-5000 years, we will launch multi-generational space ships to colonize other planets. Then those people will colonize others, and so on, geometrically. In only a few million years, humans will populate the entire galaxy, even if we only have sublight travel!
Let's say it take an average of 2 million years for a species like us to fill the galaxy. The galaxy is 6000 times older than that! If species like us are relatively common, it should have happened by now. Keep in mind that once a planet is filled with a particular species, it's unlikely than any other species would ever evolve on that planet. Once the galaxy is full, that's it.
The reason I specified a galaxy rather than the universe is that the distances between galaxies are so immense, that it's unlikely that we would ever populate other galaxes at sub-light speeds. It's just too long of a trip, even for the most intrepid explorers.
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Re:Would we know it if we saw it?
on
Explaining SETI
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· Score: 2
They could exist on planes or as forms of matter that we don't even imagine.
So what? Sure it's possible, but the only form of life that we know is possible is our own. The point is that it only takes one race developing intelligence and space travel to fill the galaxy in a relatively short time. Since that hasn't happened, it must be the fact that life like ours is extremely unlikely.
Sure, it might be the case that there are other forms of intelligence that are occur much more frequently, but don't tend to fill up the galaxy. Possible, but it doesn't seem very likely.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Apple has done things in their history that Microsoft never dreamed of. They are absolutely the worst company in the history of the industry in terms of screwing their customers, as well as the rest of the industry.
Why does Apple get such a pass from a lot of people? Can you imagine what the world would look like if Apple had won and not Microsoft? We would all be running proprietary hardware that costs $20,000 (and probably still without a hard drive like Steve wanted). Fortunately, Apple was too incompetent to truly become a monopoly.
The irony is that I actually am kind of excited about OS/X. I've wanted a desktop operating system based on Unix for 20 years. But I will NEVER, EVER buy proprietary hardware from Apple. It will only encourage them.
Our only hope is to finally drive the last nail into Apple's coffin, and hope whoever buys the assets has the good sense to finally open up Apple hardware, and fire all the arrogant SOBs that still think Apple's manure doesn't stink.
Sorry about the rant, but it's incidents like this that just reinforce my opinion of Apple's arrogance and stupidity.
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Re:Your thinking is wrong...
on
Explaining SETI
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· Score: 2
What if they don't WANT to be noticed.
Who is "they"? Either self-aware life is common, or it isn't. Human's have existed for a very, very, very short period of time. If self-aware life is common, they we would have had one a long time ago that colonized the whole galaxy. Like I said before, it doesn't take that long compared to 12 billion years of history. Do the math, don't give me this fuzzy "I just know" stuff.
and even we are on the verge of faster than light travel through gravity warping,
We're not on the "verge" of jack. We don't even have any decent theories that say it's possible, much less practical, much less on the "verge".
We are NOT alone, don't want to go into details, but we are definitely NOT alone, and haven't been for a very long time.
You're thinking emotionally, not rationally. Again, do the math. Figure out how long it takes to fill the galaxy if you have a race that wants to travel, even at sub-light speeds. It's a blip in the history of the galaxy. It only takes one race.
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Re:Let's face it, we're alone in the galaxy
on
Explaining SETI
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· Score: 2
Humans have the ability to fill our solar system with life, but we don't bother.
Humans do not currently have that ability, but in any case, I'm talking galaxy, not solar system. There's not much all the expansion capability in the solar system, but there are (probably) going to be planets in other solar systems that are habitable. There is no question that humans will eventually (1000 years? 10,000 years?) will build multi-generational ships to colonize other solar systems, assuming we don't discover some way to go super-lightspeed.
Why do you feel it must be that a race that can expand will expand?
It doesn't matter what one particular race does or doesn't do. If intelligent life is common, then there should exist one that likes expansion. It only takes one.
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Let's face it, we're alone in the galaxy
on
Explaining SETI
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· Score: 2
It's actually pretty easy to prove. The galaxy is what, 12 billion years old? Once a civilization creates space travel, it doesn't take that long (relatively speaking) to fill up the galaxy with life, even at sub-light speeds. I forget the exact amount of time, but the fill rate is geometric. X time to travel to the next star, X time to establish industry, and then send 10 more "seeds" to the next one. It only takes a few million years to fill the Galaxy.
