Well, RMS is an active Emacs project developer/patch-coordinator, as anyone on emacs-devel would know, acting in a similar role to Linus' linux role, sooo... who are you talking about?
Right, because MS Word is facing significant competition from Emacs as the text entry program of choice.
Yet, though I agree that plurality as well as proportional systems from party lists need improvement or a change, I do not see how this is to fix major problems.
I generally disagree that our voting system is in need of a major change. The existing system in my jurisdiction, which is "first-past-the-post", has a number of advantages: it is simple, easy to understand, and has been shown to lead to (reasonably) representative and stable governments through over a century of use.
I think one should beware of the law of unintended consequences when it comes to a voting system. For instance, any increase in complexity in the voting system is likely to confuse at least some voters (e.g., in range voting, the voter might forget whether to assign a low score or a high score to the desired candidates). I am also willing to bet that making the voter work harder is likely to drive down participation, which would skew the results in unpredictable ways.
Immigrants, Hackers, ID thieves, the Russians, terrorists
You seem to be implying that none of these things are worth the public's attention or concern. On the contrary.
To stay on topic, let's consider hacking. A frankly ridiculous amount of critical economic infrastructure is dependent on computers that are vulnerable to hacking, whether that vulnerability is due to operator incompetence or poor design. The hackers are constantly improving in sophistication and skill, and they are motivated by financial incentives. The next decade will see increasingly spectacular network attacks that cause massive amounts of economic damage and, indirectly, even deaths. The public should be concerned about this.
I've often wondered why we in the west feel so entitled to our middle-class lifestyle that we are willing to demand legislation that would guarantee continued poverty in the developing world. People in India and China have as much right to prosperity as we do; it's rather crass and tribalist to argue otherwise.
Summary of post: "Wouldn't it be great if humanity was replaced by an army of robots under my command? Then nobody would disagree with my nutty ideas."
As I'm sure others will mention, any advanced civilization capable of SOME space travel would be using mainly directed transmissions which would severely limit our chances of detecting them unless by chance we were somehow in the path.
But if such civilizations were even reasonably common, we should have coincidentally observed at least a few such signals by now.
You're also equating life with "intelligent life capable of generating detectable transmissions". Life could be quite prevalent, but intelligent life less so. Then there is also the chance that a civilization arose and fell long before humans ever walked the earth.
But this is exactly what the original poster is arguing (a point with which I agree): civilizations may exist but may be so far apart in time or space that they never see each other. Also, if such a civilization was spacefaring, there's no evidence that they ever visited Earth: no anomalous artifacts or fossils.
Then, for the tin foil hatters out there, an advanced civilization may be monitoring us or even participating
Wouldn't such an advanced civilization be indistinguishable from the Abrahamic God, who observes and participates but never reveals Himself?
Why focus on EM? We have been "listening" in the form of archaeology and recorded history for millennia. No artifacts or other evidence of landings have been found yet. Maybe "they" visited and cleaned up after themselves perfectly, but it is somewhat hard to believe.
You're wrong that the absence of EM evidence (or archaeological evidence) "prove[s] nothing". It certainly constrains the possible ways in which extraterrestrial intelligence could exist or operate. We have pretty much ruled out any nearby intelligence that operates in ways that we could detect or that would be meaningful to us.
I don't understand your point. Aren't we agreeing that Iran is entitled to purchase uranium for peaceful purposes? Which is exactly what they have been offered, and which they have rejected in favor of continuing to enrich.
What is exactly that makes the US, a country that actually made nuclear bombs and used them more entitled to being able to use the technology than another country?
Well, it could be the fact that the United Nations, the IAEA, as well as the EU, China, and Russia, agree that Iran is not entitled to the technology.
Why do you believe that Iran is foolish to accept an international agreement to secure its fuel supply, but it's fine for the rest of the world to accept Iran's word that its nuclear program is peaceful?
The NPT doesn't guarantee states the right to enrich; it guarantees them access to fuel. Effectively they have the right to enrich only if they can't purchase fuel on the open market. So by guaranteeing a supply, the UN is removing Iran's right to enrich.
