Good from libraries outweighs harm to producers
on
Reining in Google
·
· Score: 1
Libraries didn't make books and newspapers go away, did they? I can go into my local library and read the newspaper! FOR FREE! It's COMMUNISM! OHNOES!
This debate happened a long time ago. The benefits to society from an educated populace with easy access to information vastly outweighs any harm that might come from shared access to the information to the producers.
I'm suprised more of the public does not push for this; indeed, a digital library would be a great boon in many ways. Printed media is not going anywhere, and when people are given a reasonable choice, they will pay for a service to save effort infringing someone's copyright. See, iTunes et al.
Unfortunately, there are a few problems with this scenario in practice that prevent it from becoming widespread. I worked on optimizations with VHDL destined for FPGA's in a prior life.
- Tools: FPGA tools are getting better, but still suck compared to modern IDEs and software development. This might be me being jaded (VHDL can get nasty), some things like System C and others are in the infancy stage, but long ways to go here.
- Synthesis time: It can take DAYS on a very fast machine to run the synthesis that produces your design for the FPGA. Some designs work out to be impossible to synthesise; you might not find this out until hours or worse into the process. Then your whole design might have to change! Ha ha ha.
- Tool expense: The good tools cost a lot of money. The ones that can do good designs on the fly cost on the order of a new Ferrari or worse. Engineers that are framiliar with optimizing and implementing these tools and designs cost a lot too, but sadly, don't get to drive too many Ferraris. (me anyway!)
- CPUs and GPUs are heavily optimized and VERY VERY VERY fast for most tasks. In many cases it is cheaper to go buy a farm than implement on a FPGA, unless you are trying to do something very specialized. FPGAs are more often used for specialty communications brokering, timing, and interfacing tasks where bus speeds on a micro are too low.
Great idea in principle. Wouldn't hold my breath, however.
How can you eat zombies..
on
How Zombies Work
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· Score: 2, Funny
Solar is useless in much of Canada, where I live, anyway. You need heat when it is stormy. Solar cells don't work in snowstorms, covered in snow, or at night. However, storms and high winds go together very nicely, making windmill powered heat a GREAT idea, and a 1kW unit can have a payback in one or two years.
Don't underestimate the problems with storing hydrogen. It's pesky and diffuses through everything.
There's another use of windmill power that requires no fancy conversion electronics, or fancy electrolysis setups. Run whatever horrible waveform you get out of your alternator on a stick into a big old resistor that gets hot. This is cost-effective for me (in a rural setting) to heat my home with now, versus using diesel (heating oil). Nicely enough, periods that use more heat often are much more windy.
More interesting would be an engineering comparison on the efficiencies if using windmill-heated steam versus direct hydrogen combustion. Both would be mobile, but the steam could easily drive a turbine.
Either way, you'd need millions of windmills to replace the energy consumed daily in the form of oil. It's important to keep that in perspective. There is NO good mass volume alternative to oil in the near future, people should be planning accordingly. Unfortunately, that seems unlikely to happen.
Why not go into business for yourself? That's the joy of capitalism. Find a need, fill it better than anyone else. There IS money out there if you look hard enough. It's not easy, though.
Land of opportunity?
The other side of the coin is unionizing, or agressive worker protection laws. Right now the coin is free-market side up. When in rome..
They exist, but there are mad cooling problems that haven't been solved completely yet. My understanding is "real soon now"..
They're not all that much smaller actually. The big one is that they integrated the DC/DC converter, so you just need to run 12V into the board. That's a big problem with mini-ITX if you want to put it in a small box.
One BIG advantage to mini-ITX is that they are easily put into functional, solid enclosures with additional power supply protection you don't find in the mini. The boards themselves support booting off of flash, and it's very easy to purpose-build them with no hard drive attached.
You're not going to run a piece of industrial automation equipment off a mac mini. There's no reason you couldn't, I guess, but it's much easier to purpose-build something around the VIA board. A lot of the time, these things end up running DOS. There's no RTOS available for the mini I am aware of.
We've done a lot of work replacing old tower PC's with things that can bolt into telco utility closets next to the PBX. With the via board, these are just drop in replacements.
For the consumer that just wants a computer, the mac mini is very attractive. There's lots of other applications - like bolting a computer to a wall - where it doesn't make a lot of sense.
