So, certain information that would have weakened the government's case, and added doubt to it was not added, and you don't think of it as a lie?
No. If the UK government believed that the WMDs were there, and they were trying to put forward that case, it was not a lie. It was not a deliberate intent to mislead. You may not like what they did, but that does not mean they lied.
In this case, yes, because the primary justification for war was that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that they could be deployed within 45 minutes.
No. The justification was UN resolution 1441 - that Iraq was in 'material breach of disarmament obligations'.
They changed in purpose evidence that was sketchy and doubtful to make it appear like it was credible and conclussive. They adjusted the evidence to their aims, and not the other way aorund as it should be.
I can't know about the USA, but in terms of the UK government there is no evidence for what you say. You are welcome to believe this of course, but you can't state it as fact.
That there are people out there still defending them is a complete disgrace.
Nothing compared to the disgrace of those who would have been happy for Saddam to stay in power.
If you wish to eliminate the word `lie' from the English language as not useful because it can never be proved absolutely, feel free to start a campagn.
You are misunderstanding the point I am making. You were saying that you couldn't prove that Blair lied in this case. It is obviously possible to prove that people lie in some cases - where there is evidence of a conversation in which something contrary was stated.
I think most of us are happy with the level of proof of `clearly no one evolutionarilly higher than a liver fluke could have come to believe what this man stated'.
No - again just personal opinion.
And that is the last mention of WMDs in the speech, a statement that they are pulrey a legalistic justification, from then on it is all about the evils of SH, the necessity not to be seen to change ones mind (a politicians argument to politicians of course), and why we must go to war to defend our `way of life' from conflicting idiologies.
Look - either they are a legalistic justification or they are not. If they are believed to be a legalistic justification, then that is what they are and no lie is involved. Obviously there was a case to made for war in other terms, but that is irrelevant as to whether a specific lie was told.
The arguments you are putting forward seem to me to be a set of opinions and beliefs. Well, fair enough, but still - where is the evidence for a lie?
The problem is that the line between willfully ignoring all evidence that contradicted their beliefs (and there was plenty)
Which we know now, years later.
in the "clear and present danger" of Iraq's WMD, while believing any and all evidence, however flaky, that supported their view when making statements/dossiers etc, and outright lying seems almost academic to me.
Well I hope you don't end up as a lawyer!
The defence that the government took us to war because it was incompetent/gullible doesn't make things an awful lot better, especially when they continually refuse to apologise or admit any personal culpability for their actions.
Yes it does. There is a huge moral difference between being mistaken, and deliberately lying. I am shocked that some can't see the difference.
Short of having the technology to take a retrospective dump of Blair's brain at the moment he made the decision to make the claim, it is impossible to prove they knew it to be false. That level of proof is just never available for this kind of issue.
So, there is no excuse for throwing around accusations like 'he lied'. It is stating something you can't know and can't prove.
The UK and US went to war to get rid of Saddam Hussain. The US blather about 9/11 and the UK blather about WMDs were attempts at providing a reason which would justify the predictable deaths.
Just personal opinion. No evidence for this at all. You may have some kind of faith that this is what is true, but you can't put it forward as fact.
So the statement that 'this was not hindsight' is wrong.
We have officials saying "we didn't know" despite the fact that they were being told so repeatedly.
Which officials? Where is your evidence that individual politicians deliberately or knowingly lied about anything?
Maybe they didn't hear. Maybe they didn't believe. Willful ignorance is as good as lying and I don't see the use of arguing the difference.
Because the correct use of language is important. If don't see the point of arguing for correct language then you don't see that you could be in trouble when someone uses loose language to try and convict you. Precision and accuracy is what you are arguing for from governments. To not be precise yourself is hypocritical.
Speaking of non-sequiters, you completly evaded my question. This is beyond a mistakes and secrets. We're talking about a group (you can say the CIA or the Executive branch, as you chose)
I've done a Google search for "New Scientist Iraq Children Torture" and variations of such and can't find any information on this. Please cite sources
I'm afraid I don't keep back copies. It was one of their weekly interviews with significant people. The interview was with someone who had lived in Iraq and who had been detained and tortured, and who described how children were tortured in order to get information out of their parents.