The analogy to oil is not valid, since you can't make nuclear weapons out of oil.
The deal seems perfectly reasonable to me. Iran gets what it (ostensibly) wants, which is civilian nuclear power; and the rest of the world gets what it wants, which is non-proliferation. At the very least it is a good starting point for negotiation if both sides are serious about what they claim to want. Instead Iran has insisted that it has a right to pursue the key dual-use technology of enrichment, in defiance of the international community.
By criticizing the deal, you are implying that Iran (and, indeed, every other nation) has the right to enrich as much uranium as they please, which is not significantly different from saying that every nation has the right to acquire nuclear weapons.
So, according to you, there's absolutely no problem with every nation in the world acquiring the technology to build nuclear weapons, as long as they say it will only be used for peaceful purposes.
I broadly agree with your sentiment, if the Iranians' wish for civilian nuclear power was genuine. But the UN has already offered to supply them with all the fuel they need for their reactors, as long as they shut down their enrichment program. Iran has so far refused to accept this offer, and enrichment is the only important technology that nuclear power has in common with nuclear weapons. So it's unclear what their true intentions are.
I'm not a lawyer, but I know enough about the law to know that destroying corporate records that could be used as evidence is illegal, unless the destruction is in keeping with the company's existing policy on data retention. This is how several corporate fraudsters were nailed.
So my non-lawyerly understanding is this: if your company policy is to retain all email correspondence for six months, and you have an incriminating email exchange which all involved delete immediately because it is incriminating, you can be nailed for destroying evidence even if no criminal investigation is underway at the time. However, once the six months is up, you're free to delete without consequences. If your company has no policy on data retention, I would presume that intentional destruction of incriminating records is illegal at any time.
I find your analogy remarkable. Are you saying there should be criminal background checks and waiting periods for persons who wish to use copyright-infringement devices?
Also, if you think you're smarter than every judge who has ever lived, I'm wondering why you're not trying to become one yourself.
What a ridiculous idea. The application developer's free lunch is over, now she needs to think concurrently? Ha, she probably has difficulty with a single thread of thought...
I think this sentence makes most sense if you imagine it being read in Comic Book Guy voice.
Fine then, if not a bolt, then how about some kind of advanced ceramic or other long-lasting material. Although I suspect metal can last a long time under the right conditions.
I haven't heard of that diamond necklace one, but I suspect it is not accepted by mainstream science. Creationists can point to their own anomalous fossils as well, but this doesn't give us a good reason to accept creationism.
I guess I will revise my statement. I'm not an expert in geology, palaeontology, or archeology, but as far as I know the expert consensus is that no significant number of anomalous artifacts (that might point towards aliens) have been found. Sure, it is possible that we have been visited by very tidy aliens, but this is both purely speculative, and hard to believe given our own species' terrible record of cleaning up after itself. The best explanation is that alien intelligence has never visited Earth.
They might be intending to talk to us, or we might be accidentally aligned with a directional radio message they are sending for another purpose (for example, this is how we can detect pulsars). If ET intelligence is even reasonably common then this should have happened at least once by now.
In that case we're agreed. However, as it exists today, SETI gets a disproportionate share of attention compared to the results it has produced, and (given the record so far) to the results it is likely to produce.
Maybe there exists some tech beyond radio. But it would certainly be surprising if no ET civilization in existence had ever made wide use of radio at some point in their development. But that's what we're apparently seeing; either that or there are no civilizations to observe.
But I don't want to read the message, I only want to detect the energy in the message. It doesn't matter that the signal looks like noise, it only matters that it sticks out from the background. This is exactly what SETI is trying to do, and has failed.
Also, the existence of an Earth-like planet does not guarantee the existence of intelligent life (or life of any sort for that matter). We still don't even know how life emerged on Earth.
You can't conclude that given the data. For all we know, the prior probability on the existence of intelligent life around a given star could be 1e-21, in which case one would expect roughly one star in the universe with intelligent life.
Your first assumption resolves Fermi's paradox by claiming that intelligent life is much less common than originally thought. The other two do not explain the lack of radio evidence.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, RMS is an active Emacs project developer/patch-coordinator, as anyone on emacs-devel would know, acting in a similar role to Linus' linux role, sooo... who are you talking about?
