So what...is that it is now illegal. You don't get to be a cybersquatter anymore. If you want a domain name, get it, but you actually need to have a use for it beyond extorting money from deep pockets. You do not have an inherent internet right to the name pepsico.com, britneyspears.org, chevy.com.
No, it was entirely a speculative venture. The squatter buys up a domain name and sits on it, doing nothing (or they COULD make noises like they were going to use it). The entire intent, start to finish, was to prompt an interested body (a corporation, celebrity) to pay top dollar to get the rights to the name. Squatters essentially have no intention of actually using the names they registered for any purpose other than to drive a legitimate entity with interest in the domain to cough up lots of money to acquire the domain.
Have companies overestimated network capacity? Or are they just incompetent? Will widescale, high bandwidth access ever become the norm, rather than the exception?
Well, according to what I've seen in the Tek War series, it appears that widescale high bandwidth WILL become the norm. How else could you do all that VR haX0ring and browsing? You wont be doing that over a 56k modem, I tell you, hence, there WILL be high bandwidth for all in the future.
Someone with nothing better to do than download megabyte after megabyte of porn, music, warez... Someone who apparently has no life outside their computer and is selfish enough to take bandwidth away from everyone else so they can have a good wank over Britinny Spears videos.
It should be pretty self-obvious what a bandwidth hog is...and its precise definition must be based on how wide a given pipe is. On cable, you are sharing the same pipe with many others. What you take is bandwidth not available to others who are also paying for the service (and perhaps not getting what they expected because a bandwidth hog is taking it from them).
I don't see a problem with charging the real bandwidth hogs a bit more.
Bandwidth is not in infinite supply, afterall. As someone who isn't running a cable company or other ISP, it is real easy to say "simply fatten the pipe". Like that can be done with the snap of one's fingers or something.
What REALLY sucks is paying for broadband only to not get it because a few dorks are hogging it disproportionately for foolish, simple-minded reasons. With cable it is especially important since all the users are sharing the same pipe. What one user uses is less available for other users. Pay to play, it's only fair.
It is not important that YOU personally do not go through the source. There are enough people who can and do that you are covered. NO ONE gets to go through M$ code except M$ people, and then, only a subset of them likely see the whole beast.
With windoze you have a bunch of blackhats looking for exploits and going for it because Windoze is 1) pervasive...one vulnerability on one windoze box is virtually assured of being useful against ALL windoze boxes, and 2) a blackhat after linux is competing against a much larger number of whitehats looking at the same code, finding the same bugs - with the whitehats releasing patches as soon as the problem is found. You could wait months to years before M$ "accepts" that a problem exists, realises that it really is their responsibility to fix it (instead of simply blaming the attacker), and releases a patch on two servers from which the whole world gets to compete to download.
Lucky for you that you do not HAVE to look at the code to search for problems...but you COULD if you wanted.
It is not more a "natural" course than YOU becoming personally extinct because someone kills you. WE are the sole reason they are dying, no other reason. This is not a necessary, nor intelligent way for us to deal with the planet and its life. WE are responsible and we SHOULD be intelligent enough to STOP it and recover those that we've sent too far otherwise.
I think I'll kill someone and use YOUR defense: "Well, that loser was too weak and couldn't adapt to a world with ME in it. It's THEIR fault they are gone, it was only natural."
Riiiiight. They are dying because WE are killing them, flat out.
This is HARDLY necessary (nor intelligent).
Would it not also be true that if someone murders you, oh well? You just
weren't able to adapt properly to the fact that someone was out to kill you. You lost
the "struggle" and, thus, deserved to die.
Yeah! Tough shit for those annoying countries
at the northern part of S. America. And Africa, don't get me
started on Africa. Serves them right if a high-speed cable comes
crashing down across the widest part of the African continent
twice! They're lame...and so's all the African wildlife!
Anyway, they ain't rich and powerful so screw 'em. YES in
your backyard!
It's a moot point anyway. One wont be built anymore than
an Orion will.
As for the RPM part, I would assume it is because it is
almost a de-facto standard (sorry Debian people/deb-users).
The number of RPM users outnumbers by a fair margin the
number of deb users. Instead of driving all the RPM users and
RPM-based distros from all jumping into deb, they call for a smaller
number of users and distros to take up RPM.
Yes, I like virtually all other RPM users, have been in RPM-dependency
hell. This shouldn't be a problem inherent in RPM. Surely there is a way to
"apt-get" RPMs and handle their dependencies just as well as with apt-get
and deb?
Overall I like the spec. I'd like ANY standard spec, particularly for the filesystem
layout. I would like to know that no matter what distro I install I will ALWAYS find file x in
/etc or binary y in/usr/bin instead of/usr/local/bin (or vis versa).
