Well pointed out. I just wish to add that Intelligent Design doesn't necessarily preclude atheism, either.
You can well believe that the evidence presented in nature means that there must be an intelligent designer. (We can debate that ad nauseam, but let's just accept it as true at the moment.) However, that does not necessitate that "the designer of life on earth" == "the creator of the universe" == "the author of the Christian [or other] moral code".
This is the point on which the real controversy hangs. Opponents of ID are so vehement because they are concerned that ID's proponents wish to use it as a back door to force a moral code on nonbelievers. This does not follow logically: it may be that humans were designed by Klaatu the Alien rather than "God", and therefore even accepting ID we need not accept the various social constructions generally associated with ID's proponents (prayer in schools, opposition to homosexuality, government funding of religious schools and charities, etc.)
Mind you, I know nobody who actually believes this way. Well, that's not true: Star Trek (among others) posited that humans were placed here by aliens. But for the most part both ID's proponents and opponents believe that the ID argument equates the designer with the Christian God, and so ultimately this is a debate more about morality than science.
ID's proponents don't necessarily explicitly want to enforce their moral code, but rather to eliminate what they consider an erroneous argument for atheism. Neither ID nor evolution is a conclusive argument for or against theism, but ID does encourage (but not necessitate) the belief in God, and evolutionary theory does encourage (but not necessitate) the belief in the non-existence of God. It's unlikely that we'll ever have conclusive evidence one way or the other, so there will always be some element of "belief", which is what the top-level article is really about.
Before the "of course the aliens are already here" people get to it, I should note that a gigawatt signal that happened to be beamed at us (rather than to one of the other million or so G-class stars in this galaxy) from a measly four light-years away would arrive as perhaps nanowatts per square meter, or maybe even microwatts. Assuming, of course, that they were broadcasting right now (or rather, four years ago), as opposed to during some other part of the ten million year history of humanity.
Wouldn't it just suck if they were zapping us with a few terawatts of signal that just happened to arrive during the Renaissance, then they got bored? Juuuust missed it (geologically speaking, that is).
So it's not totally a fool's errand. It's just still gonna take a while.
A bigger question: why are all of the other solar systems so darned far away?
Uh... because everything is. Space is mostly, uh, empty space. The nearest other solar system is around four light-years away, and the nearest one after that is six light years-away.
Space is just really, really big, and there's not much in it. Most of the night sky is black, which means that from here to the end of the universe fifteen billion light-years away there isn't anything along your line of sight in 99.999% of the sky.
On average, even taking all the stars into account, space is more empty than the best vacuum we've ever achieved in a laboratory. And it's really, really, really big. You may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space. (Props to Douglas Adams.)
So the aliens may be there (I sure hope so), but finding them is like looking for a microscopic needle in a cosmological haystack. If it weren't the fact that we hope these needles are broadcasting, we wouldn't even bother looking. And when the signals come from that far away, you've got to listen really, really closely. A gigawatt of signal from 4 light-years away is 10^-23 watts per square meter, a unit so small we have to invent the name "yoctowatt" to describe it. If Arecibo were pointing right at it would still only receive a few zeptowatts. And that's for the closest star. Twice as far away, you get 1/4 as much signal. The nearest other galaxy is 1 million times further, which means the signal would be 1 million million times less strong (one trillionth, in American terms). We don't even have units for how small that gigawatt signal would be. x,w,v,u,t,s,r,q,o,p,n,m... maybe it's a "miptowatt" per square meter (and a "neccowatt" arriving at Arecibo).
So basically don't be surprised if you don't hear anything for a while.
Does that require Windows Server? I was bred on Unixes of various sorts but spend a lot of my time on Windows. There are a number of operations I don't know how to do without a mouse, even on my own machine, much less on a remote machine.
Even if I had a SSH/telnet-driven command prompt, I don't think I could kill a process on a remote machine, for example; I can do it only via the GUI. Is it just because I have a lot to learn, or is it a feature I don't have?
