You don't understand the economics of a poor agrarian society. It is in their best interests to have a large number of children
Sure, if you consider children to be a disposable commodity in some economics equation. But what of morality? Is it morally right to condemn children to suffer and die just to obtain cheap labour and retirement security? If you can't feed your kids, should you really be having them in the first place?
For cavemen, struggling every day for survival, travelling by foot from Africa to South America would have been prohibitively slow. Yet mankind did make that journey. It wasn't made by one person in one go, but by countless generations, a little bit at a time.
Once a civilisation abandons its dependence on planets and stars through improved technoloy (just as we abandoned our dependence on caves and open flame), and becomes a spacefaring civilisation, then exploring the entire galaxy is simply a matter of time. At 0.1c it could be done in 30 million years. And given the age of the galaxy, intelligent civilisations could have arisen up to a billion years ago.
Time and replication are the most powerful forces in the universe. With time, the action of wind and rain can level a mountain. Through replication, a single microscopic virus can infect and kill a blue whale. Put them together and you can go from a single cell billions of years ago, to the astonishing range of life that now spans the entire planet.
Spanning the galaxy is just another step in the process.
Unless somebody else beats you to it:-)
why isn't the universe like something out of Star TRek with hundreds of alien species flittering about, dropping in to violate the prime directive, establish moonbases, and so forth?
Because violating the prime directive may make for good TV, but any real galactic civilisation that's been around for hundreds of millions of years is going to have its act together sufficiently that they would not let a screwball like Captain Kirk boldy go anywhere near an underdeveloped planet.
Why should I or a scientist for that matter take the idea in the least seriously?
You can do whatever you want. I'm just stating facts.
I take the idea seriously because perfectly plausible scientific theory (Fermi Paradox) asserts that aliens should already be here. Not to mention the unparalleled scientific value of actually finding them. UFOs have nothing to do with it.
Once fraud and wishful thinking is accounted for, 99.99999999999% of the "evidence" for UFOs (and any number of other "fantastic" things) vanishes like a fart in the wind
As I stated before, non-scientific anectodal obervations of UFOs are meaningless.
However, I will say this: the process by which much of this "evidence" is dismissed as "fraud and wishful thinking" is nothing more than debunkerism disguising itself as scientific scrutiny. It is blinkered broad-handed dismissal using specious arguments put forth by those who lack either the aptitude or inclination for objective considered reasoning. It's the same techniques used by creationists and those who deny the holocaust or the moon landings. It is not to be trusted. And it is all too common in UFO circles.
then why doesn't E.T. land in a well populated area and say howdy?
How many possible answers would you like me to give you? More importantly, how many can you think of yourself?
Before a scientist can gather evidence, he'd have to have a glimmer of an idea where to start looking.
Most usually start with some kind of theory and something called the scientific method.:-)
Nobody said that finding evidence of alien visitation would be easy. Finding evidence of alien radio signals isn't easy. Finding evidence of life on Mars isn't easy. Finding evidence of proton decay, or magnetic monopoles, or some new exotic form of dark matter isn't easy. And it's not something that should be left to amateurs.
As it stands though, reputable professional scientists aren't interested in looking for evidence of alien visitation. Maybe the problem is too hard. Maybe the stigmas attached are too great. Maybe they all assume that if ET were here, he would necessarily land on Stephen Hawking's lawn and announce himself. Who knows. Who cares.
Now, who wants to hear my theory on why cigar shaped UFOs don't make a sonic boom?:-)
I'm sorry but your non-scientific anectdotal observations against UFOs are just as meaningless as all the non-scientific anectdotal observations in favour of them.
The simple fact is that no credible scientific evidence of alien visitation has been documented.
The second simple fact is that no credible scientific efforts to gather such evidence have been made.
And I wasn't trying to troll, just offer an unusual take on avoiding sonic booms.
Years ago, I frequented alt.aliens.visitors, where I had fun shooting holes in the arguments of knee-jerk sceptics who try to debunk thing by stating the first objection that pops into their narrow little minds, no matter how stupid or vacuous.
One common argument used by sceptics is that many UFO reports are not credible because they describe supersonic movement with no sonic boom.
My counter-argument was to imagine a craft designed as a rapidly spinning disk which could absorb air molecules on its leading half (perhaps using some form of nanotech) and then expell the molecules from its trailing half. As it isn't displacing the air, it generates no shockwave and no sonic boom. And if it expelled the molecules at a greater velocity than at which it absorbed them, it would not only suffer no drag, but would generate extra thrust.