One of the main theories on human brain evolution holds
that it came about from a biological/evolutionary self-reinforcing
feedback loop. It took ~4 billion years for something like that to
happen on earth. It didn't occur multiple times (apparently),
there's just us.
The dinosaurs had a few hundred million years for ONE species
to develop a complex brain, but the Cretacious dinos were not more
intelligent/advanced than their Jurrasic predecessors. There is no NEED
for an especially large brain. Evolution, biology, life does perfectly fine
(better than fine) without brains at all (see bacteria and fungi). It
does extraordinarily well with really basic brains (see insects). It is
a biological/evolutionary accident that we have the brains we
do and if you were to reset the clock and totally remove us from the
picture, there is absolutely no reason or assurance that something
like us would reappear ever again.
Sure, there have to be odds in favor of some species of dinosaur
taking off and developing a human-like consciousness and intelligence
but what are those odds? All we have to go on is us - and again, it took
until now, >4 billion years for it to happen and ONLY after the original
planetary dominators (dinos) were taken out.
As for Europeans and technology, it is as I said, a cultural and historical
accident that they were the ones to take technology and run with it. The
Chinese had thousands of years of history to take off, but didn't. The Native
Americans had thousands of years to take off, but they remained happily
stone-aged until Europeans brought in metals and took over. The Aztecs,
Toltecs, Mayans, Egyptions all had centuries or millenia to take off, and they did
to a point (just like China) and then...sat still and/or faded away.
It was due to the Romans and the Greeks, in particular, that Europe took off.
The Greek intellectual tradition and the practical Roman uses of that tradition and
practical use of technologies provided the Europeans with a nearby influence that
drove the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery. Without the rediscovery of
Greek writings, without the direct effect of the Roman finger in virtually all of
Europes history, the technological revolution would not have occured when and how it
did. Accident and chance, not manifest destiny.
If your people and culture are doing just fine living like x, there is no reason or need to develop ever-more advanced technology. Once one group did, however, it started a feedback loop itself and took off.
I'm certainly not saying it wouldn't have happened, though in a TOTALLY different manner and time, from somewhere else. But again, it may never have happened at all and yet humans would still be just as intelligent as they are now - just living stone-age or bronze-age, etc, lives. Native Americans were not less intelligent than Europeans just because they didn't have iron, or mining, or industry, and all else. The EARLY modern humans, caveman, were not less intelligent than humans today but they got along with life just fine (were here aren't we?).
Since there are odds for this happening, though unknown, there are odds that an alien living planet will develop a technological civilization. But what are the odds? There is no reason to assume they are high, and given the vast majority of the history of life on earth, I would say that the odds are definitely not high, but rather low.
Low odds times MANY living worlds still leads to multiple advanced alien civilizations (advanced like the Aztecs or advanced like us?) but without a real solid estimate on the habitable planet population...just guesses based on an experimental population of 1 so far.
It is irrelevant that the Chinese came upon gunpowder first.
It is irrelevant that the Vikings arrived in N. America looong before
Columbus and the other Europeans. It is irrelevant that the
Egyptions were technologically quite advanced for the day. Why?
Because it didn't carry forward.
It was the Europeans that took off and made something "special"
from gunpowder - a cultural thing. Nothing lasting came of the Viking
travails in N. America. It left no lasting historical impression. It's an
interesting footnote. The Egyptions faded away and it was the Romans
and Greeks that carried the day. After the fall of Rome, the Chinese
were the most developed (and the Japanese?) but it didn't go any farther.
It was stagnant and had no lasting impact beyond spurring trade (for
silk and later heroin) and giving the Europeans gunpowder.
It was a cultural accident that it was the Europeans that took
off technologically. The Chinese had thousands of years to go virtually
nowhere - they were "developed" but it was stagnant.
If not for a few historical and cultural accidents, the Europeans
would not have driven the world into the present technological state.
The Chinese would still be as they had been for thousands of years, and
Native Americans, never seeing/experiencing Europeans, would still
be quite happy and healthy in their technologically simple lifestyles.
The world is as it is ONLY because of a few accidents: an inopportune
comet wiping out the undisputed champions of earth mastery, the dinosaurs,
the accident of evolution that led to a runnaway brain in hominids, and the
accidents of history and culture that led to technological development
that we have today.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by "intelligent". Dinosaurs were intelligent, so were mastadons, so are dogs and cats and gorillas and birds. If you mean intelligent as in technologically adept as human animals are, there is no reason to assume that there are a lot of those.