"Sharing your musical tastes with others" means "giving it them for free"? And by "others" you mean everybody on the planet with a P2P client, anonymously? You don't, ya know, wanna chat with them about it afterwards?
Everyday in an adjective meaning "ordinary"; every day is an adverbial phrase which means "each day".
But if you'd said, "I get to see how great the average American's everyday spelling and grammar are", you'd have been right.
(Yeah, I know grammar correction is usually trolling, but here it's in context.)
Other than that, your point is actually kind of at the heart of the issue. An ordinary encyclopedia works by getting experts in the field to write articles, and those experts are chosen by fiat by an editorial community.
The whole Wiki idea is that all of us are smarter than any of us, and tries to produce everything by collaboration. It is an epistemological problem, in that the average person's views of, say, quantum mechanics are mostly irrelevant, and contribute more to the field of pop culture than to physics. That's a problem to be debated by, well, expert epistemologists. The bad grammar can be corrected easily by other people, as long as the contribution itself is in good faith.
Life would be so much simpler if we could depend on good faith.
Agreed. As long as they can afford it, it seems to make sense to retire SS1 and use the expertise they gained to build SS2.
The article was hardly the stupidest thing I've seen, but I agree that it's hardly bad news to retire it. It has done what it was built to do. The investment was in the design, not the construction. Construct a new one, a better one, and let the prototype become an artifact.
Thing is, the phone companies charge you for an unlisted number. So if you have a phone, you are in that phone book getting phone spam unless you paid them not to.
The instructions tell you to lean it against "a rock or something", with an illustration. I've always found that charming.
I've never found it took 20 minutes to work. Nor did I ever really work too hard to get the water precisely between the fill lines; it's always worked fine with approximation.
Meals Ready to Eat, the US Army's replacement for it's old rations, usually come with a similar contraption: a wafer of material which is massively exothermic when combined with water.
It comes in a bag; you add water and then stuff your entree into the bag. The water comes to a boil (or at least apparently; it may just be hydrogen evolving from the reation, and they tell you not to use it in an enclosed place). The food goes from room temperature to way-too-hot-to-eat in a few minutes.
They recommend two of them if the food starts off frozen, but I've found that one will take it from rock-solid to tolerable (the things were designed to be eaten room-temperature as well.) It's not exactly luxury food, but it's incredible to have have hot food available almost instantly without having to carry cooking equipment or starting a fire.
Its officially mac bashing time for some, which is funny as this is a board known for its windows bashing, but bring up Macs and suddenly there's no shortage of "we love MS/Dell!" Suddenly, all the problems with windows and dell's build quality are tossed out the window.
Slashdot does not have a unified opinion. It has many, many different people. It has people who buy inexpensive Dells with Windows, and Mac users, and people who build their PCs from scratch and assemble their own Linux without a distro.
If it seems schizophrenic, it's because it literally has many different personalities. Expecting it to settle on one opinion is unlikely.
I used to use two different email clients similarly: one for work and one for personal mail. Since my ISP stopped supporting the old version of Eudora I used to use, I've gone to using multiple personalities in Thunderbird, but the unified interface means that I often send email using the wrong account.
Having wildly different appearance might be a nuisance when I wanted a feature from one not present in the other, or when I hit the wrong key, but it kept it very clear in my mind whether I was sending personal or work email. Nothing disastrous happened, but I'd rather not send my clients emails with my personal address. It looks unprofessional.
I hadn't considered smaller events, like ice ages. To my understanding they tend to kill off only a very few species. The last big one killed off some very large mammals, but all the smaller ones survived. It probably also wiped out many heavily localized species of plant and insect, the kind that it takes a botanist or entomologist to tell apart from the nearly identical but distinct species 20 miles away. But as far as I can tell, if you're smaller than an elk and big enough to get out of the way, you should be able to survive those intermittent die-offs.