Has anyone been using them for any length of time? The one in the article is 60W, I've been using a few rated at 200W without problems in some of our boxes - but the longevity is always in the back of my mind.
We've put together a few dozen silent boxes based off of compact flash / IDE adapters and have been VERY pleased with the results.
Get yourself a batbelt.. heh.. most things have a pretty low batman factor these days, apple has come a long way with the new ipod and nano. Get yourself a razr phone, etc etc. That removes most of it.
There's my favorite Tilley VOMP (vest of many pockets) that isn't too much of a fashion crime, but you're not going to look very good in the club with it on. The fact you're on here asking that question means that probably isn't relevant.
What you are probably looking for is combat webbing. When you find a nice jacket you like, you can have webbing sewn in - talk to a tailor about it, don't attempt yourself. The function of the combat webbing is to distribute the load from the jacket, onto your shoulders - like a gun holster - allowing the jacket to flow freely.
You just need the "frame" part of the webbing. Even to give a skilled tailor an idea of what you're looking for.
If you're not against the "purse" look, check out the timbuk2 metro bag. After all.. it is 2005, right guys? Nothing wrong with a purse. It is very practical...:)
Finally, when I have to lug my computer, I got a tool pouch - it looks like an oversized pencil case - at home depot for $5. I stuff gadgets in there and fire it in with my notebook. Works very well.
Hope that helps. When in doubt, ask a female if you look stupid. Perferably one NOT trying to sell you things.. hehe
Re:Watch a little more closely ...
on
Deep in the Core
·
· Score: 1
With that said, wouldn't it be nice to focus all of humanities efforts on answering the questions we don't yet know the answers for... instead of killing each other?
Killing each other comes much more naturally, and a large percentage of our technological advances revolve around finding ways to kill each other more efficiently.
They're usually more on par with energy problems and it's relation to the global economy. No cheap energy, no economic growth - that's not economic theory, that's PHYSICS.
"In recent years intellectual property has received a lot more attention because ideas and innovations have become the most important resource, replacing land, energy and raw materials"
I bet my entire life savings against that statement last year. Go look at a energy fund index and tell me I was wrong. Everything - land, raw materials, and IP is about energy. The cheap energy is running out, and the people who have it are doing very, very well at the moment.
If IP is the future.. well, I guess I have a couple years to go back and get a law degree. Here's another tip for the economist: Lawyers don't produce capital. They are a legislated tax on a free market.
Go ask a few people you know if they know their analog TV's will stop working sometime in the next year or two. You'll get a look that makes you expect you just told them to stock up on aluminium foil to make hats.
When this one happens, people are going to get VERY upset, and if it's the government mandating this, you can guess who they're going to get upset at. I think people in the industry in for a big suprise.
Yes, the technology offer lots of advantages, but the current stuff WORKS. WELL. There's a lot of reasons POTS service is still around, although that name is out of favor.
Maybe I'm wrong.. but I don't think so. I expect plain 'ol analog TV to be available for a long, long time. Say you have a couple TVs.. that's a couple converter boxes.. and they're not going to be giving them away free.
Applets, apps.. whatever, Java never seemed to flow as an extension of the browser in the way that PHP did. It always seemed to be a better C++ (flame suits on) with one hell of a standard library built in.
Unfortunately, the answer to "it's not fast enough" always seemed to involve a very heavy, expensive machine from Sun. Hrmm.
Microsoft's solutions always seemed inelegant to me.
PHP always was, and is, about making web applications and database interfaces very efficiently.
Why is it suprising then, that it would be adopted?
However, if you want to make lots of money, you are much more likely to do so (in my opinion) in another graphics and math intensive field, expecially one dripping with money like oil exploration than an industry filled with easily exploitable younger adults willing to work insane hours, and a new crop of them appearing yearly.
It should be noted that these claims, especially that such distances can be achieved without line of sight, represent, at best, a theoretical maximum under ideal circumstances
Line of sight is ALWAYS going to be required in that frequency spectrum, unless you are very close or at very high power levels.
Nevermind what it will do if you want to have a family life. Done that once, now I'm a freelance contractor and working on my own business ventures. If you go into the games industry looking to get rich as a programmer, you are insane. This is an industry where the peasants (programmers, engineers) REVOLTED. I can't think of another example.
If you're doing it for the love of the art, do it for a hobby. Otherwise, I admire your guts.
