goddamit, why the hell did someone metamod this to "overrated". did you even bother following the link i posted?
i swear to god, slashdot is becoming impossible to post to, there's a small community of posters who automatically get a 2, and hardly anyone else can get a friggin voice.
i think the article i link to is very interesting and worthy of discussion...
"seti@home makes a lot of assumptions in order to make it's goals seems plausible. .."
No. SETI researchers make no such assumptions. They certainly don't make many of the assumptions you've claimed they make. For example, you say that one of SETI's assumptions is that every planet that develops life will eventually develop an intelligent civilization. I know of no serious researchers who assume such a thing. In fact, the URL you listed to demonstrate this assumption says precisely the opposite.
no, i really think you need to reread this. they specifically say that a planet that spawns life will evolve intelligence 100% of the time. to me that's utter bunk. they plug rediculous values in drake's equation's variables.
You correctly claim that our own evolutionary history would indicate that intelligence such as ours is probably an unlikely development. But you incorrectly claim that "intelligence itself is not evolutionarily stable." We only have a very few examples of intelligence, and not enough to make such a statement. Sure, brains are expensive, but judging from the success of mammals, they're a valuable investment. The only way to know for sure would be to look at the evolutionary paths of thousands of worlds, and compare them.
this is what i meant by a some very well timed random events. without them, mammals would not have been given the opportunity to evolve. mammals didn't evolve brains because they could, they did it because they had to due to the particular ecological pressures present. had those ecological pressures NOT been present, there were much better mechanisms to spend "energy" on.
The rest of your review is based on several other unprovable assumptions:
- That the civilization will not invest the time or resources in contacting other worlds.
SETI always uses us (earth) as an example. so i'm doing the same. how much have we done to contact other worlds? what if all the other intelligences are ALSO just listening?
- That the energy requirements of a long-term project would be prohibitive.
how is that unprovable? we're looking for radio signals. we know what energy costs it takes to send multidirectional radio signals for huge distances (astronomical).
As to the first two, we don't know what energy technologies will be developed in the future, how committed a civilization might be to finding others, or how good a very advanced civilization would be at picking candidate planets to beam signals at.
yeah but come on, radio communications is a PRIMITIVE and energy INEFFICIENT technology. by the time future energy technologies are developed radio waves might not even be used.
- That most civilizations will self-destruct within a few centuries.
For the third, I would dispute your claim that "We have come close to wiping ourselves out several times already." [discussion of nuclear war's effect on our survival]
i admit my statement is a cynical one, however we have to admit things look pretty bleak! and self-destruction doesn't have to mean nuclear war! there's plague, nano-technology, chemical weapons, ecological disasters, and a score of destructive ways we'll develop in the next 50 years.
This is part of what makes SETI research so valuable. Finding out how common other intelligence in the universe is tells us a lot about our own situation. Even if we did a complete, thorough search of the entire EM spectrum for ten thousand years and came up with nothing, we'd still have learned something valuable. We'd have learned that successful, intelligent species are very few and far between, and that it was even more important that we not screw things up.
i suppose. or that they are not willing to talk to us. or that we missed a critical segment of the sky. or that our algorithm had a bug in it (remember when SETI was sending the same block to every computer for a few weeks?). or that we're the only ones stupid enough to use EM in the first place (what if all the other intelligent beings use ESP?)...
you're right. but the DOMINATING species after a long period that's required for a complex organ like the brain to evolve has to involve resource competition and therefore aggressiveness. the mosquito point just underlines what i'm saying. you can't afford to make lots of organisms when they have expensive organs like the brain. i should have said that "evolution's most successful LARGE/COMPLEX creations are the ones that are the most able to conquer, kill, and survive".
actually, if you read my long "review" (the link i posted) i actually go over that. intelligence most likely came about due to intense competition between similar species. our first tools (the creation of which furthered our intelligence) were weapons. evolution's most successful creations are the ones that are the most able to conquer, kill, and survive. insects, for example. so in order for intelligence to survive and thrive, it would have to be coupled with an aggressive organism.
i don't see how it could be any other way even on totally different planets. in fact, i believe that the development of intelligence was an amazing fluke on earth. mammals in general only made it because of a particularly well timed asteroid...
most planets will probably evolve insect like organisms. unintelligent and incredibly efficient.