Since we're alone on Earth, we're alone in the galaxy.
And is it all that surprising? I would imagine that lower forms of life might be relatively common, but I think it's probably likely that self-aware life is unbelievably unlikely. It only seems likely to us because it happened to us.
I hate to be a wet blanket, but hasn't anyone noticed that we don't even have 2D video phones in any kind of penetration? Sure, they exist, but they are hardly ubiquitous even in business situations.
Given that 2D has pretty much failed for a variety of reasons, what makes anyone think that 3D is going to suddenly become a "must have" item that will drive down the cost?
In short, all the same claims have been made for video phones for 30 years (2001: A Space Odyssey, anyone?). None of them have come true. I think there are two primary reasons: 1) the advantages of seeing the person are not all that much compared to the added bandwidth cost (at least 100-1000 times voice bandwidth), and 2) I think most people don't *want* to be seen over the phone. Think about how much more trouble you have to take in your appearance when you go to a customer's site versus just going into the office (well, maybe not you, Mr. Geek, but think about the rest of the world). It's a lot more effort to have to dress up all the time for phone meetings with clients.
I predict this is one of those cases where it's "the technology of the future, and always will be".
Put it this way; if we had the money, would people be opposed to putting a cop on every street corner in the country? Unless you have paranoia about the police, most people wouldn't see a problem with this and in fact, think more police is a GOOD thing. This is just extending the eyes and mobility of the police.
As with all things (like the police), they can be abused, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do them.
If you're a male, it's unlikely you will ever see that monitor, since it is a fetal heart rate monitor for pregnant women.:)
To be fair, it's been my experience that it's the data acquisition port part of the monitor that's been so atrocious, not so much the "operational" part of the firmware. I'm sure that gets a lot more testing and attention.
What's kind of amusing is that in later versions of the Corometrics monitor they threw away their own protocol and implemented their chief rival's: HP's.
Actually, the only standard that matters is the ANSI C standard, because that is a Standard Library call. However, checking the standard, I see you are correct. It does return the number of characters, but it also returns an error code if its negative in the case of fprintf (which printf is a special case of). sprintf, on the other hand, does not return an error code.
However, you have a portability problem in your program. There are only two values that are portable for exit(): EXIT_SUCCESS and EXIT_FAILURE. It is also legal to use 0 and 1 for these values, respectively. Now, the ANSI standard allows you to use other values, but it is implementation dependent what the OS does with them.
I could also point out that errno.h is unnecessary since you don't use any error number constants.
ANSI C requires an int on main. A lot of people use void, but it is illegal. In fact, I recall a poster on comp.lang.c saying that he had a compiler that actually core dumped when you used void.
Very good! That has a very high density of bugs, I would say. I count at least 5 bugs in that code (4 if it's pre-ANSI C):
1. "void" rather than "int" on main.
2. Need to include "stdio.h".
3. Invalid declaration of main (which is not illegal in pre-ANSI C)
4. Use of "\r" rather than "\n".
5. Need to return a status code.
Any bugs that I missed? Any way to get an even higher bug density (while still displaying "Hello World")?
I guess you could do 'puts("Hello World\r")', which not only has the "\r" rather than "\n", but is also redundant! That counts as another bug in my book.
I used to write drivers that communicated with medical monitors. Talk about garbage! It was the exception rather than the rule that the monitors worked exactly how they were documented.
My vote for the medical monitor with the worst software and by far the worst communication protocol has to be the Corometrics 115 monitor. Anyone else ever have to deal with that piece of crap? My condolences if so. It took me literally *years* to get the driver to work perfectly in all situations, because there where so many versions of the firmware that caused it act differently in different situations. It was always fun debugging software running in a live patient environment.:)
Indeed. In fact, there is an article in this weeks TV Guide that talks about the new FCC chairman. A great article, but unfortunately I couldn't find it online. A quote, however: "New FCC chairman and champion of the free market Michael Powell says, 'There's a lot of garbage on TV,' and it's up to viewers--not government--to do something about it. That's a change from the Clinton days."