Free advice for those of you with mad opengl skills and a mathematics background - double score if you have a mathematics or engineering degree.
- Go read a book on "Data Visualization" - Go read a book on "Geographic Information Systems" - Go read a book on "Signal Processing" (FFT, etc) - Brush up on data structures relevant to the above.
Fire some resumes around to oil companies, insurance firms, financial trading companies, mining companies, etc etc loaded up with buzzwords. Make your programming skills secondary to the buzzwords.
Profit. My $0.02. I paid for my univesity degree writing 3D GIS systems software in OpenGL - had I have tried to do so writing games, I would probably be living on the street.
The added range will help, but there's lots of antennas out there that will give you good reliability over long distances.
The bigger problem is line of sight distances. I've done some testing with this and have the advantage of living on top of a very big hill, within view of DSL - about 5km over a lake. We've gotten connections with very crude antennas already using GPS to line things up reasonably well.
The big limitation has always been line of sight, and WiMax does nothing to change this - and might hurt, if it fragments 802.11b. Wimax (802.16?) is not compatible with.11, and I'm not sure it will succeed.
The PC market is pretty mature at this point; things are changing. The only constant is that prices are continuing to fall, and that IS putting OEM pressure on Microsoft to drop prices. It hits with a double whammy I'd bet, as most of their applications are bundled deals.
I know that the clients I deal with are VERY hesitant to migrate from Windows XP (many have not migrated from Windows 2000 or 95).
Embedded devices have been a problem for Microsoft; Their XP embedded is much better than CE, but both are overly complicated and do not have a good reputation with people I've worked with, and I don't especially like them either. Even the classic RTOS makers are getting hurt by things like RT linux.
Web services are another potential front microsoft is going to lose big on; unless MS is able to tie in propietary hooks to IE, they're going to lose there in a big way just by the nature of the product. If it doesn't matter to the user what platform they interact with, the back end can shuffle around between vendors so long as the end user experience remains the same. Does anyone care what OS google runs, so long as it works (Fast)?
You want to know where Microsoft and Windows have a huge lead? It's in development environments and integration and third party libraries. Even the Mac is a little behind there, but is in much better shape than Linux. Companies like Borland et. al have come a long way, but the tools don't seem to have picked up widespread adoption with the FOSS people.
The wild success of DirectTV, Bell ExpressVu and it's ilk basically slammed TV over wires - even classic big fat wires like Cable badly. I was involved with one such failed venture, and at one point, there were a half dozen companies in the space. It's technically possible but makes almost no sense.
I'm not sure where microsoft sees themselves positioned, but the problem is you need to have a service provider for your IPTV -and- a broadband link, and if you believe your video streams aren't going to interfere with your bandwidth.. especially over a few boxes.. heh
It doesn't make sense, and consumers aren't stupid, educated by decades of passionate hatred for Cable companies.
You want to know where IPTV has a chance? It's in interactive pr0n services direct to your TV. That, and maybe gambling. The satellite companies must make a fortune off pr0n, but they can't do the interactive thing. The webchat adult entertainment companies make a mint, but don't have a plug-it-in-and-play (ha) solution for the bedroom and living room. Anyone want a consultant?:-)
People make the assumption we will recognize life because we have at least a basic (actually; a pretty damn good) understanding of physics at the above-nuclear, or chemical, level. There is this thing called the periodic table that not only categorizes known elements, but makes pretty good estimates about unknown things as well. These reactions are what makes UP the ENTIRE OBSERBABLE UNIVERSE!
The reason life is almost assuredly carbon based has to deal with ways you can get energy - life requires an energy input - and the options available to syntheize new molecules to do things with. Carbon is a VERY SPECIAL ATOM. There is a great quote, from somewhere I can't remember, along the lines of : "Life may turn out to be just another property of the carbon atom."
I'm sure the great FSM and his noodly appendage has touched every atom in the universe. That isn't falsifiable, and isn't science. Spiritual arguements have no place in exobiology discussions.
Slashdot Mirror
Libraries didn't make books and newspapers go away, did they? I can go into my local library and read the newspaper! FOR FREE! It's COMMUNISM! OHNOES!
This debate happened a long time ago. The benefits to society from an educated populace with easy access to information vastly outweighs any harm that might come from shared access to the information to the producers.