If it were not for an accident 65 bya, there would be no humans and dinosaurs might well STILL have run of the planet. There is NO imperative for technological intelligence or development for that matter. If not for the Europeans coming to the North America, the native Americans would still be quite healthy and happy living as the always had - they had no technological development beyond what was necessary and useful to them. The Commanche were not technologically superior to the people of Mesa Verde/cliff dwellers simply because they came later. I am not in any way dissing native Americans but am simply making a point...if not for the Europeans with THEIR accidental technologically-based society coming to North America, the natives would most likely STILL be living as they have for hundreds of years.
So, there may well (and likely is) many habitable planets. There is likely MANY locations with some form of life. It does NOT follow that there must be lots and lots of technologically advanced societies. A few here and there, perhaps, with an unknown fraction of those killing themselves off due to war or polluting themselves out of a home, with the survivors being few and far between.
That said, there is no reason to assume a priori that they would be any better about space exploration than we are. It is COSTLY to go into space. It is especially costly to put people into space. It is EXTREMELY costly to colonize space. I would also doubt that there is any spiffy way around basic rules like lightspeed barriers, etc, so it is not even a given that their spacecraft, robotic or not, can get very far in any reasonable amount of time. There is no reason to assume that machines can ever be produced that would be so much better than living things at self repair (EVERYTHING makes mistakes and they are usually detrimental - evolution isn't as simple as saying "machines will make mistakes self-replicating in a way that will permit evolution to occur there too). So some technical society launches a probe to a nearby star. Maybe it gets there within a reasonable amount of time so that those back home are still willing and able to listen to its transmissions back. Maybe they launch it and then collapse and the whole project was moot. Maybe they go for a while, expand a little within their solar system and then slowly crap out...millenia before WE came along. We just missed them by a few thousand years.
The real possibilities are endless and at least some of what I am stating here addresses the Fermi Paradox (which is, of course, itself based on the false assumption/conceit that advanced intelligence means technology which means space travel, etc). Dinosaurs, et al, were HIGHLY intelligent and advanced compared to cyanobacteria. They were HIGHLY advanced and intelligent compared to virtually everything that came before (and many that came after).
There is NO technological imperative in biology/evolution.
I wouldn't have a problem with investigating AFTER someone actually gets past the strictures of the patent office. It is the idea that some newpaper reporters showed up, saw a "demo" and wrote about it...THAT is not enough to drive investigation. Reporters generally are not really scientifically literate, though some certainly would be (hopefully full-time science writers, some of whom actually earned their PhDs and selected the journalism path vs academia or industry).
IF they get past the patent office and/or actually gain traction in reports, then some group like CSICOP (Committee for Scientific Investigations of Claims of the Paranormal) might be an appropriate investigator, though perpetual motion doesn't really fall in the paranormal realm, in theory, though in practice...
If they want to claim legitimacy, then they have to follow the proper channels for "scientific" discoveries and publish, not seek to make a fast buck on sucker investors with aluminum foil helmets.
Re:This sucks, and it's the fault of Linux users.
on
Loki Games Closing?
·
· Score: 2
I'm with you. I cannot say that I've bought all Loki's games, but I have bought 4 and was holding off buying Deus Ex until Loki released their linux port of it. Now it looks like I'll have to pay for the windoze version (anyone get it working under wine?).
If I wanted a game and Loki had it or was planning on producing a port, I would ALWAYS buy it from them or wait until they released it. Now, me thinks this really is a deathnell for linux taking much on the desktop. It is symptomatic and goes along with the other rather doom-and-gloom articles produced of late about the linux revolution that wasn't.
I'll keep using it but it also means I will have to keep a pirated copy of windoze on my machines to play games that wine can't handle.
Many linux users are hypocritical children who can't wait a short while to buy a port of a windoze game. Well, this is the result. Yet ANOTHER linux game company bits the dust.
The problem with your desire to look at it in depth is that it is PRECISELY the same problem that led the patent office to kill off patents on perpetual motion machines.
Every nutbar and goof that comes up with a "free energy" miracle device would demand equal and thorough investigation to legitimise his/her "discovery". Nothing valuable or real would get done because all the scientists would be bogged down in falsifying (ultimately the lot of all free energy "discoveries") they claims in the name of trying to do the wrong thing: incorrectly prove they are true.
Nay, we can let PSICOP take a good hard look at this. They will eventually if this guy gets any real news traction...and PSICOP is made up of science professionals. It is not for productive scientists to go out, stop their real work, and go forth to Joe's garage to demonstrate why he's not getting "free" energy.
It's not even always that simple. Cancer cells evolve means of sidestepping the telomeric shortening in at least several poorly understood ways.