SETI is assuming that someone is actually sending a signal that we can pick up. have we sent such signals? twice. both very directed and both for a very short time. sending an omni-directional signal is insanely expensive. would the governments of earth ever allow such a waste of resources? than how can we assume that someone else would?
the more advanced the civilization, the more likely it is to self-destruct. look how many times we've come close. and it'll only get worse. there may be only a 200-300 year window during which a civilization is advanced enough to both send and pick up signals
we're assuming that an ET would even bother developing radio waves. what if their atmosphere was such that radio communications on their planet wouldn't have worked? what if their mass communication was done using seismic waves and by the time they got off their globe they were using targetted light beams?
...site X (pick any recently/.'ed website) declares itself the most popular website ever (accordint to projections based on website traffic immediately after being/.'ed)
<TT>damn plain text bugs... again:
<BR>
<BR>there was a typo in one of the header files
<BR>
<BR>#define V_IBM 0x0001// <- should have been 0x0002
<BR>#define V_MS 0x0001
<BR>
<BR>if (vendor == V_IBM) {
<BR> for (x=0; x < 10000; x++);
<BR>}
<BR></TT>
well, this actually isn't all that surprising to me. for anyone who's used MSN Explorer they are definitely trying to turn it into an AOL like experience. they will probably move forward and start doing all sorts of activeX trickery in the near future.
they are turning back the clock to the days before the popularity of the Web where you had proprietary servers and propriatery clients. it's worked for AOL, after all. and it's the smart thing to do. they want to better control their users, give them more specific functionality, etc. etc.
and it's not exactly like we're missing out... MSN has, does, and always will suck anyway.
what would be scary is if they started to branch out outside of MSN. do they have the balls to make MSDN accessible via IE only? microsoft.com? MSNBC?
right well. that's still not the right reason for opposing the helmet laws. the correct reason is that it's unconstitutional. that any act that does not endanger the lives or livelyhood or happiness of others in a real a way because should not be controllable by the governmen t.
(if you want to use statistics, many many many many more people die from wearing helmets than from not wearing them.)
and as far as your napster comment:
gnoring this fact of course, once again the government is protecting people from themselves.
Ignoring this fact of course, once again the government is protecting people from themselves.
sigh. if only you read further...
like i said... i'm against government regulation of: helmet laws, music file sharing.
i was responding to the uselessness of this guy's "argument". the blind people etc. i mean. c'mon. if you're going to argue the issue, do so with something relevant and reasonable.
that makes sense the same way that anti-helmet law people say that sometimes not wearing a helmet saved someone's life (there are a few documented cases).
no need to get silly, we all know that 99% of the sharing is people who are 1. too cheap and/or 2. too lazy to get a copy of the "item" itself.
btw, i'm against these regulations (including helmet laws, although i will always wear one). but i'm also against stupid comments and rediculous rationalizations.
weren't the super string and shadow matter theories born to explain the clumpiness of space that didn't make sense in a universe that exploded from a singularity?
right on! and if you drop the big bang theory, you suddenly don't need all those wacky super strings and shadow matter theories that scientists have to keep coming up with to support the big bang >theory
that is so wrong. the navigation alone required to get a plane moving that fast into a good trajectory to hit those targets requires knowledge of the instruments and aviation theory.
these planes were DIVERTED and under MANUAL control so your nav analyses is incorrect.
i don't understand why we still get so excited about bizarre explanations of how the egyptians built the pyramids. when you have tens of thousands of slaves and have no regard for whether they live or die, such a feat isn't so impossible (still incredible, but we don't need UFOs or kites to explain it). --
the longest week i ever worked was 129 hours in 7 days including a 60 hours in a row stint. it was pure work. there was a major crisis that had to be resolved. in 10 years that has happened 3 or four times. there have been several periods during which i was working 80 hour weeks steadily.
these days i'm somewhere between 40-50 hours but i've since gotten married and have a kid now too.
i worked at netscape for 3 years (from 1995-1998) were there was a MINORITY of folks who worked really fucking hard and all the time.
but the truth is that the MAJORITY of people there were riding the coat tails of those who really worked those hours. yeah, maybe they were spending 12 physically at work, but there was a lot of goofing off. my guess is that the average netscapee's work day was 6 hours of actual work despite that hard working minority (of which i was a part of for the first 2 years before i got all bitter:)
this had a negative effect on the job market in that startup CEOs expected their employees to physically be at work for 10+ hours a day. one of the CEOs i worked for actually "fixed" the schedule i gave him by making everyone work saturdays...