By pure coincidence, many reports of UFOs are of rapidly spinning disks.
Planets are old school. They're like caves for cavemen.
At some point a technological society stops relying on the things that nature has conveniently dropped into its laps and starts looking for ways to do better than nature. Caves gave way to huts and houses and skyrise apartments. Burning wood for heat gave way to coal, natural gas, and electricity. Animal hides gave way to weaving and artificial fabrics. Stone gave way to bronze, steel, ceramics, and plastics.
The same will inevitably happen to planets and stars. We will reshape our environment as we have always done.
A spacefaring civilisation needs to learn how to live in space. It is our destiny. Why avoid it?
No, I can only give you part marks for that. You're still thinking in a rational, scientific, base-10 way. Imperial measures are none of those things.
Almost all imperial rulers, yardsticks, and tape measures have inches divided into halves, quarters, eighths, and 16ths. Some go to 32nds. You generally can't measure out a decimal fraction of an inch without having to multiple it by 16.
So the correct answer, if really you want to do things the Imperial way, is a hair less than 39 and 3/8ths of an inch.
I'd just lust like to say, in a completly off-topic way, that that line alway bugged the heck out of me. It is such horribly awkward phrasing. What is wrong with "The place is Babylon 5"?
If they were trying to come up with something to rival Kirk's "To boldly go...", they failed.
I think that clumsy line is the main reason I gave up watching B5.
Anyhow, whatever *nix one chooses, it handily beats Windoze over the head except for gaming
And hardware support
Ironically, 30 minutes ago my brother returned an old computer I had given him because WinXP wouldn't install on the hardware. It was an older PII system, with no USB or PS/2 mouse adaptor and WinXP could not detect the serial mouse.
Before I gave it to him, the same computer had been running Gentoo with no problems.
Well yes, if you do stupid things, then bad stuff can happen. So don't do stupid things!
Only an idiot would emerge world a live production server, and whenever I want to do something cpu-intensive while doing an emerge, then I just suspend the emerge until I'm done. Beside, I don't sit at my computer 24-7, and am quite happy to have it do most of the compiling when I'm not there.
I've run mandrake, suse, redhat, slack, and debian, and was never really happy with my computer set up until I got gentoo. But that's me. I'm not saying it's for everyone (just the smart ones:-)
once you're old enough to shave and start using real UNIXes you will realize what a waste of time all that compiling and over-optimizing is.
If you just stare at the screen and watch the code compile, then yes, that would be a waste of time. Most Gentoo user though are smart enough to know how to multitask. While program foo is compiling, you do something else, either on the computer, or (and here's the really shocking bit) away from the computer.
So with that in mind, please explain to me how typing
This is true for gentoo-sources or vanilla-sources, but mm-sources, which is 2.6 kernel maintainer Andrew Morton's patch, is marked as stable in Gentoo on x86 for 2.6.2-rc1.
I know that many of the more expensive phones, the P800 and Hiptop for example, became available in the US long before they made it into Canada. That may well be the case for all the phones listed.
Prices are almost always set high initially when a product comes to market, to grab the early adopters willing to pay anything. Then they gradually drop to attract the more price-conscious consumers. So the article is comparing bleading edge Canadian prices, against US prices that have been getting discounted for a while. So of course the US phones are going to be cheaper.
Five days after I saw Revolutions, I realised what it was that I saw. The third Matrix movie is, in many many ways, the first Matrix movie. It's the same story, told again, different enough so as not too be obvious, but still with enough commonalities so as to leave me quite impressed with the whole franchise. The storytelling was at it's best in the first movie to be sure, but I can certainly appreciate the vision and ambition of the trilogy as a whole. Can't wait for Revolutions to come out on DVD.
One of the reasons I chose my last basement suite was that there were good grounded outlets all over the place. However, it was still a 90-year-old house and obviously the wiring wasn't up to snuff somewhere, because the landlords were doing renovations upstairs which resulted in a couple of nasty power surges in my suite. The first one killed my primary and backup hardrive, and the second one a couple of months later destroyed almost every piece of electronic equipment of mine that was plugged in at the time.
My primary computer escaped the carnage because I was staying at my mom's at the time as she had become very ill. She is now in hospital, and I've given up my apartment and moved back home to look after the place.