SOME cancerous cells have a perpetually turned on telomerase at some level to maintain the chromosome ends. Others seem to make do without apparent telomerase activity...recombination or other means. As a side note, fruit flies (Drosophila) do not have telomeres in the classic sense. They rely entirely on recombination events to produce repetitive chromosome ends that do the same thing as telomeres.
Finally, telomeres are only a part of the puzzle of ageing. They are not the end-all be-all of immortality. Ageing is a complex interplay of biochemical and genetic events. Programmed senescence (telomeres play a part in this) as well as simple wear and tear.
If you gave yourself a telomerase-stimulating drug in the hopes that you would slow down ageing, what you would actually end up doing is enhancing your risk of developing cancer.
In any case, telomeres shorten with each cell division (except in germ cells) until a critical point is reached. Then proteins that interact with the telomeric DNA begin shutting down genes adjacent to the telomeres and activate others which subsequently alter the expression of other genes. Mitochondria deteriorate with age regardless of telomeric shortening and gradually produce more and more damaging oxygen radicals which do runaway damage to the mitochondrial DNA, mitochondrial proteins, and its cell wall which exacerbates the production of radicals at the expense of energy production. Other parts of the cell take damage from leaking mitochondria, from your nuclear DNA to cellular proteins and cell wall lipids. Random damage to DNA also takes its toll outside of the oxygen radicals. Repair proteins become themselves damaged and are expressed at lower levels so your damage repair systems degenerate too. You can't even hope to increase their production because if you produce too much of a "good thing" the cells sense this as a problem and apoptos/die.
There is a lot more to ageing than telomere shortening, to cut it short.
For cell cultures, ageing generally refers to senescence. Most normal cells, once cultured, can manage about 50 doublings before they senesce and will grow no more. Large, scattered areas of the genome are silenced, the mitochondria deteriorate and produce more damaging oxygen radicals per unit ATP (energy) produced, which leads to oxidative damage to proteins, cell walls, and genetic material. On top of that, the repair machinery becomes less and less capable.
Basically, the cell shuts down and then wears out. That is ageing on the cellular level.
The standard way around this is to immortalize cells. This can mean anything from simply growing lots of normal cells out and selecting those cells that manage to keep going - they've acquired mutations that permit continued cell divisions. A faster and easier way is to either transfect the cells with an immortalizing defective virus (cancer causing outside of cell culture) or mutagenizing the cells chemically or radioactively to obtain a similar result - mutant cells, with cancer-like tendencies, that can grow indefinitely. You can also start cultures from human tumors...they are already at least partially immortalized.
With a lot of the stem cells, you can get them to grow and grow indefinitely if they are handled properly - don't let them grow too dense, continual tissue culture media changing to help prevent the build up of signal protein and signal molecule gradients that would drive the cells to start differentiating. Once they differentiate, barring mutations as mentioned above, their lifespan is limited.
Not necessarily. The person needing a treatment may need the treatment due to a genetic problem. This problem would exist in all their cells, even the potential stem cells.
There would need to be a source outside of oneself for such cells in cases where the problem (or a potential problem aside from the one requiring the immediate treatment) is genetic in nature.
Of course, if there is a large enough supply of such cells within a patient, and they could be properly cultured and propagated, genetic engineering could be attempted to fix certain genetic mutation before going on to use the cells for treatment. Depends on how much time you have to treat the problem and the nature of the genetic abnormality.
To make it scientific, it has to be FALSEFIABLE. You don't go off with the creation "science" nonsense of presupposing that x is true, therefore go out and find evidence to bolster this "fact" (biblical myth). Nay, it must be torn apart in every way to try to falsify the claim. If it beats that, then it has a bit of leg to stand on.
If you are a small ISP, and thus have a rather smallish customer base, and you get heavily DoSed (perhaps again and again), you could easily start hemorrhaging customers to others. Depending on what damage was done to what data, what damage was done by loss of connectivity to small businesses among your customers, you could lose your business shorts.
You know, if is paranoid of course but...upon reading the short/. blurb, I immediately thought "What a way for a bigger boy to knock out a smaller kid." Of course, this sort of tactic could also be used by smaller competitors too but the BIG boys (MSN, for instance) have more than enough resources and a total lack of ethics...they could do this without batting an eye or breaking a sweat.
It was highly likely to be a few buttwipe, snotnose kiddiez but I have that little doubt sitting in the back of my mind. If not this particular episode, what of any others? Who gained by the shutdown of this ISP? MSN? AOL?
Because it WOULD. You wrote an oxymoron. ANYTHING from M$, no matter how "hard" they try, will/does suck. It sucks on technical grounds, it sucks on moral grounds, it sucks in prinicipal.