Right, because MS Word is facing significant competition from Emacs as the text entry program of choice.
Yet, though I agree that plurality as well as proportional systems from party lists need improvement or a change, I do not see how this is to fix major problems.
I generally disagree that our voting system is in need of a major change. The existing system in my jurisdiction, which is "first-past-the-post", has a number of advantages: it is simple, easy to understand, and has been shown to lead to (reasonably) representative and stable governments through over a century of use.
I think one should beware of the law of unintended consequences when it comes to a voting system. For instance, any increase in complexity in the voting system is likely to confuse at least some voters (e.g., in range voting, the voter might forget whether to assign a low score or a high score to the desired candidates). I am also willing to bet that making the voter work harder is likely to drive down participation, which would skew the results in unpredictable ways.
Immigrants, Hackers, ID thieves, the Russians, terrorists
You seem to be implying that none of these things are worth the public's attention or concern. On the contrary.
To stay on topic, let's consider hacking. A frankly ridiculous amount of critical economic infrastructure is dependent on computers that are vulnerable to hacking, whether that vulnerability is due to operator incompetence or poor design. The hackers are constantly improving in sophistication and skill, and they are motivated by financial incentives. The next decade will see increasingly spectacular network attacks that cause massive amounts of economic damage and, indirectly, even deaths. The public should be concerned about this.
I've often wondered why we in the west feel so entitled to our middle-class lifestyle that we are willing to demand legislation that would guarantee continued poverty in the developing world. People in India and China have as much right to prosperity as we do; it's rather crass and tribalist to argue otherwise.
Summary of post: "Wouldn't it be great if humanity was replaced by an army of robots under my command? Then nobody would disagree with my nutty ideas."
As I'm sure others will mention, any advanced civilization capable of SOME space travel would be using mainly directed transmissions which would severely limit our chances of detecting them unless by chance we were somehow in the path.
But if such civilizations were even reasonably common, we should have coincidentally observed at least a few such signals by now.
You're also equating life with "intelligent life capable of generating detectable transmissions". Life could be quite prevalent, but intelligent life less so. Then there is also the chance that a civilization arose and fell long before humans ever walked the earth.
But this is exactly what the original poster is arguing (a point with which I agree): civilizations may exist but may be so far apart in time or space that they never see each other. Also, if such a civilization was spacefaring, there's no evidence that they ever visited Earth: no anomalous artifacts or fossils.
Then, for the tin foil hatters out there, an advanced civilization may be monitoring us or even participating
Wouldn't such an advanced civilization be indistinguishable from the Abrahamic God, who observes and participates but never reveals Himself?
Why focus on EM? We have been "listening" in the form of archaeology and recorded history for millennia. No artifacts or other evidence of landings have been found yet. Maybe "they" visited and cleaned up after themselves perfectly, but it is somewhat hard to believe.
You're wrong that the absence of EM evidence (or archaeological evidence) "prove[s] nothing". It certainly constrains the possible ways in which extraterrestrial intelligence could exist or operate. We have pretty much ruled out any nearby intelligence that operates in ways that we could detect or that would be meaningful to us.
I don't understand your point. Aren't we agreeing that Iran is entitled to purchase uranium for peaceful purposes? Which is exactly what they have been offered, and which they have rejected in favor of continuing to enrich.
As a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, Iran has surrendered its right to develop nuclear arms.
What is exactly that makes the US, a country that actually made nuclear bombs and used them more entitled to being able to use the technology than another country?
Well, it could be the fact that the United Nations, the IAEA, as well as the EU, China, and Russia, agree that Iran is not entitled to the technology.
Why do you believe that Iran is foolish to accept an international agreement to secure its fuel supply, but it's fine for the rest of the world to accept Iran's word that its nuclear program is peaceful?
The NPT doesn't guarantee states the right to enrich; it guarantees them access to fuel. Effectively they have the right to enrich only if they can't purchase fuel on the open market. So by guaranteeing a supply, the UN is removing Iran's right to enrich.
The analogy to oil is not valid, since you can't make nuclear weapons out of oil.