Another quote:
"But, he added: 'We have to be realistic about what government can do. We have a First Amendment in this country that prohibits, thankfully, people in my position from being national censors. Broadcasters shouldn't be dictated to by government."
In short, the Left loves to lie about the what the Republicans stand for. Yes, they have their share of the wackos (the religious right comes to mind), but on balance, freedom lives in the Republican party. I guess it's probably too much to ask for Jaime to learn something today, and shed some of his naivete.
[and no, the "real" home of freedom is not the Libertarians, although they and Republicans share a lot of ideology.]
Oh, and thanks to Microsoft innovation - you may remember this from the trial - the browser is integrated with the OS, [etc, etc]
That is inaccurate. It's thanks to an object oriented operating system that we have this problem. Ever heard of the term "reuse"? It's a feature, not a bug, that you can reuse components in various applications without having to rewrite them.
KDE would have exactly this flaw if the Konquerer component had this flaw and an e-mail reader used the component.
In short, I wish people would stop with the idiotic Microsoft bashing. All software has bugs. Let's fix it and move on.
We have more cities with high density, but density is certainly not new. New York City, Boston, etc all had extremely dense populations at the turn of the century.
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Ultimately I think there are just so many scenarios that allow for intelligent life to exist in our galaxy without our having discovered them as of yet.
True, but the point is that it only takes 1 space travelling civilization with an expansion desire to dominate the galaxy. If self-aware intelligent life is relatively common, then it would be likely that we would see at least 1 in multiple billion years that meets that simple requirement. It seems unlikely that if the galaxy were teeming with intelligence that every single one of them would be "homebodies" or would have some show-stopping problem.
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That's a reasonable point, but it still only holds off the inevitable. What would make people want to colonize another world, other than adventure? Probably for more room, because of overpopulation. How long will it take for the solar system to become crowded enough for people to want a whole new world.
Also, colonizing an asteroid is not the same as living on a whole new world. It's possible we might get the technology to create whole new planets out of stray matter (or blasting off a chunk of jupiter or something), but I have a feeling it will be a lot easier to move to other planets.
I think there are always going to be those people who just want to just create a whole new world. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of them are religious cults wanting to start a whole new civilization. That's how the pilgrims got started!
But still the point remains: if intelligent life were common, then it seems likely that one would have arisin in 12 billion years that had a trait that they like to travel and populate other places.
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we haven't filled the Galaxy yet and there's no reason to assume that other life forms like us would necessarily be significantly more advanced than we are.
You're thinking on too small a time scale. Remember, the galaxy is about 12 billion years old. We are about 2-300,000 years old. We've only had technology for about 4-10,000 years, advanced technology only a few hundred, and space travel for 40 years. That's nothing! The odds of two species evolving at precisely the same time is vanishingly small, given the time scale.
I guarantee that in the next 1000-5000 years, we will launch multi-generational space ships to colonize other planets. Then those people will colonize others, and so on, geometrically. In only a few million years, humans will populate the entire galaxy, even if we only have sublight travel!
Let's say it take an average of 2 million years for a species like us to fill the galaxy. The galaxy is 6000 times older than that! If species like us are relatively common, it should have happened by now. Keep in mind that once a planet is filled with a particular species, it's unlikely than any other species would ever evolve on that planet. Once the galaxy is full, that's it.
The reason I specified a galaxy rather than the universe is that the distances between galaxies are so immense, that it's unlikely that we would ever populate other galaxes at sub-light speeds. It's just too long of a trip, even for the most intrepid explorers.
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They could exist on planes or as forms of matter that we don't even imagine.
So what? Sure it's possible, but the only form of life that we know is possible is our own. The point is that it only takes one race developing intelligence and space travel to fill the galaxy in a relatively short time. Since that hasn't happened, it must be the fact that life like ours is extremely unlikely.
Sure, it might be the case that there are other forms of intelligence that are occur much more frequently, but don't tend to fill up the galaxy. Possible, but it doesn't seem very likely.
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I've said it before and I'll say it again: Apple has done things in their history that Microsoft never dreamed of. They are absolutely the worst company in the history of the industry in terms of screwing their customers, as well as the rest of the industry.