Slashdot Mirror
So what...is that it is now illegal. You don't get to be a cybersquatter anymore. If you want a domain name, get it, but you actually need to have a use for it beyond extorting money from deep pockets. You do not have an inherent internet right to the name pepsico.com, britneyspears.org, chevy.com.
That's the way it is.
No, it was entirely a speculative venture. The squatter buys up a domain name and sits on it, doing nothing (or they COULD make noises like they were going to use it). The entire intent, start to finish, was to prompt an interested body (a corporation, celebrity) to pay top dollar to get the rights to the name. Squatters essentially have no intention of actually using the names they registered for any purpose other than to drive a legitimate entity with interest in the domain to cough up lots of money to acquire the domain.
Have companies overestimated network capacity? Or are they just incompetent? Will widescale, high bandwidth access ever become the norm, rather than the exception?
Well, according to what I've seen in the Tek War series, it appears that widescale high bandwidth WILL become the norm. How else could you do all that VR haX0ring and browsing? You wont be doing that over a 56k modem, I tell you, hence, there WILL be high bandwidth for all in the future.
Someone with nothing better to do than download megabyte after megabyte of porn, music, warez... Someone who apparently has no life outside their computer and is selfish enough to take bandwidth away from everyone else so they can have a good wank over Britinny Spears videos.
It should be pretty self-obvious what a bandwidth hog is...and its precise definition must be based on how wide a given pipe is. On cable, you are sharing the same pipe with many others. What you take is bandwidth not available to others who are also paying for the service (and perhaps not getting what they expected because a bandwidth hog is taking it from them).
I don't see a problem with charging the real bandwidth hogs a bit more.
Bandwidth is not in infinite supply, afterall. As someone who isn't running a cable company or other ISP, it is real easy to say "simply fatten the pipe". Like that can be done with the snap of one's fingers or something.
What REALLY sucks is paying for broadband only to not get it because a few dorks are hogging it disproportionately for foolish, simple-minded reasons. With cable it is especially important since all the users are sharing the same pipe. What one user uses is less available for other users. Pay to play, it's only fair.
It is not important that YOU personally do not go through the source. There are enough people who can and do that you are covered. NO ONE gets to go through M$ code except M$ people, and then, only a subset of them likely see the whole beast.
With windoze you have a bunch of blackhats looking for exploits and going for it because Windoze is 1) pervasive...one vulnerability on one windoze box is virtually assured of being useful against ALL windoze boxes, and 2) a blackhat after linux is competing against a much larger number of whitehats looking at the same code, finding the same bugs - with the whitehats releasing patches as soon as the problem is found. You could wait months to years before M$ "accepts" that a problem exists, realises that it really is their responsibility to fix it (instead of simply blaming the attacker), and releases a patch on two servers from which the whole world gets to compete to download.
Lucky for you that you do not HAVE to look at the code to search for problems...but you COULD if you wanted.
It is not more a "natural" course than YOU becoming personally extinct because someone kills you. WE are the sole reason they are dying, no other reason. This is not a necessary, nor intelligent way for us to deal with the planet and its life. WE are responsible and we SHOULD be intelligent enough to STOP it and recover those that we've sent too far otherwise.
I think I'll kill someone and use YOUR defense: "Well, that loser was too weak and couldn't adapt to a world with ME in it. It's THEIR fault they are gone, it was only natural."
Riiiiight. They are dying because WE are killing them, flat out.
This is HARDLY necessary (nor intelligent).
Would it not also be true that if someone murders you, oh well? You just
weren't able to adapt properly to the fact that someone was out to kill you. You lost
the "struggle" and, thus, deserved to die.
Yeah! Tough shit for those annoying countries
at the northern part of S. America. And Africa, don't get me
started on Africa. Serves them right if a high-speed cable comes
crashing down across the widest part of the African continent
twice! They're lame...and so's all the African wildlife!
Anyway, they ain't rich and powerful so screw 'em. YES in
your backyard!
It's a moot point anyway. One wont be built anymore than
an Orion will.
As for the RPM part, I would assume it is because it is
almost a de-facto standard (sorry Debian people/deb-users).
The number of RPM users outnumbers by a fair margin the
number of deb users. Instead of driving all the RPM users and
RPM-based distros from all jumping into deb, they call for a smaller
number of users and distros to take up RPM.
Yes, I like virtually all other RPM users, have been in RPM-dependency
hell. This shouldn't be a problem inherent in RPM. Surely there is a way to
"apt-get" RPMs and handle their dependencies just as well as with apt-get
and deb?
Overall I like the spec. I'd like ANY standard spec, particularly for the filesystem /usr/bin instead of /usr/local/bin (or vis versa).
layout. I would like to know that no matter what distro I install I will ALWAYS find file x in
/etc or binary y in
Would it actually be "GNU/RSB"?