I'm suprised more of the public does not push for this; indeed, a digital library would be a great boon in many ways. Printed media is not going anywhere, and when people are given a reasonable choice, they will pay for a service to save effort infringing someone's copyright. See, iTunes et al.
Go google!
Unfortunately, there are a few problems with this scenario in practice that prevent it from becoming widespread. I worked on optimizations with VHDL destined for FPGA's in a prior life.
- Tools: FPGA tools are getting better, but still suck compared to modern IDEs and software development. This might be me being jaded (VHDL can get nasty), some things like System C and others are in the infancy stage, but long ways to go here.
- Synthesis time: It can take DAYS on a very fast machine to run the synthesis that produces your design for the FPGA. Some designs work out to be impossible to synthesise; you might not find this out until hours or worse into the process. Then your whole design might have to change! Ha ha ha.
- Tool expense: The good tools cost a lot of money. The ones that can do good designs on the fly cost on the order of a new Ferrari or worse. Engineers that are framiliar with optimizing and implementing these tools and designs cost a lot too, but sadly, don't get to drive too many Ferraris. (me anyway!)
- CPUs and GPUs are heavily optimized and VERY VERY VERY fast for most tasks. In many cases it is cheaper to go buy a farm than implement on a FPGA, unless you are trying to do something very specialized. FPGAs are more often used for specialty communications brokering, timing, and interfacing tasks where bus speeds on a micro are too low.
Great idea in principle. Wouldn't hold my breath, however.
without a fork()?
I take it you live in a warm climate.
Solar is useless in much of Canada, where I live, anyway. You need heat when it is stormy. Solar cells don't work in snowstorms, covered in snow, or at night. However, storms and high winds go together very nicely, making windmill powered heat a GREAT idea, and a 1kW unit can have a payback in one or two years.
Don't underestimate the problems with storing hydrogen. It's pesky and diffuses through everything.
There's another use of windmill power that requires no fancy conversion electronics, or fancy electrolysis setups. Run whatever horrible waveform you get out of your alternator on a stick into a big old resistor that gets hot. This is cost-effective for me (in a rural setting) to heat my home with now, versus using diesel (heating oil). Nicely enough, periods that use more heat often are much more windy.
More interesting would be an engineering comparison on the efficiencies if using windmill-heated steam versus direct hydrogen combustion. Both would be mobile, but the steam could easily drive a turbine.
Either way, you'd need millions of windmills to replace the energy consumed daily in the form of oil. It's important to keep that in perspective. There is NO good mass volume alternative to oil in the near future, people should be planning accordingly. Unfortunately, that seems unlikely to happen.
Why not go into business for yourself? That's the joy of capitalism. Find a need, fill it better than anyone else. There IS money out there if you look hard enough. It's not easy, though.
Land of opportunity?
The other side of the coin is unionizing, or agressive worker protection laws. Right now the coin is free-market side up. When in rome..
They exist, but there are mad cooling problems that haven't been solved completely yet. My understanding is "real soon now"..
They're not all that much smaller actually. The big one is that they integrated the DC/DC converter, so you just need to run 12V into the board. That's a big problem with mini-ITX if you want to put it in a small box.
The 200W one might work, yeah.. never tried it though.
mini-box.com has 'em.. you might need a cable to space it off the motherboard, but other than that, it should work fine.
Disclaimer: I'm in the business.
One BIG advantage to mini-ITX is that they are easily put into functional, solid enclosures with additional power supply protection you don't find in the mini. The boards themselves support booting off of flash, and it's very easy to purpose-build them with no hard drive attached.
You're not going to run a piece of industrial automation equipment off a mac mini. There's no reason you couldn't, I guess, but it's much easier to purpose-build something around the VIA board. A lot of the time, these things end up running DOS. There's no RTOS available for the mini I am aware of.
We've done a lot of work replacing old tower PC's with things that can bolt into telco utility closets next to the PBX. With the via board, these are just drop in replacements.
For the consumer that just wants a computer, the mac mini is very attractive. There's lots of other applications - like bolting a computer to a wall - where it doesn't make a lot of sense.
YMMV, of course.
From what I have been able to determine, these all originate from the same company in China.. 2.5yrs is pretty good.
Has anyone been using them for any length of time? The one in the article is 60W, I've been using a few rated at 200W without problems in some of our boxes - but the longevity is always in the back of my mind.