This may well have been the interview with Hussain Al-Shahristani in the 26 June 2004 issue.
So why didn't the US and the UK approach the UN with those concerns? Why was it necessary to focus on WMD when presumably, according to you at least, the evidence for the need for humanitarian intervention is so overwhelming?
Because... just because I personally believe that going to war for humanitarian reasons is a good thing does not mean that this is what governments do. My personal beliefs have no relevance as to why the war in Iraq was started. What I am saying is that I consider one of the outcomes of the way - the removal of the dictator - to be a great thing.
To make a material claim about somthing that you know to be false is as good a definition of a lie as I can think of.
Yet again... There is no evidence they knew it to be false. This was investigated. Of course, when an inquiry finds that a government did not lie, the cynical public always call this a 'whitewash', but that does not mean the public is right.
We went to war because governments believed that there were WMDs present. You have not provided any evidence to show that these governments did not believe that at the time when war was declared.
But `we' weren't desperate to act before the report came out. Well, I wasn't.
If I remember, the final report about WMD came out sometime after the war had finished. What report are you describing?
One very plausible explanation for the indecent haste is that Bush and Blair were pretty sure that the report would remove one of their excuses, and the only one Blair could use.
Again, no matter how unpleasant you may think Bush and Blair are (and there are reasons to think this!), you are just putting forward a personal opinion with no evidence.
I've heard reports that at least some of the sources cited for 'murdered millions' are leaky at best, and 'routinely tortured children' is mainly appealing to emotion.
No, this is pretty well established - it has been published in reputable journals like New Scientist. If it had not been there, I would definitely have questioned this type of accusation, but New Scientist is well-respected.
Checked out Saudi Arabia recently?
Yes - a nasty place!
Don't get me wrong, Hussein was/is a nasty fucker, and I'd be happy to see him shot in the balls, but there are plenty of other nasty fuckers around. How come, if the rationale is human rights, is the US not bombing the shit out of these guys?
I have no idea, but I don't support the argument that because we can't (or won't) deal with all the problems, we should deal with any. The reason we don't deal with China is simple - they have nukes!
Later it was discovered that accusations were false. In my book, if you claim to have absolute proof that guarentees certainty of a fact and that fact latter turns out to be false.... you lied.
No. If you are told by your intelligence services that there is proof, and you believe them, you say that, and then the intelligence services were mistaken, you did not lie. You were misled. There is a difference.
In any case, it seems that this coalition could do with a lesson in not making accusatiosn lightly too. The consequences of their accusations were far more serious!
Yes. A dictator who murdered millions, threatened the stability of the Gulf, and routinely tortured children has been kicked out of power. That is a serious consequence.
UN hadn't even properly finished its weapons inspections (to which Iraq was being more and more cooperative) and the UK blindly followed. If that's not leading soldiers to their deaths based on a lie, then at least it's based on gross neglect of duty.
No, really, this wasn't the case. There were major problems with the UN inspections - huge amounts of corruption that is still being investigated.
I am one of those who celebrate the demise of a terrible dictator in Iraq, but I also have a lot of worries about how the war was fought, and what the motives were, but it was not (at least not in the case of the UK) based on lying, and to say that we 'blindly followed' is nothing more than intellectually lazy nonsense. The decision may have been wrong or mistaken, but decisions like that are certainly not taken 'blindly', and to say so is naive in the extreme.
hey most people in england happen to think the goverment deserved a good poking for taking us to war on a lie
No matter how much you dislike what happened, it is not true that we (British) went to war on a 'lie'. This would only be true if it the government knew in advance that there were no weapons of mass destruction at the time of declaration of war. There is little or no evidence of this. It is fair to say that the government was mistaken, or that the intelligence services were incompetent, or that politicians were naive or stupid. But, that is fundamentally different from saying that they deliberately lied. Such accusations should not be made lightly.
If your going to use Fermi's 'paradox' one could just as easily counter with drakes equation. Both use pure speculation and assumption.
But Fermi's paradox has hugely less assumptions that Drake's equation, so is more rational.