One of the main theories on human brain evolution holds
that it came about from a biological/evolutionary self-reinforcing
feedback loop. It took ~4 billion years for something like that to
happen on earth. It didn't occur multiple times (apparently),
there's just us.
The dinosaurs had a few hundred million years for ONE species
to develop a complex brain, but the Cretacious dinos were not more
intelligent/advanced than their Jurrasic predecessors. There is no NEED
for an especially large brain. Evolution, biology, life does perfectly fine
(better than fine) without brains at all (see bacteria and fungi). It
does extraordinarily well with really basic brains (see insects). It is
a biological/evolutionary accident that we have the brains we
do and if you were to reset the clock and totally remove us from the
picture, there is absolutely no reason or assurance that something
like us would reappear ever again.
Sure, there have to be odds in favor of some species of dinosaur
taking off and developing a human-like consciousness and intelligence
but what are those odds? All we have to go on is us - and again, it took
until now, >4 billion years for it to happen and ONLY after the original
planetary dominators (dinos) were taken out.
As for Europeans and technology, it is as I said, a cultural and historical
accident that they were the ones to take technology and run with it. The
Chinese had thousands of years of history to take off, but didn't. The Native
Americans had thousands of years to take off, but they remained happily
stone-aged until Europeans brought in metals and took over. The Aztecs,
Toltecs, Mayans, Egyptions all had centuries or millenia to take off, and they did
to a point (just like China) and then...sat still and/or faded away.
It was due to the Romans and the Greeks, in particular, that Europe took off.
The Greek intellectual tradition and the practical Roman uses of that tradition and
practical use of technologies provided the Europeans with a nearby influence that
drove the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery. Without the rediscovery of
Greek writings, without the direct effect of the Roman finger in virtually all of
Europes history, the technological revolution would not have occured when and how it
did. Accident and chance, not manifest destiny.
If your people and culture are doing just fine living like x, there is no reason or need to develop ever-more advanced technology. Once one group did, however, it started a feedback loop itself and took off.
I'm certainly not saying it wouldn't have happened, though in a TOTALLY different manner and time, from somewhere else. But again, it may never have happened at all and yet humans would still be just as intelligent as they are now - just living stone-age or bronze-age, etc, lives. Native Americans were not less intelligent than Europeans just because they didn't have iron, or mining, or industry, and all else. The EARLY modern humans, caveman, were not less intelligent than humans today but they got along with life just fine (were here aren't we?).
Since there are odds for this happening, though unknown, there are odds that an alien living planet will develop a technological civilization. But what are the odds? There is no reason to assume they are high, and given the vast majority of the history of life on earth, I would say that the odds are definitely not high, but rather low.
Low odds times MANY living worlds still leads to multiple advanced alien civilizations (advanced like the Aztecs or advanced like us?) but without a real solid estimate on the habitable planet population...just guesses based on an experimental population of 1 so far.
It is irrelevant that the Chinese came upon gunpowder first.
It is irrelevant that the Vikings arrived in N. America looong before
Columbus and the other Europeans. It is irrelevant that the
Egyptions were technologically quite advanced for the day. Why?
Because it didn't carry forward.
It was the Europeans that took off and made something "special"
from gunpowder - a cultural thing. Nothing lasting came of the Viking
travails in N. America. It left no lasting historical impression. It's an
interesting footnote. The Egyptions faded away and it was the Romans
and Greeks that carried the day. After the fall of Rome, the Chinese
were the most developed (and the Japanese?) but it didn't go any farther.
It was stagnant and had no lasting impact beyond spurring trade (for
silk and later heroin) and giving the Europeans gunpowder.
It was a cultural accident that it was the Europeans that took
off technologically. The Chinese had thousands of years to go virtually
nowhere - they were "developed" but it was stagnant.
If not for a few historical and cultural accidents, the Europeans
would not have driven the world into the present technological state.
The Chinese would still be as they had been for thousands of years, and
Native Americans, never seeing/experiencing Europeans, would still
be quite happy and healthy in their technologically simple lifestyles.
The world is as it is ONLY because of a few accidents: an inopportune
comet wiping out the undisputed champions of earth mastery, the dinosaurs,
the accident of evolution that led to a runnaway brain in hominids, and the
accidents of history and culture that led to technological development
that we have today.
Accidents all.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by "intelligent". Dinosaurs were intelligent, so were mastadons, so are dogs and cats and gorillas and birds. If you mean intelligent as in technologically adept as human animals are, there is no reason to assume that there are a lot of those.