It's the really big ones that presumably lead to calculations like that, where the odds play interesting games because everybody dies all at once. But even taking that into account I can't justify 1 in 455 for the human species.
It sounds high to me. Species-level extinctions occur ever hundred million years or so. So in a 100-year period, I figure a one-in-a-million shot of getting wiped out.
Since the last extinction-level event we've had 650,000 centuries, not one of which has produced an event that would wipe out humanity. I don't know why he should expect that the next century will be any different. I call bullshit.
Sadly, many of the companies with positions open for cleared people have far, far fewer openings for uncleared work, even while they have contracts that they literally can't begin for lack of cleared people. They'd much rather snipe cleared people from other companies than pay for the clearance process themselves.
They're getting a patent to ensure that nobody buys one machine, builds a duplicate, and then sells it cheaper. Market forces would drive the price down. You have two producers competing, but only one of whom has extensive R&D invested.
It's not that they wouldn't sell their inventions; it's that they'd go into a different line of work entirely. R&D is expensive, and if they had no patent protection on it, they might simply go out of business.
The pro-patent people claim that without patents, R&D wouldn't get done, because of the scenario I outlined. But obviously that isn't entirely true, since lots of people do R&D work and then make it public for free. I can't explain why that would happen in terms of basic economics. Other factors come into play (the joy of discovery, the market advantage to the initial developer, the costs of reverse engineering being as high or higher than the costs of original development).
I know of no way to test definitively how well R&D would continue in the absence of patent protections. I don't believe pointing at the open source movement is entirely adequate as evidence. (I believe that the relationship between open source developers and proprietary systems is extremely intricate, and that open source would not actually exist without the proprietary vendors. But that's a long discussion that gets off topic very quickly.)
I'm not certain that the early days of software development "strongly suggest" that developers wouldn't come without patent protection. In fact many early software developers were driven out of business by competition: they would create and develop ideas and then be outcompeted by another company using those ideas. Netscape has ceased to exist; VisiCalc is similarly gone. Developers have clamored for patents on their software ever since there was a mass-market for software.
Clearly this is a privilege which has been abused, not least by flooding the USPTO with dubious applications such that they end up approving everything without much analysis. I'm not necessarily arguing for software patents, but I don't consider the argument against them to be knock-out-of-the-park either. This is a complicated argument, without a simple solution.
You certainly could go that route: Harmony to CD to MP3 to iPod. What a pain in the ass.
The whole reason people bought an iPod is because it's an extremely friendly, easy-to-use object. Real wants to capitalize on that by selling music for it, but they want their own DRM, too. So they hacked the format, trying to give you the best of both worlds, at least as far as they're concerned.
Your route avoids the reverse engineering through the "CD hole", but even aside from the effort and possible loss of quality (from the Real format to the CD format at least, plus the re-compression to MP3 or AAC if you want to rip that way) there's the fact that you have to use a physical CD in the mix.
I suppose with an RW CD you could reuse the same disk, but has anybody written a CD ramdisk yet? Something that pretends to be a CD burner but which in fact just caches to RAM, or to the hard disk? I can't think of any use for it except to fake out iTunes. You still get the re-encoding losses but at least you're not actually spinning up a physical object to do a purely computational task.
So I wouldn't call it a no-brainer. The fact that something can be done doesn't mean most people will want to do it. They're not preventing every loophole, just the ones that require no work on the part of the end-user. That's probably enough to drive away 99% of the business that would use Real with an iPod and back to iTMS, where Apple wants them.
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Well pointed out. I just wish to add that Intelligent Design doesn't necessarily preclude atheism, either.
You can well believe that the evidence presented in nature means that there must be an intelligent designer. (We can debate that ad nauseam, but let's just accept it as true at the moment.) However, that does not necessitate that "the designer of life on earth" == "the creator of the universe" == "the author of the Christian [or other] moral code".