This too is an old house and the wiring here is archaic. Most of the outlets are only two prong, and most of three prong outlets aren't properly grounded. There are a grand total of two sets of grounded outlets in the entire house that don't trigger a reading of "wiring fault". One set is down in the basement, and the other is on the upstairs stove.
I couldn't keep an eye on mom from the basement, so my entire home office system is plugged into the stove, via 100 feet of yellow outdoor extension cord which snakes halfway around the house, and into the biggest UPS I could find. Hardly ideal, though it is kind of funny that the stove is now a point of failure in my computer system.
So a warning kiddies: avoid old houses. Even if the rent is low, they ain't worth it.
The updated design is unusable on my Danger hiptop, as all the article summaries get squeezed into a narrow column one or two words wide. Classic Slashdot comes out fine. (Yes, I know, this is almost certainly a problem with the hiptop and/or the Danger proxy system, not with the webpage itself).
I never liked the "machines are using humans as energy cells" aspect of the plot.
Nobody ever said that it's actually the case. That's just what the humans of the day believe. They could be quite wrong. Popular beliefs aren't always correct.
Just because a person says something, doesn't make it true -- in movies, or in real life.
The RIAA seeks to protect the music industry by attacking P2P, because the free exchange of music threatens to bankrupt the music industry.
Now the RIAA is attacking P2P because of the free exchange of kiddie porn. So does this mean that the RIAA is also trying to protect the kiddie porn industry from bankruptcy?
Man, these guys really are buttmonkeys, aren't they?;-)
Slashdot Mirror
My thinking exactly. And if a large enough cluster could be taught to migrate, it could be used to carry around coconuts!
Oh. I thought (frr,yyy) was a (login,password).
Once a civilisation abandons its dependence on planets and stars through improved technoloy (just as we abandoned our dependence on caves and open flame), and becomes a spacefaring civilisation, then exploring the entire galaxy is simply a matter of time. At 0.1c it could be done in 30 million years. And given the age of the galaxy, intelligent civilisations could have arisen up to a billion years ago.
Time and replication are the most powerful forces in the universe. With time, the action of wind and rain can level a mountain. Through replication, a single microscopic virus can infect and kill a blue whale. Put them together and you can go from a single cell billions of years ago, to the astonishing range of life that now spans the entire planet.
Spanning the galaxy is just another step in the process. Unless somebody else beats you to it :-)
Because violating the prime directive may make for good TV, but any real galactic civilisation that's been around for hundreds of millions of years is going to have its act together sufficiently that they would not let a screwball like Captain Kirk boldy go anywhere near an underdeveloped planet.
I take the idea seriously because perfectly plausible scientific theory (Fermi Paradox) asserts that aliens should already be here. Not to mention the unparalleled scientific value of actually finding them. UFOs have nothing to do with it.
As I stated before, non-scientific anectodal obervations of UFOs are meaningless.However, I will say this: the process by which much of this "evidence" is dismissed as "fraud and wishful thinking" is nothing more than debunkerism disguising itself as scientific scrutiny. It is blinkered broad-handed dismissal using specious arguments put forth by those who lack either the aptitude or inclination for objective considered reasoning. It's the same techniques used by creationists and those who deny the holocaust or the moon landings. It is not to be trusted. And it is all too common in UFO circles.
How many possible answers would you like me to give you? More importantly, how many can you think of yourself? Most usually start with some kind of theory and something called the scientific method.Nobody said that finding evidence of alien visitation would be easy. Finding evidence of alien radio signals isn't easy. Finding evidence of life on Mars isn't easy. Finding evidence of proton decay, or magnetic monopoles, or some new exotic form of dark matter isn't easy. And it's not something that should be left to amateurs.
As it stands though, reputable professional scientists aren't interested in looking for evidence of alien visitation. Maybe the problem is too hard. Maybe the stigmas attached are too great. Maybe they all assume that if ET were here, he would necessarily land on Stephen Hawking's lawn and announce himself. Who knows. Who cares.
Now, who wants to hear my theory on why cigar shaped UFOs don't make a sonic boom? :-)
The simple fact is that no credible scientific evidence of alien visitation has been documented.
The second simple fact is that no credible scientific efforts to gather such evidence have been made.
And I wasn't trying to troll, just offer an unusual take on avoiding sonic booms.