The biggest problem with trying to guess anything about an alein life, let alone civilisation, is that it would be alien.
You are making the assumptions! You assume that all civilsations would either not spread or be effectively invisible.
The problem is all that time to expand niegther guarantees expansion nor wastefullness on the part of expandind races nor
Actually, it does. The analyses of how expansion would occur have been repeatedly done by many scientists. You need only the most feeble expansion: Each new colony could hang around for millenia, and then only send of 1 or 2 spacecraft and you would still fill up the galaxy in 100 million tears. Wastefulness would actually encourage expansion, because of the need to find new resources.
I really suggest you read Stephen Baxter's book 'Deep Future' for a good review of the situation before you comment further - all of your objections are well-known and have been dealt with.
miraculously makes us diligent and wise enough to spot them.
You seem to keep missing the key point. We don't have to be diligent or wise! If any civilisation expands, they would be right here! We should see their ships in our skies!
The absence of proof being proof of absence is a known fallacy and insisting otherwise does not give it credence.
No. I have plenty of proof that all observations made of the universe can be explained without the need for extra assumptions.
Observing and not finding is certainly evidence. I feel that your attitude is like someone looking over a huge dry desert and saying that there is lots of aliens out there. When asked why they can't be seen, you reply that we aren't inspecting the sand grains closely enough, or that all aliens that there have ever been are invisible. Its nothing but special pleading - trying to insist that something is there despite evidence is more like religion than science.
Perhaps we should stop - it has been fun, but we are going round in circles:)
I would seriously suggest you read that Stephen Baxter book - all your points are fully explained (or so I think).
Remember, I am not saying there is no life out there - I believe that life is abundant. What I am saying is that there is now a lot of evidence that there are no other technological spacefaring civilisations.
I don't know what to say to make my point at this juncture, especially if your not even really paying atention to what I said.
I feel the same.
You say our eyesight is so good we could miss them? Yet we're still finding new quasars to point out just one type of very high eneregy object. And not only that we simply are not looking for life with but a tiny fraction of our ability.
Quasars are billions of light years away. The stars in our galaxy are millions of times closer.
Space is very huge, I can understand how you fail understand just how trully huge it is, the human mind cannot as readilly grasp such hugeness as it can other things. Your failure to grasp this doese not invalidate the very fact that it's raw size gives us to much to search to say nothing is there
You are repeatedly failing to grasp the immense passages of time that have passed, and the nature of the Fermi paradox. The basis of this paradox is that, effectively, space is rendered small by time. There has been enough time for civilizations to have arisen at a single planet and drifted lazily across space - colonizing new planets and stars at FAR less than light-speed - hundreds of times over and over since the galaxy started. Let me repeat that again - there has been enough time for the galaxy to have been fully colonised from nothing hundreds of times. Even if this had happened ONCE, we would see the evidence.
The only thing our not having stumbled across an other civilization proves is we haven't stumbled across another civilization. It niegther proves there are none or that there are many.
Yes it does! It is VERY strong evidence for absence!
I don't know how I can put things any clearer, but I will try again:
Life spreads. We only have to assume that ONE such civilization would have arisen at any time in the past 10 billion years (since the origin of the galaxy) and life and intelligence should be EVERYWHERE - we should find it hard to avoid bumping into them! The stars should be visibly harvested for energy.
The way that Solaris 10 is to be open sourced was approved by the OSI under the CDDL license, so no need for those "quotes". If you don't approve, complain about the OSI. Just because it is not GPL, does not mean it is not open source.
Linux so far scales to up to 256 CPUs on real computers
'Scales' is meaningless unless you say what it can do. Allowing a carefully-written and finely tuned application to run across multiple CPUs is totally different from being able to act as a general-purpose machine. When Solaris scales across many processors this is usually as a general-purpose enterprise server, with multiple users, multi-threaded databases and application servers. This is fundamentally different from a customised numerical computation server, which is something SGI specialises in.
Our sight is still very limited. Shure we can dectect some interesting things, but only where we specifically look and within some rather sharp limits. Space is a lot bigger than big.