This is the point on which the real controversy hangs. Opponents of ID are so vehement because they are concerned that ID's proponents wish to use it as a back door to force a moral code on nonbelievers. This does not follow logically: it may be that humans were designed by Klaatu the Alien rather than "God", and therefore even accepting ID we need not accept the various social constructions generally associated with ID's proponents (prayer in schools, opposition to homosexuality, government funding of religious schools and charities, etc.)
Mind you, I know nobody who actually believes this way. Well, that's not true: Star Trek (among others) posited that humans were placed here by aliens. But for the most part both ID's proponents and opponents believe that the ID argument equates the designer with the Christian God, and so ultimately this is a debate more about morality than science.
ID's proponents don't necessarily explicitly want to enforce their moral code, but rather to eliminate what they consider an erroneous argument for atheism. Neither ID nor evolution is a conclusive argument for or against theism, but ID does encourage (but not necessitate) the belief in God, and evolutionary theory does encourage (but not necessitate) the belief in the non-existence of God. It's unlikely that we'll ever have conclusive evidence one way or the other, so there will always be some element of "belief", which is what the top-level article is really about.
Before the "of course the aliens are already here" people get to it, I should note that a gigawatt signal that happened to be beamed at us (rather than to one of the other million or so G-class stars in this galaxy) from a measly four light-years away would arrive as perhaps nanowatts per square meter, or maybe even microwatts. Assuming, of course, that they were broadcasting right now (or rather, four years ago), as opposed to during some other part of the ten million year history of humanity.
Wouldn't it just suck if they were zapping us with a few terawatts of signal that just happened to arrive during the Renaissance, then they got bored? Juuuust missed it (geologically speaking, that is).
So it's not totally a fool's errand. It's just still gonna take a while.
A bigger question: why are all of the other solar systems so darned far away?
Uh... because everything is. Space is mostly, uh, empty space. The nearest other solar system is around four light-years away, and the nearest one after that is six light years-away.
Space is just really, really big, and there's not much in it. Most of the night sky is black, which means that from here to the end of the universe fifteen billion light-years away there isn't anything along your line of sight in 99.999% of the sky.
On average, even taking all the stars into account, space is more empty than the best vacuum we've ever achieved in a laboratory. And it's really, really, really big. You may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space. (Props to Douglas Adams.)
So the aliens may be there (I sure hope so), but finding them is like looking for a microscopic needle in a cosmological haystack. If it weren't the fact that we hope these needles are broadcasting, we wouldn't even bother looking. And when the signals come from that far away, you've got to listen really, really closely. A gigawatt of signal from 4 light-years away is 10^-23 watts per square meter, a unit so small we have to invent the name "yoctowatt" to describe it. If Arecibo were pointing right at it would still only receive a few zeptowatts. And that's for the closest star. Twice as far away, you get 1/4 as much signal. The nearest other galaxy is 1 million times further, which means the signal would be 1 million million times less strong (one trillionth, in American terms). We don't even have units for how small that gigawatt signal would be. x,w,v,u,t,s,r,q,o,p,n,m... maybe it's a "miptowatt" per square meter (and a "neccowatt" arriving at Arecibo).
So basically don't be surprised if you don't hear anything for a while.
Not to mention the whole breathing thing.
I hope nobody notices my silence on the subject of death-beam lasers.
Does that require Windows Server? I was bred on Unixes of various sorts but spend a lot of my time on Windows. There are a number of operations I don't know how to do without a mouse, even on my own machine, much less on a remote machine.
Even if I had a SSH/telnet-driven command prompt, I don't think I could kill a process on a remote machine, for example; I can do it only via the GUI. Is it just because I have a lot to learn, or is it a feature I don't have?
"Sharing your musical tastes with others" means "giving it them for free"? And by "others" you mean everybody on the planet with a P2P client, anonymously? You don't, ya know, wanna chat with them about it afterwards?
Fine with me. I'm just asking.