We've put together a few dozen silent boxes based off of compact flash / IDE adapters and have been VERY pleased with the results.
Get yourself a batbelt.. heh.. most things have a pretty low batman factor these days, apple has come a long way with the new ipod and nano. Get yourself a razr phone, etc etc. That removes most of it.
m &extractBy=CategoryId&id=9&productNo=TE51
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:)
c ategoryId=11
There's my favorite Tilley VOMP (vest of many pockets) that isn't too much of a fashion crime, but you're not going to look very good in the club with it on. The fact you're on here asking that question means that probably isn't relevant.
http://www.tilley.com/detail.asp?catId=13&gender=
Now, I'm surprised that this hasn't come up:
What you are probably looking for is combat webbing. When you find a nice jacket you like, you can have webbing sewn in - talk to a tailor about it, don't attempt yourself. The function of the combat webbing is to distribute the load from the jacket, onto your shoulders - like a gun holster - allowing the jacket to flow freely.
http://www.army-surplus.ca/produits_details.php?p
You just need the "frame" part of the webbing. Even to give a skilled tailor an idea of what you're looking for.
If you're not against the "purse" look, check out the timbuk2 metro bag. After all.. it is 2005, right guys? Nothing wrong with a purse. It is very practical...
http://www.timbuk2.com/tb2/catalog/categories.t2?
Finally, when I have to lug my computer, I got a tool pouch - it looks like an oversized pencil case - at home depot for $5. I stuff gadgets in there and fire it in with my notebook. Works very well.
Hope that helps. When in doubt, ask a female if you look stupid. Perferably one NOT trying to sell you things.. hehe
Then we could have hurricane Zathura..
With that said, wouldn't it be nice to focus all of humanities efforts on answering the questions we don't yet know the answers for
Killing each other comes much more naturally, and a large percentage of our technological advances revolve around finding ways to kill each other more efficiently.
They're usually more on par with energy problems and it's relation to the global economy. No cheap energy, no economic growth - that's not economic theory, that's PHYSICS.
"In recent years intellectual property has received a lot more attention because ideas and innovations have become the most important resource, replacing land, energy and raw materials"
I bet my entire life savings against that statement last year. Go look at a energy fund index and tell me I was wrong. Everything - land, raw materials, and IP is about energy. The cheap energy is running out, and the people who have it are doing very, very well at the moment.
If IP is the future.. well, I guess I have a couple years to go back and get a law degree. Here's another tip for the economist: Lawyers don't produce capital. They are a legislated tax on a free market.
Go ask a few people you know if they know their analog TV's will stop working sometime in the next year or two. You'll get a look that makes you expect you just told them to stock up on aluminium foil to make hats.
When this one happens, people are going to get VERY upset, and if it's the government mandating this, you can guess who they're going to get upset at. I think people in the industry in for a big suprise.
Yes, the technology offer lots of advantages, but the current stuff WORKS. WELL. There's a lot of reasons POTS service is still around, although that name is out of favor.
Maybe I'm wrong.. but I don't think so. I expect plain 'ol analog TV to be available for a long, long time. Say you have a couple TVs.. that's a couple converter boxes.. and they're not going to be giving them away free.
Applets, apps.. whatever, Java never seemed to flow as an extension of the browser in the way that PHP did. It always seemed to be a better C++ (flame suits on) with one hell of a standard library built in.
Unfortunately, the answer to "it's not fast enough" always seemed to involve a very heavy, expensive machine from Sun. Hrmm.
Microsoft's solutions always seemed inelegant to me.
PHP always was, and is, about making web applications and database interfaces very efficiently.
Why is it suprising then, that it would be adopted?
Not arguing the environments are different.
However, if you want to make lots of money, you are much more likely to do so (in my opinion) in another graphics and math intensive field, expecially one dripping with money like oil exploration than an industry filled with easily exploitable younger adults willing to work insane hours, and a new crop of them appearing yearly.
It should be noted that these claims, especially that such distances can be achieved without line of sight, represent, at best, a theoretical maximum under ideal circumstances
Line of sight is ALWAYS going to be required in that frequency spectrum, unless you are very close or at very high power levels.
Nevermind what it will do if you want to have a family life. Done that once, now I'm a freelance contractor and working on my own business ventures. If you go into the games industry looking to get rich as a programmer, you are insane. This is an industry where the peasants (programmers, engineers) REVOLTED. I can't think of another example.
n G=Google+Search&meta=
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=ea+lawsuit&bt
Think about that.