I totally disagree. Our sight is good and deep. we can see everything from radio waves to gamma rays, and we can see incredible detail: With radio telescopes we can see details the size of our solar system in nearby galaxies. Not only do we see detail in size, we see detail in intensity: we can detect infinitesimal ripples in the microwave background.
For an alien civilisation to be spottable enough for us to be likely to spot them by chance (or nearly so) they would have to be at least as inefficient as us and/or in just the right place (likely very close) OR specifically targeting us for notice.
I think you are missing an important point. Life spreads. Unless there was a very good reason for all civilisations to keep quiet and hide, they should be abundantly visible everywhere - there has been more than enough time for all the galaxy to have been colonised dozens of time over. The 'space is big' argument just doesn't hold.
If our own tech is hard for us to spot as other than normal noise, how much harder would a more advanced civilisations be?
In general, our tech is very easy to spot over normal noise. In terms of some radio frequencies the Earth outshines the sun!
I find the sheer number of different reasons why an alien civilisation would not be highly visible and thus spotted by near random chance a better explanation than expecting them to make so much noise we couldn't miss them despite the raw hugeness of space.
what are these reasons? I find it hard to think of any...
Slashdot Mirror
Saying "I know X is true" is still a lie if the truth is merely "I suspect there is a chance X is true".
No it isn't, as there is no possible situation in which we can know that something is certainly true.
Are you expecting a level of truth from politicians that neither scientists or philosophers can achieve?
So, certain information that would have weakened the government's case, and added doubt to it was not added, and you don't think of it as a lie?
No. If the UK government believed that the WMDs were there, and they were trying to put forward that case, it was not a lie. It was not a deliberate intent to mislead. You may not like what they did, but that does not mean they lied.
In this case, yes, because the primary justification for war was that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that they could be deployed within 45 minutes.
No. The justification was UN resolution 1441 - that Iraq was in 'material breach of disarmament obligations'.
They changed in purpose evidence that was sketchy and doubtful to make it appear like it was credible and conclussive. They adjusted the evidence to their aims, and not the other way aorund as it should be.
I can't know about the USA, but in terms of the UK government there is no evidence for what you say. You are welcome to believe this of course, but you can't state it as fact.
That there are people out there still defending them is a complete disgrace.
Nothing compared to the disgrace of those who would have been happy for Saddam to stay in power.
Frankly people like you don't deserve the liberty and freedom you are so casualy dismissive about ...
When have I been dismissive of freedom or liberty?
On the contrary, it is the casual use of language - such the ability to define 'lie' in any terms you wish - that is dangerous.
I celebrate liberty and freedom, which is why I celebrate the end of the tyrannical reign of Saddam.
If you wish to eliminate the word `lie' from the English language as not useful because it can never be proved absolutely, feel free to start a campagn.
You are misunderstanding the point I am making. You were saying that you couldn't prove that Blair lied in this case. It is obviously possible to prove that people lie in some cases - where there is evidence of a conversation in which something contrary was stated.
I think most of us are happy with the level of proof of `clearly no one evolutionarilly higher than a liver fluke could have come to believe what this man stated'.
No - again just personal opinion.
And that is the last mention of WMDs in the speech, a statement that they are pulrey a legalistic justification, from then on it is all about the evils of SH, the necessity not to be seen to change ones mind (a politicians argument to politicians of course), and why we must go to war to defend our `way of life' from conflicting idiologies.
Look - either they are a legalistic justification or they are not. If they are believed to be a legalistic justification, then that is what they are and no lie is involved. Obviously there was a case to made for war in other terms, but that is irrelevant as to whether a specific lie was told.
The arguments you are putting forward seem to me to be a set of opinions and beliefs. Well, fair enough, but still - where is the evidence for a lie?
The problem is that the line between willfully ignoring all evidence that contradicted their beliefs (and there was plenty)
Which we know now, years later.
in the "clear and present danger" of Iraq's WMD, while believing any and all evidence, however flaky, that supported their view when making statements/dossiers etc, and outright lying seems almost academic to me.
Well I hope you don't end up as a lawyer!