Or a networking stack, or threads, or security, or a clipboard, or plug&play, or localization, or...
But it's still for nerds. Different nerds, is all.
Everyday in an adjective meaning "ordinary"; every day is an adverbial phrase which means "each day".
But if you'd said, "I get to see how great the average American's everyday spelling and grammar are", you'd have been right.
(Yeah, I know grammar correction is usually trolling, but here it's in context.)
Other than that, your point is actually kind of at the heart of the issue. An ordinary encyclopedia works by getting experts in the field to write articles, and those experts are chosen by fiat by an editorial community.
The whole Wiki idea is that all of us are smarter than any of us, and tries to produce everything by collaboration. It is an epistemological problem, in that the average person's views of, say, quantum mechanics are mostly irrelevant, and contribute more to the field of pop culture than to physics. That's a problem to be debated by, well, expert epistemologists. The bad grammar can be corrected easily by other people, as long as the contribution itself is in good faith.
Life would be so much simpler if we could depend on good faith.
Agreed. As long as they can afford it, it seems to make sense to retire SS1 and use the expertise they gained to build SS2.
The article was hardly the stupidest thing I've seen, but I agree that it's hardly bad news to retire it. It has done what it was built to do. The investment was in the design, not the construction. Construct a new one, a better one, and let the prototype become an artifact.
Thing is, the phone companies charge you for an unlisted number. So if you have a phone, you are in that phone book getting phone spam unless you paid them not to.
The instructions tell you to lean it against "a rock or something", with an illustration. I've always found that charming.
I've never found it took 20 minutes to work. Nor did I ever really work too hard to get the water precisely between the fill lines; it's always worked fine with approximation.
We used to heat 'em under the hood of a truck, near the engine block.
And for me they improved vastly when they got rid of the "chocolate" bar. Man, that was the nastiest thing I have ever eaten.
Meals Ready to Eat, the US Army's replacement for it's old rations, usually come with a similar contraption: a wafer of material which is massively exothermic when combined with water.
It comes in a bag; you add water and then stuff your entree into the bag. The water comes to a boil (or at least apparently; it may just be hydrogen evolving from the reation, and they tell you not to use it in an enclosed place). The food goes from room temperature to way-too-hot-to-eat in a few minutes.
They recommend two of them if the food starts off frozen, but I've found that one will take it from rock-solid to tolerable (the things were designed to be eaten room-temperature as well.) It's not exactly luxury food, but it's incredible to have have hot food available almost instantly without having to carry cooking equipment or starting a fire.
On an offtopic note, when is Slashdot going to allow hebrew in comments?
Right after they fix the HTML to work properly in the Firefox browser we're all praising in this thread.
Its officially mac bashing time for some, which is funny as this is a board known for its windows bashing, but bring up Macs and suddenly there's no shortage of "we love MS/Dell!" Suddenly, all the problems with windows and dell's build quality are tossed out the window.
Slashdot does not have a unified opinion. It has many, many different people. It has people who buy inexpensive Dells with Windows, and Mac users, and people who build their PCs from scratch and assemble their own Linux without a distro.
If it seems schizophrenic, it's because it literally has many different personalities. Expecting it to settle on one opinion is unlikely.
I used to use two different email clients similarly: one for work and one for personal mail. Since my ISP stopped supporting the old version of Eudora I used to use, I've gone to using multiple personalities in Thunderbird, but the unified interface means that I often send email using the wrong account.
Having wildly different appearance might be a nuisance when I wanted a feature from one not present in the other, or when I hit the wrong key, but it kept it very clear in my mind whether I was sending personal or work email. Nothing disastrous happened, but I'd rather not send my clients emails with my personal address. It looks unprofessional.
Hell, I'm ticked off that I didn't take luddite.com when I had the chance.