Why does Apple get such a pass from a lot of people? Can you imagine what the world would look like if Apple had won and not Microsoft? We would all be running proprietary hardware that costs $20,000 (and probably still without a hard drive like Steve wanted). Fortunately, Apple was too incompetent to truly become a monopoly.
The irony is that I actually am kind of excited about OS/X. I've wanted a desktop operating system based on Unix for 20 years. But I will NEVER, EVER buy proprietary hardware from Apple. It will only encourage them.
Our only hope is to finally drive the last nail into Apple's coffin, and hope whoever buys the assets has the good sense to finally open up Apple hardware, and fire all the arrogant SOBs that still think Apple's manure doesn't stink.
Sorry about the rant, but it's incidents like this that just reinforce my opinion of Apple's arrogance and stupidity.
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What if they don't WANT to be noticed.
Who is "they"? Either self-aware life is common, or it isn't. Human's have existed for a very, very, very short period of time. If self-aware life is common, they we would have had one a long time ago that colonized the whole galaxy. Like I said before, it doesn't take that long compared to 12 billion years of history. Do the math, don't give me this fuzzy "I just know" stuff.
and even we are on the verge of faster than light travel through gravity warping,
We're not on the "verge" of jack. We don't even have any decent theories that say it's possible, much less practical, much less on the "verge".
We are NOT alone, don't want to go into details, but we are definitely NOT alone, and haven't been for a very long time.
You're thinking emotionally, not rationally. Again, do the math. Figure out how long it takes to fill the galaxy if you have a race that wants to travel, even at sub-light speeds. It's a blip in the history of the galaxy. It only takes one race.
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Humans have the ability to fill our solar system with life, but we don't bother.
Humans do not currently have that ability, but in any case, I'm talking galaxy, not solar system. There's not much all the expansion capability in the solar system, but there are (probably) going to be planets in other solar systems that are habitable. There is no question that humans will eventually (1000 years? 10,000 years?) will build multi-generational ships to colonize other solar systems, assuming we don't discover some way to go super-lightspeed.
Why do you feel it must be that a race that can expand will expand?
It doesn't matter what one particular race does or doesn't do. If intelligent life is common, then there should exist one that likes expansion. It only takes one.
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It's actually pretty easy to prove. The galaxy is what, 12 billion years old? Once a civilization creates space travel, it doesn't take that long (relatively speaking) to fill up the galaxy with life, even at sub-light speeds. I forget the exact amount of time, but the fill rate is geometric. X time to travel to the next star, X time to establish industry, and then send 10 more "seeds" to the next one. It only takes a few million years to fill the Galaxy.
Since we're alone on Earth, we're alone in the galaxy.
And is it all that surprising? I would imagine that lower forms of life might be relatively common, but I think it's probably likely that self-aware life is unbelievably unlikely. It only seems likely to us because it happened to us.
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I hate to be a wet blanket, but hasn't anyone noticed that we don't even have 2D video phones in any kind of penetration? Sure, they exist, but they are hardly ubiquitous even in business situations.
Given that 2D has pretty much failed for a variety of reasons, what makes anyone think that 3D is going to suddenly become a "must have" item that will drive down the cost?
In short, all the same claims have been made for video phones for 30 years (2001: A Space Odyssey, anyone?). None of them have come true. I think there are two primary reasons: 1) the advantages of seeing the person are not all that much compared to the added bandwidth cost (at least 100-1000 times voice bandwidth), and 2) I think most people don't *want* to be seen over the phone. Think about how much more trouble you have to take in your appearance when you go to a customer's site versus just going into the office (well, maybe not you, Mr. Geek, but think about the rest of the world). It's a lot more effort to have to dress up all the time for phone meetings with clients.
I predict this is one of those cases where it's "the technology of the future, and always will be".
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Put it this way; if we had the money, would people be opposed to putting a cop on every street corner in the country? Unless you have paranoia about the police, most people wouldn't see a problem with this and in fact, think more police is a GOOD thing. This is just extending the eyes and mobility of the police.
As with all things (like the police), they can be abused, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do them.
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But you're assuming that we, as Americans, care about internationalization issues. [RM101 ducks, as the truth of this strikes too close to home...] :)
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Oops! You're right...
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I don't know why I checked the anonymous button on that!