The defence that the government took us to war because it was incompetent/gullible doesn't make things an awful lot better, especially when they continually refuse to apologise or admit any personal culpability for their actions.
Yes it does. There is a huge moral difference between being mistaken, and deliberately lying. I am shocked that some can't see the difference.
Short of having the technology to take a retrospective dump of Blair's brain at the moment he made the decision to make the claim, it is impossible to prove they knew it to be false. That level of proof is just never available for this kind of issue.
So, there is no excuse for throwing around accusations like 'he lied'. It is stating something you can't know and can't prove.
The UK and US went to war to get rid of Saddam Hussain. The US blather about 9/11 and the UK blather about WMDs were attempts at providing a reason which would justify the predictable deaths.
Just personal opinion. No evidence for this at all. You may have some kind of faith that this is what is true, but you can't put it forward as fact.
All vindication is based on hindsight.
So the statement that 'this was not hindsight' is wrong.
We have officials saying "we didn't know" despite the fact that they were being told so repeatedly.
Which officials? Where is your evidence that individual politicians deliberately or knowingly lied about anything?
Maybe they didn't hear. Maybe they didn't believe.
Willful ignorance is as good as lying and I don't see the use of arguing the difference.
Because the correct use of language is important. If don't see the point of arguing for correct language then you don't see that you could be in trouble when someone uses loose language to try and convict you. Precision and accuracy is what you are arguing for from governments. To not be precise yourself is hypocritical.
Speaking of non-sequiters, you completly evaded my question. This is beyond a mistakes and secrets. We're talking about a group (you can say the CIA or the Executive branch, as you chose)
Who? Which inidividual politicians?
But it's not "hindsight." It's vindication.
A non-sequitur. It is vindication based on highsight, and is irrelevant to the question as to whether anyone actually deliberately lied.
Of course, if we can't get the information that we need to represent our own interests, what's the point of a democracy to begin with?
Because in the real world, secrecy is necessary sometimes, and governments make mistakes. To believe otherwise is both idealistic and naive.
I've done a Google search for "New Scientist Iraq Children Torture" and variations of such and can't find any information on this. Please cite sources
I'm afraid I don't keep back copies. It was one of their weekly interviews with significant people. The interview was with someone who had lived in Iraq and who had been detained and tortured, and who described how children were tortured in order to get information out of their parents.
This may well have been the interview with Hussain Al-Shahristani in the 26 June 2004 issue.
So why didn't the US and the UK approach the UN with those concerns? Why was it necessary to focus on WMD when presumably, according to you at least, the evidence for the need for humanitarian intervention is so overwhelming?
Because... just because I personally believe that going to war for humanitarian reasons is a good thing does not mean that this is what governments do. My personal beliefs have no relevance as to why the war in Iraq was started. What I am saying is that I consider one of the outcomes of the way - the removal of the dictator - to be a great thing.
To make a material claim about somthing that you know to be false is as good a definition of a lie as I can think of.
Yet again...
There is no evidence they knew it to be false. This was investigated. Of course, when an inquiry finds that a government did not lie, the cynical public always call this a 'whitewash', but that does not mean the public is right.
We went to war because governments believed that there were WMDs present. You have not provided any evidence to show that these governments did not believe that at the time when war was declared.
Because that is the claim the UK government made.
Its one of the claims. But not the key one.
But `we' weren't desperate to act before the report came out. Well, I wasn't.
If I remember, the final report about WMD came out sometime after the war had finished. What report are you describing?
One very plausible explanation for the indecent haste is that Bush and Blair were pretty sure that the report would remove one of their excuses, and the only one Blair could use.
Again, no matter how unpleasant you may think Bush and Blair are (and there are reasons to think this!), you are just putting forward a personal opinion with no evidence.
I've heard reports that at least some of the sources cited for 'murdered millions' are leaky at best, and 'routinely tortured children' is mainly appealing to emotion.
No, this is pretty well established - it has been published in reputable journals like New Scientist. If it had not been there, I would definitely have questioned this type of accusation, but New Scientist is well-respected.
Checked out Saudi Arabia recently?
Yes - a nasty place!