One common argument used by sceptics is that many UFO reports are not credible because they describe supersonic movement with no sonic boom.
My counter-argument was to imagine a craft designed as a rapidly spinning disk which could absorb air molecules on its leading half (perhaps using some form of nanotech) and then expell the molecules from its trailing half. As it isn't displacing the air, it generates no shockwave and no sonic boom. And if it expelled the molecules at a greater velocity than at which it absorbed them, it would not only suffer no drag, but would generate extra thrust.
By pure coincidence, many reports of UFOs are of rapidly spinning disks.
At some point a technological society stops relying on the things that nature has conveniently dropped into its laps and starts looking for ways to do better than nature. Caves gave way to huts and houses and skyrise apartments. Burning wood for heat gave way to coal, natural gas, and electricity. Animal hides gave way to weaving and artificial fabrics. Stone gave way to bronze, steel, ceramics, and plastics.
The same will inevitably happen to planets and stars. We will reshape our environment as we have always done.
A spacefaring civilisation needs to learn how to live in space. It is our destiny. Why avoid it?
Almost all imperial rulers, yardsticks, and tape measures have inches divided into halves, quarters, eighths, and 16ths. Some go to 32nds. You generally can't measure out a decimal fraction of an inch without having to multiple it by 16.
So the correct answer, if really you want to do things the Imperial way, is a hair less than 39 and 3/8ths of an inch.
I'd just lust like to say, in a completly off-topic way, that that line alway bugged the heck out of me. It is such horribly awkward phrasing. What is wrong with "The place is Babylon 5"?
If they were trying to come up with something to rival Kirk's "To boldly go...", they failed.
I think that clumsy line is the main reason I gave up watching B5.
They should have used triangular wheels. One less bump.
That's nothing. I heard that if you look really close at the 2.6.3 source, you can see Janet Jackson's nipple!
Only an idiot would emerge world a live production server, and whenever I want to do something cpu-intensive while doing an emerge, then I just suspend the emerge until I'm done. Beside, I don't sit at my computer 24-7, and am quite happy to have it do most of the compiling when I'm not there.
I've run mandrake, suse, redhat, slack, and debian, and was never really happy with my computer set up until I got gentoo. But that's me. I'm not saying it's for everyone (just the smart ones :-)
So with that in mind, please explain to me how typing
is in any way a waste of my time?Prices are almost always set high initially when a product comes to market, to grab the early adopters willing to pay anything. Then they gradually drop to attract the more price-conscious consumers. So the article is comparing bleading edge Canadian prices, against US prices that have been getting discounted for a while. So of course the US phones are going to be cheaper.
Five days after I saw Revolutions, I realised what it was that I saw. The third Matrix movie is, in many many ways, the first Matrix movie. It's the same story, told again, different enough so as not too be obvious, but still with enough commonalities so as to leave me quite impressed with the whole franchise. The storytelling was at it's best in the first movie to be sure, but I can certainly appreciate the vision and ambition of the trilogy as a whole. Can't wait for Revolutions to come out on DVD.
This too is an old house and the wiring here is archaic. Most of the outlets are only two prong, and most of three prong outlets aren't properly grounded. There are a grand total of two sets of grounded outlets in the entire house that don't trigger a reading of "wiring fault". One set is down in the basement, and the other is on the upstairs stove.
I couldn't keep an eye on mom from the basement, so my entire home office system is plugged into the stove, via 100 feet of yellow outdoor extension cord which snakes halfway around the house, and into the biggest UPS I could find. Hardly ideal, though it is kind of funny that the stove is now a point of failure in my computer system.
So a warning kiddies: avoid old houses. Even if the rent is low, they ain't worth it.
The updated design is unusable on my Danger hiptop, as all the article summaries get squeezed into a narrow column one or two words wide. Classic Slashdot comes out fine. (Yes, I know, this is almost certainly a problem with the hiptop and/or the Danger proxy system, not with the webpage itself).
Nobody ever said that it's actually the case. That's just what the humans of the day believe. They could be quite wrong. Popular beliefs aren't always correct.
Just because a person says something, doesn't make it true -- in movies, or in real life.
Now the RIAA is attacking P2P because of the free exchange of kiddie porn. So does this mean that the RIAA is also trying to protect the kiddie porn industry from bankruptcy?
Man, these guys really are buttmonkeys, aren't they? ;-)