Singularities are where the math stops working. There is no reason to believe they have any reality. Gravitational singularities can't exist because they rely on infinite compression, which is impossible because of quantum mechanics.
Never trust any survey that quotes figures like 'Staffing expenses were 33.5% better'.
Any manager with any experience of market research or statistics is going to be amazed at how they came up with that decimal place. I mean, saying '1/3 better' is one thing, but '33.5' is a sign of numerical ignorance.
Maybe we should reply with 'Linux saves 98.68263123% of software costs'.
There is a lot of evidence we are alone
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Lonely Planets
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· Score: 1
With no observations and no tests, any hypothesis rings kind of hollow.
We have plenty of observations - no (convincing) signs of alien artifacts on Earth, or (so far) anywhere else in the solar system. There are no signs of any intelligent modifications of stars or other astronomical objects in our galaxy or any of those nearby (for a civilisation tens or hundreds of millions of years old, this should be trivial). Its like the galaxy is a forest, and we can see no signs of chopped trees or fires.
Either we are alone, or all technological species are stay-at-homers with no desire for exploration or expansion.
The argument that the galaxy is too big for travel is meaningless - even slower-than light colony ships or robotic probes could fill the galaxy in a few million years, and the galaxy is billions of years old.
We are not just intelligent life - we are spacefaring intelligent life. The universe could be teeming with all kinds of life, and even intelligent life, but technological, cultural, spacefaring life could be extremely rare indeed. For example, dolphins are pretty intelligent, as are dogs, chimps, parrots and octopuses, but only humans have developed technology.
Mod parent up, please... this is the absolute truth. It's just not realistic to expect ANY software company to keep supporting EVERY version of their stuff, forever.
True, but most reasonable companies will continue to support widely used previous versions of software, to keep potential customers happy. Competition in the software market means that customers would move elsewhere if not.
Being a monopoly, Microsoft can force the market where they want it to be, rather than being subject to competitive pressure.
Software gets old and the best thing to do is officially put it to rest. If you want to continue to use it that's your choice. Just means you also don't plan to update your hardware.
No it doesn't - there is nothing to 'wear out' in software. The problem with MS dropping support for older systems is that they keep changing their network protocols and authentication - just ask the Samba people. Sooner or later their server systems will drop support for the older clients.
WHen I got into Linux the community would brag that it would still run on 8086 or 286. That's over for mainstream Linux. Hardware moved forward and so did Linux.
Linux never ran on these, because of their lack of memory management. Linus started off with 386 support. Future versions of the new 2.6 kernels may well run on these older processors, as support for embedded systems has been added.
There is often mention of the expense of the moon missions, but the truth is they cost hardly anything - less than a fraction of a percent of the gross national product of the USA at the time.
The USA could easily fund new moon missions and mars missions, using a fraction of the current defense budget.
Dawkins doesn't say that
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Coalescent
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Baxter also seems to implicitly use work by Richard Dawkins, in "The Selfish Gene", where Dawkins argues that organisms are just the vessels by which their genes propagate in time. For the most part, this refers to nonsentient creatures. But the most provocative implication of Dawkins' work is that we too are bound by such imperatives. The plot in this book also seems to follow this thread.
Anyone who is up-to-date with Dawkins work would know that Dawins says the exact opposite - as sentient beings we are not bound these imperatives.
Java is fast, dynamic, multi-threaded, scalable from mobile phones to mainframes. You see, real coding is about developing reliable stuff that works, not about being amused.
In java you can abstract the data persistence thru a variety of encasulation techniques. All of which creates such a mess than everyone's scrambling these days to figure out how to simplify it. Sounds like a mess to introduce deeper into the database.
Why abstract the data persistence? just use JDBC. At least this has some level of portability, unlike the messy database routine naming in PHP.
And portability? Do you really think that java functions created for mysql will port *seamlessly* to postgresql, db2, or oracle? No way. And if they don't - why don't you simply write the functions in a tiny, simplistic language that everyone can use easily?
'Yes way'. That's what Java is for. That is why MySQL is using the same language for this as postgresql and oracle.
I never got past the 'Western in space' problem. Great actors, good stories, but why bother with the spaceships? The combination of hi and lo tech just looked silly - it was like... spaceships landing in the wild west and being met with men on horses. It was an inconsistent and totally implausible view of the future. I'm a real Joss Whedon fan, but Firefly sucked.