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If you're a male, it's unlikely you will ever see that monitor, since it is a fetal heart rate monitor for pregnant women. :)
To be fair, it's been my experience that it's the data acquisition port part of the monitor that's been so atrocious, not so much the "operational" part of the firmware. I'm sure that gets a lot more testing and attention.
What's kind of amusing is that in later versions of the Corometrics monitor they threw away their own protocol and implemented their chief rival's: HP's.
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Actually, I was wrong about "main(void)" (Bug #3). The ANSI C Standard allows that declaration.
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Actually, the only standard that matters is the ANSI C standard, because that is a Standard Library call. However, checking the standard, I see you are correct. It does return the number of characters, but it also returns an error code if its negative in the case of fprintf (which printf is a special case of). sprintf, on the other hand, does not return an error code.
However, you have a portability problem in your program. There are only two values that are portable for exit(): EXIT_SUCCESS and EXIT_FAILURE. It is also legal to use 0 and 1 for these values, respectively. Now, the ANSI standard allows you to use other values, but it is implementation dependent what the OS does with them.
I could also point out that errno.h is unnecessary since you don't use any error number constants.
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ANSI C requires an int on main. A lot of people use void, but it is illegal. In fact, I recall a poster on comp.lang.c saying that he had a compiler that actually core dumped when you used void.
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Er, 'printf' doesn't return a status, it returns the number of characters printed. You don't need to check it.
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Very good! That has a very high density of bugs, I would say. I count at least 5 bugs in that code (4 if it's pre-ANSI C):
1. "void" rather than "int" on main.
2. Need to include "stdio.h".
3. Invalid declaration of main (which is not illegal in pre-ANSI C)
4. Use of "\r" rather than "\n".
5. Need to return a status code.
Any bugs that I missed? Any way to get an even higher bug density (while still displaying "Hello World")?
I guess you could do 'puts("Hello World\r")', which not only has the "\r" rather than "\n", but is also redundant! That counts as another bug in my book.
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I used to write drivers that communicated with medical monitors. Talk about garbage! It was the exception rather than the rule that the monitors worked exactly how they were documented.
My vote for the medical monitor with the worst software and by far the worst communication protocol has to be the Corometrics 115 monitor. Anyone else ever have to deal with that piece of crap? My condolences if so. It took me literally *years* to get the driver to work perfectly in all situations, because there where so many versions of the firmware that caused it act differently in different situations. It was always fun debugging software running in a live patient environment. :)
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Indeed. In fact, there is an article in this weeks TV Guide that talks about the new FCC chairman. A great article, but unfortunately I couldn't find it online. A quote, however: "New FCC chairman and champion of the free market Michael Powell says, 'There's a lot of garbage on TV,' and it's up to viewers--not government--to do something about it. That's a change from the Clinton days."
Another quote:
"But, he added: 'We have to be realistic about what government can do. We have a First Amendment in this country that prohibits, thankfully, people in my position from being national censors. Broadcasters shouldn't be dictated to by government."
In short, the Left loves to lie about the what the Republicans stand for. Yes, they have their share of the wackos (the religious right comes to mind), but on balance, freedom lives in the Republican party. I guess it's probably too much to ask for Jaime to learn something today, and shed some of his naivete.
[and no, the "real" home of freedom is not the Libertarians, although they and Republicans share a lot of ideology.]
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I don't remember, but it sounds like something I would have said.
And wow! Nothing has changed in a year. Linux still doesn't have any decent applications compared to Windows or the Mac.
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That was the sound of this joke falling flat.
I hope this isn't an omen of the quality of the 4/1 jokes this year.
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Oh, and thanks to Microsoft innovation - you may remember this from the trial - the browser is integrated with the OS, [etc, etc]
That is inaccurate. It's thanks to an object oriented operating system that we have this problem. Ever heard of the term "reuse"? It's a feature, not a bug, that you can reuse components in various applications without having to rewrite them.
KDE would have exactly this flaw if the Konquerer component had this flaw and an e-mail reader used the component.
In short, I wish people would stop with the idiotic Microsoft bashing. All software has bugs. Let's fix it and move on.
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Density?
We have more cities with high density, but density is certainly not new. New York City, Boston, etc all had extremely dense populations at the turn of the century.
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