If you're doing it for the love of the art, do it for a hobby. Otherwise, I admire your guts.
Free advice for those of you with mad opengl skills and a mathematics background - double score if you have a mathematics or engineering degree.
- Go read a book on "Data Visualization"
- Go read a book on "Geographic Information Systems"
- Go read a book on "Signal Processing" (FFT, etc)
- Brush up on data structures relevant to the above.
Fire some resumes around to oil companies, insurance firms, financial trading companies, mining companies, etc etc loaded up with buzzwords. Make your programming skills secondary to the buzzwords.
Profit. My $0.02. I paid for my univesity degree writing 3D GIS systems software in OpenGL - had I have tried to do so writing games, I would probably be living on the street.
The added range will help, but there's lots of antennas out there that will give you good reliability over long distances.
.11, and I'm not sure it will succeed.
The bigger problem is line of sight distances. I've done some testing with this and have the advantage of living on top of a very big hill, within view of DSL - about 5km over a lake. We've gotten connections with very crude antennas already using GPS to line things up reasonably well.
The big limitation has always been line of sight, and WiMax does nothing to change this - and might hurt, if it fragments 802.11b. Wimax (802.16?) is not compatible with
The PC market is pretty mature at this point; things are changing. The only constant is that prices are continuing to fall, and that IS putting OEM pressure on Microsoft to drop prices. It hits with a double whammy I'd bet, as most of their applications are bundled deals.
I know that the clients I deal with are VERY hesitant to migrate from Windows XP (many have not migrated from Windows 2000 or 95).
Embedded devices have been a problem for Microsoft; Their XP embedded is much better than CE, but both are overly complicated and do not have a good reputation with people I've worked with, and I don't especially like them either. Even the classic RTOS makers are getting hurt by things like RT linux.
Web services are another potential front microsoft is going to lose big on; unless MS is able to tie in propietary hooks to IE, they're going to lose there in a big way just by the nature of the product. If it doesn't matter to the user what platform they interact with, the back end can shuffle around between vendors so long as the end user experience remains the same. Does anyone care what OS google runs, so long as it works (Fast)?
You want to know where Microsoft and Windows have a huge lead? It's in development environments and integration and third party libraries. Even the Mac is a little behind there, but is in much better shape than Linux. Companies like Borland et. al have come a long way, but the tools don't seem to have picked up widespread adoption with the FOSS people.
Interesting times.
We will anxiously await sightings of the Jolly Roger, while dressed in full Pirate Regalia.
How else would we react?
The wild success of DirectTV, Bell ExpressVu and it's ilk basically slammed TV over wires - even classic big fat wires like Cable badly. I was involved with one such failed venture, and at one point, there were a half dozen companies in the space. It's technically possible but makes almost no sense.
:-)
I'm not sure where microsoft sees themselves positioned, but the problem is you need to have a service provider for your IPTV -and- a broadband link, and if you believe your video streams aren't going to interfere with your bandwidth.. especially over a few boxes.. heh
It doesn't make sense, and consumers aren't stupid, educated by decades of passionate hatred for Cable companies.
You want to know where IPTV has a chance? It's in interactive pr0n services direct to your TV. That, and maybe gambling. The satellite companies must make a fortune off pr0n, but they can't do the interactive thing. The webchat adult entertainment companies make a mint, but don't have a plug-it-in-and-play (ha) solution for the bedroom and living room. Anyone want a consultant?
People make the assumption we will recognize life because we have at least a basic (actually; a pretty damn good) understanding of physics at the above-nuclear, or chemical, level. There is this thing called the periodic table that not only categorizes known elements, but makes pretty good estimates about unknown things as well. These reactions are what makes UP the ENTIRE OBSERBABLE UNIVERSE!
The reason life is almost assuredly carbon based has to deal with ways you can get energy - life requires an energy input - and the options available to syntheize new molecules to do things with. Carbon is a VERY SPECIAL ATOM. There is a great quote, from somewhere I can't remember, along the lines of : "Life may turn out to be just another property of the carbon atom."
I'm sure the great FSM and his noodly appendage has touched every atom in the universe. That isn't falsifiable, and isn't science. Spiritual arguements have no place in exobiology discussions.
Yarrr!