the problem is some of us are getting older, starting families, and can no longer pull this shit off. an unnamed community/review site actually made a public statement that "families are a liability"...
this is all bullshit. the number of hours is often irrelevant. i expect my employees to be at work during an overlapping period of say 6 hours each day. the rest is just about does their shit get done.
now obviously this doesn't work for every industry but in the industry of most of the slashdot readers it's as irrelevant as when a recruiter asking you "how many lines of code have you written".
the people i admire the most are the ones who work a 40 hours week, have a family that they take care of, and still get more work done than these 60 hour working geeks who play everquest each evening or read slashdot all day... (i'm not saying don't play and fuck off at work, but not at the cost of your work not getting done, i know this sound obvious, but believe me, there are many people who got away with this). the bottom line is that the work gets done in a quality way and that my employees can communicate and work well with the others. that's how good work happens.
in the current climate, we are seeing something new (okay, not new, really a return to older ethics). people actually working hard again because there's so much competition on the street. i still believe, however, that in general someone who knows how to separate life and work effectively is in turn more effective than the so called workaholic.
a high school student could have written that crap.
he didn't even get into the way that perl or java are normally run (mod_perl, tiger, dynamo, jsp), the types of libraries that each language provides, the open source level support, etc. etc. etc.
but what do you expect from a guy who would have his saturn painted like vincent van gough's starry night. (not to mention that he got a saturn in the first place, gack!) and then wrote a poem about it. and put cheesy midi on the page with the pictures of his car.
Slashdot Mirror
goddamit, why the hell did someone metamod this to "overrated". did you even bother following the link i posted?
i swear to god, slashdot is becoming impossible to post to, there's a small community of posters who automatically get a 2, and hardly anyone else can get a friggin voice.
i think the article i link to is very interesting and worthy of discussion...
No. SETI researchers make no such assumptions. They certainly don't make many of the assumptions you've claimed they make. For example, you say that one of SETI's assumptions is that every planet that develops life will eventually develop an intelligent civilization. I know of no serious researchers who assume such a thing. In fact, the URL you listed to demonstrate this assumption says precisely the opposite.
no, i really think you need to reread this. they specifically say that a planet that spawns life will evolve intelligence 100% of the time. to me that's utter bunk. they plug rediculous values in drake's equation's variables.
You correctly claim that our own evolutionary history would indicate that intelligence such as ours is probably an unlikely development. But you incorrectly claim that "intelligence itself is not evolutionarily stable." We only have a very few examples of intelligence, and not enough to make such a statement. Sure, brains are expensive, but judging from the success of mammals, they're a valuable investment. The only way to know for sure would be to look at the evolutionary paths of thousands of worlds, and compare them.
this is what i meant by a some very well timed random events. without them, mammals would not have been given the opportunity to evolve. mammals didn't evolve brains because they could, they did it because they had to due to the particular ecological pressures present. had those ecological pressures NOT been present, there were much better mechanisms to spend "energy" on.
The rest of your review is based on several other unprovable assumptions:
- That the civilization will not invest the time or resources in contacting other worlds.
SETI always uses us (earth) as an example. so i'm doing the same. how much have we done to contact other worlds? what if all the other intelligences are ALSO just listening?
- That the energy requirements of a long-term project would be prohibitive.
how is that unprovable? we're looking for radio signals. we know what energy costs it takes to send multidirectional radio signals for huge distances (astronomical).
As to the first two, we don't know what energy technologies will be developed in the future, how committed a civilization might be to finding others, or how good a very advanced civilization would be at picking candidate planets to beam signals at.
yeah but come on, radio communications is a PRIMITIVE and energy INEFFICIENT technology. by the time future energy technologies are developed radio waves might not even be used.
- That most civilizations will self-destruct within a few centuries.
For the third, I would dispute your claim that "We have come close to wiping ourselves out several times already." [discussion of nuclear war's effect on our survival]
i admit my statement is a cynical one, however we have to admit things look pretty bleak! and self-destruction doesn't have to mean nuclear war! there's plague, nano-technology, chemical weapons, ecological disasters, and a score of destructive ways we'll develop in the next 50 years.