I hadn't considered smaller events, like ice ages. To my understanding they tend to kill off only a very few species. The last big one killed off some very large mammals, but all the smaller ones survived. It probably also wiped out many heavily localized species of plant and insect, the kind that it takes a botanist or entomologist to tell apart from the nearly identical but distinct species 20 miles away. But as far as I can tell, if you're smaller than an elk and big enough to get out of the way, you should be able to survive those intermittent die-offs.
It's the really big ones that presumably lead to calculations like that, where the odds play interesting games because everybody dies all at once. But even taking that into account I can't justify 1 in 455 for the human species.
It sounds high to me. Species-level extinctions occur ever hundred million years or so. So in a 100-year period, I figure a one-in-a-million shot of getting wiped out.
Since the last extinction-level event we've had 650,000 centuries, not one of which has produced an event that would wipe out humanity. I don't know why he should expect that the next century will be any different. I call bullshit.
The Guardian is a British paper. The idea that creationism is valid and needs to be taught in schools seems to be a uniquely American idiocy.
Sadly, many of the companies with positions open for cleared people have far, far fewer openings for uncleared work, even while they have contracts that they literally can't begin for lack of cleared people. They'd much rather snipe cleared people from other companies than pay for the clearance process themselves.
They're getting a patent to ensure that nobody buys one machine, builds a duplicate, and then sells it cheaper. Market forces would drive the price down. You have two producers competing, but only one of whom has extensive R&D invested.
It's not that they wouldn't sell their inventions; it's that they'd go into a different line of work entirely. R&D is expensive, and if they had no patent protection on it, they might simply go out of business.
The pro-patent people claim that without patents, R&D wouldn't get done, because of the scenario I outlined. But obviously that isn't entirely true, since lots of people do R&D work and then make it public for free. I can't explain why that would happen in terms of basic economics. Other factors come into play (the joy of discovery, the market advantage to the initial developer, the costs of reverse engineering being as high or higher than the costs of original development).
I know of no way to test definitively how well R&D would continue in the absence of patent protections. I don't believe pointing at the open source movement is entirely adequate as evidence. (I believe that the relationship between open source developers and proprietary systems is extremely intricate, and that open source would not actually exist without the proprietary vendors. But that's a long discussion that gets off topic very quickly.)
I'm not certain that the early days of software development "strongly suggest" that developers wouldn't come without patent protection. In fact many early software developers were driven out of business by competition: they would create and develop ideas and then be outcompeted by another company using those ideas. Netscape has ceased to exist; VisiCalc is similarly gone. Developers have clamored for patents on their software ever since there was a mass-market for software.
Clearly this is a privilege which has been abused, not least by flooding the USPTO with dubious applications such that they end up approving everything without much analysis. I'm not necessarily arguing for software patents, but I don't consider the argument against them to be knock-out-of-the-park either. This is a complicated argument, without a simple solution.
You certainly could go that route: Harmony to CD to MP3 to iPod. What a pain in the ass.
The whole reason people bought an iPod is because it's an extremely friendly, easy-to-use object. Real wants to capitalize on that by selling music for it, but they want their own DRM, too. So they hacked the format, trying to give you the best of both worlds, at least as far as they're concerned.
Your route avoids the reverse engineering through the "CD hole", but even aside from the effort and possible loss of quality (from the Real format to the CD format at least, plus the re-compression to MP3 or AAC if you want to rip that way) there's the fact that you have to use a physical CD in the mix.
I suppose with an RW CD you could reuse the same disk, but has anybody written a CD ramdisk yet? Something that pretends to be a CD burner but which in fact just caches to RAM, or to the hard disk? I can't think of any use for it except to fake out iTunes. You still get the re-encoding losses but at least you're not actually spinning up a physical object to do a purely computational task.
So I wouldn't call it a no-brainer. The fact that something can be done doesn't mean most people will want to do it. They're not preventing every loophole, just the ones that require no work on the part of the end-user. That's probably enough to drive away 99% of the business that would use Real with an iPod and back to iTMS, where Apple wants them.