Java is ideal for this kind of thing because it is secure, and can be very fast (with a well-designed VM) and because you can re-use code. Java was not a great idea in 98 as it was dead slow. Now it matches C speeds, its a pretty good choice for portable coding.
The huge advantage of Java is its security. The app server or database engine can include a customised implementation of the Java SecurityManager, to ensure that user code can't do bad things. This is why enterprise database engines allowed this kind of embedding for java but not C/C++ etc.
Java not stable or reliable? What planet are you on? Java was designed for stability and reliability. The neatest thing in this context is the SecurityManager, which means you can restrict what it can do within an app server or database, unlike C code or whatever.
So, then, there is no possibility that they came by, saw us, decided that either we weren't ready for a visit (which I believe personally - not that they came by already, but that we aren't ready), or that they came by and throught we weren't technologically ready for the visit, or? Why does it half to be that they simply aren't interested in space travel or aren't there at all, and that's it? Why can there not be any other possibilities?
So where are the probes? Where are the space stations? You have to assume that ALL of them simply aren't interested in space travel - that at no stage in the lifetimes of millions of civilisations that may each be tens or hundreds of millions of years old did anyone take an interest in migration or colonisation. This is a big assumption, but its one you have to make if you expect to find radio signals via SETI.
I'm not joking at all. Its not bullshit - take a look at any SETI site and you will see that my point (the Fermi Paradox) is taken deadly seriously. we earthlings haven't got beyond the moon because we have only been space travellers for under 50 years. Are you seriously suggesting that if there were millions of other life forms in the universe they would ALL be stay-at-homers, or ALL be the same age as us in terms of technology?
Second, just because beings have mastered interstellar travel doesn't mean they have found us.
Yes it does, eventually. Any culture that travels in space, even at sublight speed, and builds colonies and expands exponentially and could have explored the galaxy in its entirety in a few tens of millions of years at most, according to most models of growth. The Earth is thousands of millions of years old.
As far as your assertions that ET would of already heard us and visited us if they existed, there are MANY possibilities that can include intelligent life not traveling here for any number of reasons. But that goes into the realm of speculation. Seti is about hard science, and the seti project is extremely cautious about making any sort of claim.
The problem of why ET would not have visited us is a serious one (the Fermi Paradox), and is a compelling argument for SETI being a waste of time. Lack of visits implies that either there are ETs out there and not one of them is even slightly interested in space flight (the entire galaxy could be colonised at sublight speeds within tens of millions of years), or that there are none there at all.
Intelligent life is NOT a certainty. For 3 billion years, the only life on this planet was single-celled organisms. Complex life is only 500-600 million years old. The dinosaurs were around for hundreds of millions of years, and there is no evidence that any of those were even slightly intelligent. There are many possibly sentient creatures around now - the great apes and cetaceans, but only one has developed technology in the fast few thousand years, probably as a result of the exceptional circumstances resulting from the ice ages. Just looking at our planet, intellent technological life is an extremely unlikely occurrence.
Java is fully open. The spec of the VM publically available, and anyone can implement a Java compiler (GNU have one - look at GJC and the Classpath project). Sun don't provide an open source Java compiler and VM, but neither does Microsoft for C#. What they do provide is a free high-performance VM for Windows, Solaris and Linux.
EJBs (Entity Java Beans) are a very small part of Java. There are thousands of client-side applications and tens of thousands of websites that use other Java technologies such as JSP, Servlets, Applets, JNI, JDO etc. Noone could say these are anything but serious applications
Just look at the Mono roadmap..Net on non-Microsoft platforms will always be just a bit (or maybe a lot) behind.Net on Windows. There is simply no reason not to use Java. With a fast VM (such as IBM's) and a decent native GUI toolkit (such as SWT) you can write full-featured high-performance applications with the advantage of portability. If you want web services, use J2EE. The next version of J2EE can provide services to.Net clients!
You don't lose out by choosing Java, you only gain freedom from Microsoft.
.Net on Linux is always going to lag behind.Net on Windows. Linux is a dominant presence in the server market, yet the aspects of.Net that Mono suggest they are least likely to implement are the enterprise server features, so only the client-side features of.Net are likely to be anywhere near complete.
There is a language and system already available on almost every platform that has complete client and enterprise features and open source versions (GCJ, Kaffe) - its called Java.
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Singularities are where the math stops working. There is no reason to believe they have any reality. Gravitational singularities can't exist because they rely on infinite compression, which is impossible because of quantum mechanics.