Don't get me wrong, Hussein was/is a nasty fucker, and I'd be happy to see him shot in the balls, but there are plenty of other nasty fuckers around. How come, if the rationale is human rights, is the US not bombing the shit out of these guys?
I have no idea, but I don't support the argument that because we can't (or won't) deal with all the problems, we should deal with any. The reason we don't deal with China is simple - they have nukes!
Actually, they need only haver known that there were none capable of being direct threats to Britain available for use within 45 minutes.
How is this relevant? Do biological or chemical or nuclear weapons only 'count' if they can be used quickly?
We now know the inspectors would have reported no weapons present. What did Bush and Blair believe that report would say?
Well, that is kind of the point, isn't it? Its all very fine to say what we now know. This is called 'hindsight'.
Very well put - I completely agree. However, I still think it is wrong to say that a 'lie' was involved - that implies deliberate intent to deceive.
Later it was discovered that accusations were false. In my book, if you claim to have absolute proof that guarentees certainty of a fact and that fact latter turns out to be false.... you lied.
No. If you are told by your intelligence services that there is proof, and you believe them, you say that, and then the intelligence services were mistaken, you did not lie. You were misled. There is a difference.
In any case, it seems that this coalition could do with a lesson in not making accusatiosn lightly too. The consequences of their accusations were far more serious!
Yes. A dictator who murdered millions, threatened the stability of the Gulf, and routinely tortured children has been kicked out of power. That is a serious consequence.
UN hadn't even properly finished its weapons inspections (to which Iraq was being more and more cooperative) and the UK blindly followed. If that's not leading soldiers to their deaths based on a lie, then at least it's based on gross neglect of duty.
No, really, this wasn't the case. There were major problems with the UN inspections - huge amounts of corruption that is still being investigated.
I am one of those who celebrate the demise of a terrible dictator in Iraq, but I also have a lot of worries about how the war was fought, and what the motives were, but it was not (at least not in the case of the UK) based on lying, and to say that we 'blindly followed' is nothing more than intellectually lazy nonsense. The decision may have been wrong or mistaken, but decisions like that are certainly not taken 'blindly', and to say so is naive in the extreme.
hey most people in england happen to think the goverment deserved a good poking for taking us to war on a lie
No matter how much you dislike what happened, it is not true that we (British) went to war on a 'lie'. This would only be true if it the government knew in advance that there were no weapons of mass destruction at the time of declaration of war. There is little or no evidence of this. It is fair to say that the government was mistaken, or that the intelligence services were incompetent, or that politicians were naive or stupid. But, that is fundamentally different from saying that they deliberately lied. Such accusations should not be made lightly.
If your going to use Fermi's 'paradox' one could just as easily counter with drakes equation. Both use pure speculation and assumption.
:)
But Fermi's paradox has hugely less assumptions that Drake's equation, so is more rational.
The biggest problem with trying to guess anything about an alein life, let alone civilisation, is that it would be alien.
You are making the assumptions! You assume that all civilsations would either not spread or be effectively invisible.
The problem is all that time to expand niegther guarantees expansion nor wastefullness on the part of expandind races nor
Actually, it does. The analyses of how expansion would occur have been repeatedly done by many scientists. You need only the most feeble expansion: Each new colony could hang around for millenia, and then only send of 1 or 2 spacecraft and you would still fill up the galaxy in 100 million tears. Wastefulness would actually encourage expansion, because of the need to find new resources.
I really suggest you read Stephen Baxter's book 'Deep Future' for a good review of the situation before you comment further - all of your objections are well-known and have been dealt with.
miraculously makes us diligent and wise enough to spot them.
You seem to keep missing the key point. We don't have to be diligent or wise! If any civilisation expands, they would be right here! We should see their ships in our skies!
The absence of proof being proof of absence is a known fallacy and insisting otherwise does not give it credence.
No. I have plenty of proof that all observations made of the universe can be explained without the need for extra assumptions.
Observing and not finding is certainly evidence. I feel that your attitude is like someone looking over a huge dry desert and saying that there is lots of aliens out there. When asked why they can't be seen, you reply that we aren't inspecting the sand grains closely enough, or that all aliens that there have ever been are invisible. Its nothing but special pleading - trying to insist that something is there despite evidence is more like religion than science.