If it were not for an accident 65 bya, there would be no humans and dinosaurs might well STILL have run of the planet. There is NO imperative for technological intelligence or development for that matter. If not for the Europeans coming to the North America, the native Americans would still be quite healthy and happy living as the always had - they had no technological development beyond what was necessary and useful to them. The Commanche were not technologically superior to the people of Mesa Verde/cliff dwellers simply because they came later. I am not in any way dissing native Americans but am simply making a point...if not for the Europeans with THEIR accidental technologically-based society coming to North America, the natives would most likely STILL be living as they have for hundreds of years.
So, there may well (and likely is) many habitable planets. There is likely MANY locations with some form of life. It does NOT follow that there must be lots and lots of technologically advanced societies. A few here and there, perhaps, with an unknown fraction of those killing themselves off due to war or polluting themselves out of a home, with the survivors being few and far between.
That said, there is no reason to assume a priori that they would be any better about space exploration than we are. It is COSTLY to go into space. It is especially costly to put people into space. It is EXTREMELY costly to colonize space. I would also doubt that there is any spiffy way around basic rules like lightspeed barriers, etc, so it is not even a given that their spacecraft, robotic or not, can get very far in any reasonable amount of time. There is no reason to assume that machines can ever be produced that would be so much better than living things at self repair (EVERYTHING makes mistakes and they are usually detrimental - evolution isn't as simple as saying "machines will make mistakes self-replicating in a way that will permit evolution to occur there too). So some technical society launches a probe to a nearby star. Maybe it gets there within a reasonable amount of time so that those back home are still willing and able to listen to its transmissions back. Maybe they launch it and then collapse and the whole project was moot. Maybe they go for a while, expand a little within their solar system and then slowly crap out...millenia before WE came along. We just missed them by a few thousand years.
The real possibilities are endless and at least some of what I am stating here addresses the Fermi Paradox (which is, of course, itself based on the false assumption/conceit that advanced intelligence means technology which means space travel, etc). Dinosaurs, et al, were HIGHLY intelligent and advanced compared to cyanobacteria. They were HIGHLY advanced and intelligent compared to virtually everything that came before (and many that came after).
There is NO technological imperative in biology/evolution.
I wouldn't have a problem with investigating AFTER someone actually gets past the strictures of the patent office. It is the idea that some newpaper reporters showed up, saw a "demo" and wrote about it...THAT is not enough to drive investigation. Reporters generally are not really scientifically literate, though some certainly would be (hopefully full-time science writers, some of whom actually earned their PhDs and selected the journalism path vs academia or industry).
IF they get past the patent office and/or actually gain traction in reports, then some group like CSICOP (Committee for Scientific Investigations of Claims of the Paranormal) might be an appropriate investigator, though perpetual motion doesn't really fall in the paranormal realm, in theory, though in practice...
If they want to claim legitimacy, then they have to follow the proper channels for "scientific" discoveries and publish, not seek to make a fast buck on sucker investors with aluminum foil helmets.
I'm with you. I cannot say that I've bought all Loki's games, but I have bought 4 and was holding off buying Deus Ex until Loki released their linux port of it. Now it looks like I'll have to pay for the windoze version (anyone get it working under wine?).
If I wanted a game and Loki had it or was planning on producing a port, I would ALWAYS buy it from them or wait until they released it. Now, me thinks this really is a deathnell for linux taking much on the desktop. It is symptomatic and goes along with the other rather doom-and-gloom articles produced of late about the linux revolution that wasn't.
I'll keep using it but it also means I will have to keep a pirated copy of windoze on my machines to play games that wine can't handle.
Many linux users are hypocritical children who can't wait a short while to buy a port of a windoze game. Well, this is the result. Yet ANOTHER linux game company bits the dust.
The problem with your desire to look at it in depth is that it is PRECISELY the same problem that led the patent office to kill off patents on perpetual motion machines.
Every nutbar and goof that comes up with a "free energy" miracle device would demand equal and thorough investigation to legitimise his/her "discovery". Nothing valuable or real would get done because all the scientists would be bogged down in falsifying (ultimately the lot of all free energy "discoveries") they claims in the name of trying to do the wrong thing: incorrectly prove they are true.
Nay, we can let PSICOP take a good hard look at this. They will eventually if this guy gets any real news traction...and PSICOP is made up of science professionals. It is not for productive scientists to go out, stop their real work, and go forth to Joe's garage to demonstrate why he's not getting "free" energy.
It's not even always that simple. Cancer cells evolve means of sidestepping the telomeric shortening in at least several poorly understood ways.