The deal seems perfectly reasonable to me. Iran gets what it (ostensibly) wants, which is civilian nuclear power; and the rest of the world gets what it wants, which is non-proliferation. At the very least it is a good starting point for negotiation if both sides are serious about what they claim to want. Instead Iran has insisted that it has a right to pursue the key dual-use technology of enrichment, in defiance of the international community.
By criticizing the deal, you are implying that Iran (and, indeed, every other nation) has the right to enrich as much uranium as they please, which is not significantly different from saying that every nation has the right to acquire nuclear weapons.
So, according to you, there's absolutely no problem with every nation in the world acquiring the technology to build nuclear weapons, as long as they say it will only be used for peaceful purposes.
I broadly agree with your sentiment, if the Iranians' wish for civilian nuclear power was genuine. But the UN has already offered to supply them with all the fuel they need for their reactors, as long as they shut down their enrichment program. Iran has so far refused to accept this offer, and enrichment is the only important technology that nuclear power has in common with nuclear weapons. So it's unclear what their true intentions are.
I'm not a lawyer, but I know enough about the law to know that destroying corporate records that could be used as evidence is illegal, unless the destruction is in keeping with the company's existing policy on data retention. This is how several corporate fraudsters were nailed.
So my non-lawyerly understanding is this: if your company policy is to retain all email correspondence for six months, and you have an incriminating email exchange which all involved delete immediately because it is incriminating, you can be nailed for destroying evidence even if no criminal investigation is underway at the time. However, once the six months is up, you're free to delete without consequences. If your company has no policy on data retention, I would presume that intentional destruction of incriminating records is illegal at any time.
The judge has a love for evidence.
Yeah, I prefer the ones who have already made up their mind in advance.
I find your analogy remarkable. Are you saying there should be criminal background checks and waiting periods for persons who wish to use copyright-infringement devices?
Also, if you think you're smarter than every judge who has ever lived, I'm wondering why you're not trying to become one yourself.
What a ridiculous idea. The application developer's free lunch is over, now she needs to think concurrently? Ha, she probably has difficulty with a single thread of thought...
I think this sentence makes most sense if you imagine it being read in Comic Book Guy voice.
Fine then, if not a bolt, then how about some kind of advanced ceramic or other long-lasting material. Although I suspect metal can last a long time under the right conditions.
I haven't heard of that diamond necklace one, but I suspect it is not accepted by mainstream science. Creationists can point to their own anomalous fossils as well, but this doesn't give us a good reason to accept creationism.
I guess I will revise my statement. I'm not an expert in geology, palaeontology, or archeology, but as far as I know the expert consensus is that no significant number of anomalous artifacts (that might point towards aliens) have been found. Sure, it is possible that we have been visited by very tidy aliens, but this is both purely speculative, and hard to believe given our own species' terrible record of cleaning up after itself. The best explanation is that alien intelligence has never visited Earth.
They might be intending to talk to us, or we might be accidentally aligned with a directional radio message they are sending for another purpose (for example, this is how we can detect pulsars). If ET intelligence is even reasonably common then this should have happened at least once by now.
In that case we're agreed. However, as it exists today, SETI gets a disproportionate share of attention compared to the results it has produced, and (given the record so far) to the results it is likely to produce.
Maybe there exists some tech beyond radio. But it would certainly be surprising if no ET civilization in existence had ever made wide use of radio at some point in their development. But that's what we're apparently seeing; either that or there are no civilizations to observe.
But I don't want to read the message, I only want to detect the energy in the message. It doesn't matter that the signal looks like noise, it only matters that it sticks out from the background. This is exactly what SETI is trying to do, and has failed.
Also, the existence of an Earth-like planet does not guarantee the existence of intelligent life (or life of any sort for that matter). We still don't even know how life emerged on Earth.
You can't conclude that given the data. For all we know, the prior probability on the existence of intelligent life around a given star could be 1e-21, in which case one would expect roughly one star in the universe with intelligent life.
Your first assumption resolves Fermi's paradox by claiming that intelligent life is much less common than originally thought. The other two do not explain the lack of radio evidence.