Perhaps we should stop - it has been fun, but we are going round in circles
I would seriously suggest you read that Stephen Baxter book - all your points are fully explained (or so I think).
Remember, I am not saying there is no life out there - I believe that life is abundant. What I am saying is that there is now a lot of evidence that there are no other technological spacefaring civilisations.
I don't know what to say to make my point at this juncture, especially if your not even really paying atention to what I said.
I feel the same.
You say our eyesight is so good we could miss them? Yet we're still finding new quasars to point out just one type of very high eneregy object. And not only that we simply are not looking for life with but a tiny fraction of our ability.
Quasars are billions of light years away. The stars in our galaxy are millions of times closer.
Space is very huge, I can understand how you fail understand just how trully huge it is, the human mind cannot as readilly grasp such hugeness as it can other things. Your failure to grasp this doese not invalidate the very fact that it's raw size gives us to much to search to say nothing is there
You are repeatedly failing to grasp the immense passages of time that have passed, and the nature of the Fermi paradox. The basis of this paradox is that, effectively, space is rendered small by time. There has been enough time for civilizations to have arisen at a single planet and drifted lazily across space - colonizing new planets and stars at FAR less than light-speed - hundreds of times over and over since the galaxy started. Let me repeat that again - there has been enough time for the galaxy to have been fully colonised from nothing hundreds of times. Even if this had happened ONCE, we would see the evidence.
The only thing our not having stumbled across an other civilization proves is we haven't stumbled across another civilization. It niegther proves there are none or that there are many.
Yes it does! It is VERY strong evidence for absence!
I don't know how I can put things any clearer, but I will try again:
Life spreads. We only have to assume that ONE such civilization would have arisen at any time in the past 10 billion years (since the origin of the galaxy) and life and intelligence should be EVERYWHERE - we should find it hard to avoid bumping into them! The stars should be visibly harvested for energy.
I have no quarrel with the process or the license.
When someone puts something in quotes like "open source", this is usually meant to indicate that the quoted phrase is being questioned...
That's what I assumed.
which is why they "open-sourced" 10
The way that Solaris 10 is to be open sourced was approved by the OSI under the CDDL license, so no need for those "quotes". If you don't approve, complain about the OSI. Just because it is not GPL, does not mean it is not open source.
Linux so far scales to up to 256 CPUs on real computers
'Scales' is meaningless unless you say what it can do. Allowing a carefully-written and finely tuned application to run across multiple CPUs is totally different from being able to act as a general-purpose machine. When Solaris scales across many processors this is usually as a general-purpose enterprise server, with multiple users, multi-threaded databases and application servers. This is fundamentally different from a customised numerical computation server, which is something SGI specialises in.
Our sight is still very limited. Shure we can dectect some interesting things, but only where we specifically look and within some rather sharp limits. Space is a lot bigger than big.
I totally disagree. Our sight is good and deep. we can see everything from radio waves to gamma rays, and we can see incredible detail: With radio telescopes we can see details the size of our solar system in nearby galaxies. Not only do we see detail in size, we see detail in intensity: we can detect infinitesimal ripples in the microwave background.
For an alien civilisation to be spottable enough for us to be likely to spot them by chance (or nearly so) they would have to be at least as inefficient as us and/or in just the right place (likely very close) OR specifically targeting us for notice.
I think you are missing an important point. Life spreads. Unless there was a very good reason for all civilisations to keep quiet and hide, they should be abundantly visible everywhere - there has been more than enough time for all the galaxy to have been colonised dozens of time over. The 'space is big' argument just doesn't hold.
If our own tech is hard for us to spot as other than normal noise, how much harder would a more advanced civilisations be?
In general, our tech is very easy to spot over normal noise. In terms of some radio frequencies the Earth outshines the sun!
I find the sheer number of different reasons why an alien civilisation would not be highly visible and thus spotted by near random chance a better explanation than expecting them to make so much noise we couldn't miss them despite the raw hugeness of space.
what are these reasons? I find it hard to think of any...