SOME cancerous cells have a perpetually turned on telomerase at some level to maintain the chromosome ends. Others seem to make do without apparent telomerase activity...recombination or other means. As a side note, fruit flies (Drosophila) do not have telomeres in the classic sense. They rely entirely on recombination events to produce repetitive chromosome ends that do the same thing as telomeres.
Finally, telomeres are only a part of the puzzle of ageing. They are not the end-all be-all of immortality. Ageing is a complex interplay of biochemical and genetic events. Programmed senescence (telomeres play a part in this) as well as simple wear and tear.
If you gave yourself a telomerase-stimulating drug in the hopes that you would slow down ageing, what you would actually end up doing is enhancing your risk of developing cancer.
In any case, telomeres shorten with each cell division (except in germ cells) until a critical point is reached. Then proteins that interact with the telomeric DNA begin shutting down genes adjacent to the telomeres and activate others which subsequently alter the expression of other genes. Mitochondria deteriorate with age regardless of telomeric shortening and gradually produce more and more damaging oxygen radicals which do runaway damage to the mitochondrial DNA, mitochondrial proteins, and its cell wall which exacerbates the production of radicals at the expense of energy production. Other parts of the cell take damage from leaking mitochondria, from your nuclear DNA to cellular proteins and cell wall lipids. Random damage to DNA also takes its toll outside of the oxygen radicals. Repair proteins become themselves damaged and are expressed at lower levels so your damage repair systems degenerate too. You can't even hope to increase their production because if you produce too much of a "good thing" the cells sense this as a problem and apoptos/die.
There is a lot more to ageing than telomere shortening, to cut it short.
For cell cultures, ageing generally refers to senescence. Most normal cells, once cultured, can manage about 50 doublings before they senesce and will grow no more. Large, scattered areas of the genome are silenced, the mitochondria deteriorate and produce more damaging oxygen radicals per unit ATP (energy) produced, which leads to oxidative damage to proteins, cell walls, and genetic material. On top of that, the repair machinery becomes less and less capable.
Basically, the cell shuts down and then wears out. That is ageing on the cellular level.
The standard way around this is to immortalize cells. This can mean anything from simply growing lots of normal cells out and selecting those cells that manage to keep going - they've acquired mutations that permit continued cell divisions. A faster and easier way is to either transfect the cells with an immortalizing defective virus (cancer causing outside of cell culture) or mutagenizing the cells chemically or radioactively to obtain a similar result - mutant cells, with cancer-like tendencies, that can grow indefinitely. You can also start cultures from human tumors...they are already at least partially immortalized.
With a lot of the stem cells, you can get them to grow and grow indefinitely if they are handled properly - don't let them grow too dense, continual tissue culture media changing to help prevent the build up of signal protein and signal molecule gradients that would drive the cells to start differentiating. Once they differentiate, barring mutations as mentioned above, their lifespan is limited.
Not necessarily. The person needing a treatment may need the treatment due to a genetic problem. This problem would exist in all their cells, even the potential stem cells.
There would need to be a source outside of oneself for such cells in cases where the problem (or a potential problem aside from the one requiring the immediate treatment) is genetic in nature.
Of course, if there is a large enough supply of such cells within a patient, and they could be properly cultured and propagated, genetic engineering could be attempted to fix certain genetic mutation before going on to use the cells for treatment. Depends on how much time you have to treat the problem and the nature of the genetic abnormality.
To make it scientific, it has to be FALSEFIABLE. You don't go off with the creation "science" nonsense of presupposing that x is true, therefore go out and find evidence to bolster this "fact" (biblical myth). Nay, it must be torn apart in every way to try to falsify the claim. If it beats that, then it has a bit of leg to stand on.
Erm...actually, the chance that this guy broke the laws of thermodynamics are not infinitismal, they are right at and equal to 0, zero, null.
If you are a small ISP, and thus have a rather smallish customer base, and you get heavily DoSed (perhaps again and again), you could easily start hemorrhaging customers to others. Depending on what damage was done to what data, what damage was done by loss of connectivity to small businesses among your customers, you could lose your business shorts.
You know, if is paranoid of course but...upon reading the short /. blurb, I immediately thought "What a way for a bigger boy to knock out a smaller kid." Of course, this sort of tactic could also be used by smaller competitors too but the BIG boys (MSN, for instance) have more than enough resources and a total lack of ethics...they could do this without batting an eye or breaking a sweat.
It was highly likely to be a few buttwipe, snotnose kiddiez but I have that little doubt sitting in the back of my mind. If not this particular episode, what of any others? Who gained by the shutdown of this ISP? MSN? AOL?
Because it WOULD. You wrote an oxymoron. ANYTHING from M$, no matter how "hard" they try, will/does suck. It sucks on technical grounds, it sucks on moral grounds, it sucks in prinicipal.