Never trust any survey that quotes figures like
'Staffing expenses were 33.5% better'.
Any manager with any experience of market research or statistics is going to be amazed at how they came up with that decimal place. I mean, saying '1/3 better' is one thing, but '33.5' is a sign of numerical ignorance.
Maybe we should reply with 'Linux saves 98.68263123% of software costs'.
With no observations and no tests, any hypothesis rings kind of hollow.
We have plenty of observations - no (convincing) signs of alien artifacts on Earth, or (so far) anywhere else in the solar system. There are no signs of any intelligent modifications of stars or other astronomical objects in our galaxy or any of those nearby (for a civilisation tens or hundreds of millions of years old, this should be trivial). Its like the galaxy is a forest, and we can see no signs of chopped trees or fires.
Either we are alone, or all technological species are stay-at-homers with no desire for exploration or expansion.
The argument that the galaxy is too big for travel is meaningless - even slower-than light colony ships or robotic probes could fill the galaxy in a few million years, and the galaxy is billions of years old.
We are not just intelligent life - we are spacefaring intelligent life. The universe could be teeming with all kinds of life, and even intelligent life, but technological, cultural, spacefaring life could be extremely rare indeed. For example, dolphins are pretty intelligent, as are dogs, chimps, parrots and octopuses, but only humans have developed technology.
Mod parent up, please... this is the absolute truth. It's just not realistic to expect ANY software company to keep supporting EVERY version of their stuff, forever.
True, but most reasonable companies will continue to support widely used previous versions of software, to keep potential customers happy. Competition in the software market means that customers would move elsewhere if not.
Being a monopoly, Microsoft can force the market where they want it to be, rather than being subject to competitive pressure.
Software gets old and the best thing to do is officially put it to rest. If you want to continue to use it that's your choice. Just means you also don't plan to update your hardware.
No it doesn't - there is nothing to 'wear out' in software. The problem with MS dropping support for older systems is that they keep changing their network protocols and authentication - just ask the Samba people. Sooner or later their server systems will drop support for the older clients.
WHen I got into Linux the community would brag that it would still run on 8086 or 286. That's over for mainstream Linux. Hardware moved forward and so did Linux.
Linux never ran on these, because of their lack of memory management. Linus started off with 386 support. Future versions of the new 2.6 kernels may well run on these older processors, as support for embedded systems has been added.
There is often mention of the expense of the moon missions, but the truth is they cost hardly anything - less than a fraction of a percent of the gross national product of the USA at the time.
The USA could easily fund new moon missions and mars missions, using a fraction of the current defense budget.
Baxter also seems to implicitly use work by Richard Dawkins, in "The Selfish Gene", where Dawkins argues that organisms are just the vessels by which their genes propagate in time. For the most part, this refers to nonsentient creatures. But the most provocative implication of Dawkins' work is that we too are bound by such imperatives. The plot in this book also seems to follow this thread.
Anyone who is up-to-date with Dawkins work would know that Dawins says the exact opposite - as sentient beings we are not bound these imperatives.
Could be useful as a rescue craft. Paint it green, and call it something exciting, like 'Thunderbird 2'.
Java is fast, dynamic, multi-threaded, scalable from mobile phones to mainframes. You see, real coding is about developing reliable stuff that works, not about being amused.
In java you can abstract the data persistence thru a variety of encasulation techniques. All of which creates such a mess than everyone's scrambling these days to figure out how to simplify it. Sounds like a mess to introduce deeper into the database.
Why abstract the data persistence? just use JDBC. At least this has some level of portability, unlike the messy database routine naming in PHP.
And portability? Do you really think that java functions created for mysql will port *seamlessly* to postgresql, db2, or oracle? No way. And if they don't - why don't you simply write the functions in a tiny, simplistic language that everyone can use easily?
'Yes way'. That's what Java is for. That is why MySQL is using the same language for this as postgresql and oracle.
I never got past the 'Western in space' problem. Great actors, good stories, but why bother with the spaceships? The combination of hi and lo tech just looked silly - it was like ... spaceships landing in the wild west and being met with men on horses. It was an inconsistent and totally implausible view of the future. I'm a real Joss Whedon fan, but Firefly sucked.
Java is ideal for this kind of thing because it is secure, and can be very fast (with a well-designed VM) and because you can re-use code. Java was not a great idea in 98 as it was dead slow. Now it matches C speeds, its a pretty good choice for portable coding.