This is part of what makes SETI research so valuable. Finding out how common other intelligence in the universe is tells us a lot about our own situation. Even if we did a complete, thorough search of the entire EM spectrum for ten thousand years and came up with nothing, we'd still have learned something valuable. We'd have learned that successful, intelligent species are very few and far between, and that it was even more important that we not screw things up.
i suppose. or that they are not willing to talk to us. or that we missed a critical segment of the sky. or that our algorithm had a bug in it (remember when SETI was sending the same block to every computer for a few weeks?). or that we're the only ones stupid enough to use EM in the first place (what if all the other intelligent beings use ESP?)...
seti is bunk (article i posted on epinions a year ago)
you're right. but the DOMINATING species after a long period that's required for a complex organ like the brain to evolve has to involve resource competition and therefore aggressiveness. the mosquito point just underlines what i'm saying. you can't afford to make lots of organisms when they have expensive organs like the brain. i should have said that "evolution's most successful LARGE/COMPLEX creations are the ones that are the most able to conquer, kill, and survive".
actually, if you read my long "review" (the link i posted) i actually go over that. intelligence most likely came about due to intense competition between similar species. our first tools (the creation of which furthered our intelligence) were weapons. evolution's most successful creations are the ones that are the most able to conquer, kill, and survive. insects, for example. so in order for intelligence to survive and thrive, it would have to be coupled with an aggressive organism.
i don't see how it could be any other way even on totally different planets. in fact, i believe that the development of intelligence was an amazing fluke on earth. mammals in general only made it because of a particularly well timed asteroid...
most planets will probably evolve insect like organisms. unintelligent and incredibly efficient.
- SETI is assuming that someone is actually sending a signal that we can pick up. have we sent such signals? twice. both very directed and both for a very short time. sending an omni-directional signal is insanely expensive. would the governments of earth ever allow such a waste of resources? than how can we assume that someone else would?
- the more advanced the civilization, the more likely it is to self-destruct. look how many times we've come close. and it'll only get worse. there may be only a 200-300 year window during which a civilization is advanced enough to both send and pick up signals
- we're assuming that an ET would even bother developing radio waves. what if their atmosphere was such that radio communications on their planet wouldn't have worked? what if their mass communication was done using seismic waves and by the time they got off their globe they were using targetted light beams?
i think SETI is bunk. i once wrote a review of the SETI project around these sorts of arguments....site X (pick any recently /.'ed website) declares itself the most popular website ever (accordint to projections based on website traffic immediately after being /.'ed)
<TT>damn plain text bugs... again: <BR> <BR>there was a typo in one of the header files <BR> <BR>#define V_IBM 0x0001 // <- should have been 0x0002
<BR>#define V_MS 0x0001
<BR>
<BR>if (vendor == V_IBM) {
<BR> for (x=0; x < 10000; x++);
<BR>}
<BR></TT>
there was a typo in one of the header files
#define V_IBM 0x0001 - should have been 0x0002
#define V_MS 0x0001
if (vendor == V_IBM) {
for (x=0; x 10000; x++);
}
well, this actually isn't all that surprising to me. for anyone who's used MSN Explorer they are definitely trying to turn it into an AOL like experience. they will probably move forward and start doing all sorts of activeX trickery in the near future.
they are turning back the clock to the days before the popularity of the Web where you had proprietary servers and propriatery clients. it's worked for AOL, after all. and it's the smart thing to do. they want to better control their users, give them more specific functionality, etc. etc.
and it's not exactly like we're missing out... MSN has, does, and always will suck anyway.
what would be scary is if they started to branch out outside of MSN. do they have the balls to make MSDN accessible via IE only? microsoft.com? MSNBC?
isn't it depressing how just a few years ago it was microsoft that had to massage their user agent string to look like netscape?
oops. that was just a typo. i meant: many many many more people die from NOT wearing helmets than from wearing them...
right well. that's still not the right reason for opposing the helmet laws. the correct reason is that it's unconstitutional. that any act that does not endanger the lives or livelyhood or happiness of others in a real a way because should not be controllable by the governmen t.
(if you want to use statistics, many many many many more people die from wearing helmets than from not wearing them.)
and as far as your napster comment:
gnoring this fact of course, once again the government is protecting people from themselves.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
you dumb sheep!