The huge advantage of Java is its security. The app server or database engine can include a customised implementation of the Java SecurityManager, to ensure that user code can't do bad things. This is why enterprise database engines allowed this kind of embedding for java but not C/C++ etc.
Java not stable or reliable? What planet are you on? Java was designed for stability and reliability. The neatest thing in this context is the SecurityManager, which means you can restrict what it can do within an app server or database, unlike C code or whatever.
So, then, there is no possibility that they came by, saw us, decided that either we weren't ready for a visit (which I believe personally - not that they came by already, but that we aren't ready), or that they came by and throught we weren't technologically ready for the visit, or? Why does it half to be that they simply aren't interested in space travel or aren't there at all, and that's it? Why can there not be any other possibilities?
So where are the probes? Where are the space stations? You have to assume that ALL of them simply aren't interested in space travel - that at no stage in the lifetimes of millions of civilisations that may each be tens or hundreds of millions of years old did anyone take an interest in migration or colonisation. This is a big assumption, but its one you have to make if you expect to find radio signals via SETI.
I'm not joking at all. Its not bullshit - take a look at any SETI site and you will see that my point (the Fermi Paradox) is taken deadly seriously. we earthlings haven't got beyond the moon because we have only been space travellers for under 50 years. Are you seriously suggesting that if there were millions of other life forms in the universe they would ALL be stay-at-homers, or ALL be the same age as us in terms of technology?
Second, just because beings have mastered interstellar travel doesn't mean they have found us.
Yes it does, eventually. Any culture that travels in space, even at sublight speed, and builds colonies and expands exponentially and could have explored the galaxy in its entirety in a few tens of millions of years at most, according to most models of growth. The Earth is thousands of millions of years old.
As far as your assertions that ET would of already heard us and visited us if they existed, there are MANY possibilities that can include intelligent life not traveling here for any number of reasons. But that goes into the realm of speculation. Seti is about hard science, and the seti project is extremely cautious about making any sort of claim.
The problem of why ET would not have visited us is a serious one (the Fermi Paradox), and is a compelling argument for SETI being a waste of time. Lack of visits implies that either there are ETs out there and not one of them is even slightly interested in space flight (the entire galaxy could be colonised at sublight speeds within tens of millions of years), or that there are none there at all.
I'm sure there is lots of life out there - I expect its very common. I don't believe there is much, if any, technological life other than us.
Intelligent life is NOT a certainty. For 3 billion years, the only life on this planet was single-celled organisms. Complex life is only 500-600 million years old. The dinosaurs were around for hundreds of millions of years, and there is no evidence that any of those were even slightly intelligent. There are many possibly sentient creatures around now - the great apes and cetaceans, but only one has developed technology in the fast few thousand years, probably as a result of the exceptional circumstances resulting from the ice ages. Just looking at our planet, intellent technological life is an extremely unlikely occurrence.
Java is fully open. The spec of the VM publically available, and anyone can implement a Java compiler (GNU have one - look at GJC and the Classpath project). Sun don't provide an open source Java compiler and VM, but neither does Microsoft for C#. What they do provide is a free high-performance VM for Windows, Solaris and Linux.
EJBs (Entity Java Beans) are a very small part of Java. There are thousands of client-side applications and tens of thousands of websites that use other Java technologies such as JSP, Servlets, Applets, JNI, JDO etc. Noone could say these are anything but serious applications
Just look at the Mono roadmap. .Net on non-Microsoft platforms will always be just a bit (or maybe a lot) behind .Net on Windows. There is simply no reason not to use Java. With a fast VM (such as IBM's) and a decent native GUI toolkit (such as SWT) you can write full-featured high-performance applications with the advantage of portability. If you want web services, use J2EE. The next version of J2EE can provide services to .Net clients!
You don't lose out by choosing Java, you only gain freedom from Microsoft.
.Net on Linux is always going to lag behind .Net on Windows. Linux is a dominant presence in the server market, yet the aspects of .Net that Mono suggest they are least likely to implement are the enterprise server features, so only the client-side features of .Net are likely to be anywhere near complete.
There is a language and system already available on almost every platform that has complete client and enterprise features and open source versions (GCJ, Kaffe) - its called Java.
So why bother?
So yes, anything to do with Windows will have to be .Net in a few years time.
This is very unlikely. Windows is going to have to support non-.Net legacy applications for the indefinite future.