Ignoring this fact of course, once again the government is protecting people from themselves.
sigh. if only you read further...
like i said... i'm against government regulation of: helmet laws, music file sharing.
i was responding to the uselessness of this guy's "argument". the blind people etc. i mean. c'mon. if you're going to argue the issue, do so with something relevant and reasonable.
that makes sense the same way that anti-helmet law people say that sometimes not wearing a helmet saved someone's life (there are a few documented cases).
no need to get silly, we all know that 99% of the sharing is people who are 1. too cheap and/or 2. too lazy to get a copy of the "item" itself.
btw, i'm against these regulations (including helmet laws, although i will always wear one). but i'm also against stupid comments and rediculous rationalizations.
weren't the super string and shadow matter theories born to explain the clumpiness of space that didn't make sense in a universe that exploded from a singularity?
Action Park in NJ used to have an Aerodome. there were a bunch of these on the East Coast in the 80s.
right on! and if you drop the big bang theory, you suddenly don't need all those wacky super strings and shadow matter theories that scientists have to keep coming up with to support the big bang >theory
...
that is so wrong. the navigation alone required to get a plane moving that fast into a good trajectory to hit those targets requires knowledge of the instruments and aviation theory.
these planes were DIVERTED and under MANUAL control so your nav analyses is incorrect.
http://www.ifccfbi.gov
i don't understand why we still get so excited about bizarre explanations of how the egyptians built the pyramids. when you have tens of thousands of slaves and have no regard for whether they live or die, such a feat isn't so impossible (still incredible, but we don't need UFOs or kites to explain it).
--
off by 1 error
--
i work in "the industry" and have since 1991.
:)
the longest week i ever worked was 129 hours in 7 days including a 60 hours in a row stint. it was pure work. there was a major crisis that had to be resolved. in 10 years that has happened 3 or four times. there have been several periods during which i was working 80 hour weeks steadily.
these days i'm somewhere between 40-50 hours but i've since gotten married and have a kid now too.
i worked at netscape for 3 years (from 1995-1998) were there was a MINORITY of folks who worked really fucking hard and all the time.
but the truth is that the MAJORITY of people there were riding the coat tails of those who really worked those hours. yeah, maybe they were spending 12 physically at work, but there was a lot of goofing off. my guess is that the average netscapee's work day was 6 hours of actual work despite that hard working minority (of which i was a part of for the first 2 years before i got all bitter
this had a negative effect on the job market in that startup CEOs expected their employees to physically be at work for 10+ hours a day. one of the CEOs i worked for actually "fixed" the schedule i gave him by making everyone work saturdays...
the problem is some of us are getting older, starting families, and can no longer pull this shit off. an unnamed community/review site actually made a public statement that "families are a liability"...
this is all bullshit. the number of hours is often irrelevant. i expect my employees to be at work during an overlapping period of say 6 hours each day. the rest is just about does their shit get done.
now obviously this doesn't work for every industry but in the industry of most of the slashdot readers it's as irrelevant as when a recruiter asking you "how many lines of code have you written".
the people i admire the most are the ones who work a 40 hours week, have a family that they take care of, and still get more work done than these 60 hour working geeks who play everquest each evening or read slashdot all day... (i'm not saying don't play and fuck off at work, but not at the cost of your work not getting done, i know this sound obvious, but believe me, there are many people who got away with this). the bottom line is that the work gets done in a quality way and that my employees can communicate and work well with the others. that's how good work happens.
in the current climate, we are seeing something new (okay, not new, really a return to older ethics). people actually working hard again because there's so much competition on the street. i still believe, however, that in general someone who knows how to separate life and work effectively is in turn more effective than the so called workaholic.
--
here's a video (windows media .ASF format) of the spectator system in action.
very cool.
--
a high school student could have written that crap.
he didn't even get into the way that perl or java are normally run (mod_perl, tiger, dynamo, jsp), the types of libraries that each language provides, the open source level support, etc. etc. etc.
but what do you expect from a guy who would have his saturn painted like vincent van gough's starry night. (not to mention that he got a saturn in the first place, gack!) and then wrote a poem about it. and put cheesy midi on the page with the pictures of his car.
i bet erik zoltan is made of pure cheese.
--