This is unreasonable. Do you know WHY template programming is so powerful? It's because the template system is a fully functional programming language in and of itself. It's like a scripting language tacked on to the back of another language. It damn well better be better than anything else out there.
It would be like pairing Java and Python together. Absurdly powerful, but there's a lot of programmer-time overhead in learning and using the systems properly together.
Seriously, that's not my problem. I don't believe in such things, so why is the government trying to make me live my life in a way that conforms with OTHER people's religous beliefs?
If a person doesn't believe in same-sex marriage, that's fine. They don't have to marry someone of their gender. People that DO want to marry people of the same gender should be permitted to do so, and I still haven't heard a reasonable argument why not. All of them come back to someone believing that it's not right - but that's an unreasonable argument to use. Would it be reasonable to OUTLAW pork if the country were run by Jews? No! The Jewish could just NOT EAT THAT, and the rest of us should be allowed to decide for ourselves.
The government shouldn't be in the business of legislating morality. It's your choice to have sex before marriage, cheat on your spouse, or any number of other things that are considered morally reprehensible by some.
A lot of this argument boils down to semantics in the end, I find. A lot of people are concerned with the term 'marriage'. They feel that they're somehow giving something up by letting homosexuals get married, which I personally find a fairly ridiculous position. However, if everyone was joined in a civil union, and the actual 'marriage' was the blessing in the church, they'd complain a lot less.
It'll be different 20 years from now, mark my words. The newer generation approves of same-sex unions in greater numbers than the older generations. Two or three generations from now, nobody'll understand what we were fighting about.
At least there's a good reason for that. Consanguinuity is a problem further on down the line genetically. I've never quite understood why you can't marry and adopted sibling, but that's just another one of those stupid things, I guess.
Telling everyone that they can do what they want as long as it's not the thing they actually want to do isn't really freedom, especially when what is happening isn't a burden or problem to other people around it. Again, what possible reason could the state have for not permitting such an action? It harms nobody. It's essentially a much cheaper version of getting a lawyer to draw up the contract for you. Gays and Lesbians can get married in the United Church, so they can even have their weddings blessed.
There's no rational reason that I've heard to let these laws stand.
Your example is perhaps technically correct, but often, we don't obey the word of the law, but the spirit of the law.
In any case, it's still discriminatory, because you're essentially being told that you can't marry the person of your choosing. It's like being told that as a hetero male, you can marry any woman you like, as long as it's not one specific woman.
If I choose to enter into a contract with another man, that's my choice, right? Why would you want to prevent people from entering the marriage contract with people of the same sex? What possible purpose does that serve?
Well, it's obvious that having a mother and a father isn't SUFFICIENT to having a good family life. Most of us come from hetero families, and a lot of us had screwed up childhoods.
The big difference with Gay parents is that you're pretty much guaranteed that they wanted the child in their lives in the first place. It's easy for a couple to 'accidentally' have a child, and not really be very interested, prepared or capable of raising the child. With an adoptive family, they at least do a cursory check to see that you're qualified.
Actually, it's well established that many creatures in the world engage in homosexual sex quite frequently. Dolphins will have sex with other male dolphins' blowholes, and many primates apparently have sex to celebrate finding large quantities of food.
Besides, just because nothing else does it isn't really much of an excuse. Human are an aberration in many ways. I don't know many ocelots that post on slashdot, or doves that program computers. Don't use animals as any sort of excuse or explanation. Humans are different in many ways.
I suppose. But I can't think of a good solution for this. On one hand, you need to protect players in the event of a legitimate network outage. On the other hand, someone's always going to be an ass.
Someone else in this thread mentioned that Diablo II hardcore players would quaff potions and Alt-F4 the game if things got bad. That's just the way it's going to be, I guess.
I agree, and there should be very strict guidelines for how that sort of thing is handled.
If your connection drops, you should be put into a safe state. Unable to move, but also unassailable.
I don't really think much of PvP at random in the world. I think it should be done in duels, or tightly controlled areas like the theoretically up-and-coming WoW Battlegrounds.
Spawn deaths suck, so maybe creatures wouldn't be allowed to respawn in attack range of you. Or maybe the notion of permadeath will make people more careful.
Lastly, I don't see any reason at all to have low level characters entering areas that are so overwhelmingly beyond their capabilities. And again, maybe with a few warning signs and indicators that the upcoming area isn't safe for low level characters, people will be careful enough to not wander into places where they shouldn't be.
I've thought about permadeath in games before, and it does add something that you can't get out of games where death has little consequence.
Without permadeath, there's no notion of sacrifice, daring, or true adventure. If you and your group run into a giant dragon that's going to destroy your sorry asses, your Paladin can't tell the rest of you to run away from the dragon while he holds it off and gives you time to escape. You can't have a hero in the game, because there's no actual danger. Dying is just the thing that costs you a few minutes of time and some minor frustration.
Now that said, I'm not sure that the addition of such a game concept is essential to good gameplay - in fact, it's provably not essential, since there are lots of great games that don't have permadeath.
The balance is trying to find a way to include permadeath to really make the game exciting, but not have it so often that people become frustrated at rerolling new characters. And, there should be at least some reward (a heroes list, or something) for being brave enough to throw away some of your time for the sake of adventure.
Largely, I agree with you. I think we're just arguing over some small points.
I can see your point that home taping isn't theft. However, I think that from the point of view of the people that came up with the levy, it IS theft. Never before have they tried to reclaim the supposed lost income of artists in any way. If what you were doing was in no way theft (from their point of view), I don't think they'd be trying this.
Then again, the music industry is one corrupt, money-grubbing industry. I despise their lobby, and I think they're bad for commerce and the customer. If they could get money out of you for listening to the radio, I'm sure they'd try.
The reason why I think this would be compensation for purported 'stealing' is because this was a measure specifically brought in to address piracy, and because it's levied against those that never use the media to copy music.
My first point is a matter of public record.
My second point is based on the erroneous assumption that anyone buying a CD that can be used to copy music is using it to copy music. My company buys thousands of blank CDs a year to put data on, but still pays the levy. If the levy were truly to provide an alternate means of revenue, then it wouldn't be necessary to charge people that don't copy music.
To use your analogy, I'm being charged money for being in a bar where there's no live music playing.
It's because of the lack of guarantee that an artist is being paid for music that wasn't explicitly purchased that both the levy (IMO) and the act are immoral. I'm all for paying artists - I buy music off the ITMS regularly and I don't download music from anywhere else anymore - but I'm also for only punishing those that deserve it.
Sorry, I guess I wasn't clear. Part of what I was saying was that the view of the tariff is that you're stealing, and it's trying to compensate for that. Whether or not you think the action is moral, or classified as stealing isn't the issue - I'm just trying to show what perspective the law is taking.
If you don't think your actions are stealing, that's fine by me. I'm not trying to convince you otherwise.:)
While I think I agree with the core of what you're saying - we shouldn't be punished if we don't do anything wrong - your argument is specious.
It's not moral to burn music for free in Canada because of the tariff. If we put a tariff on bullets to pay grieving family members, it wouldn't suddenly make it moral to go out and shoot other people. The tariff doesn't really impact the morality of the situation at all. Compensating someone because you've stolen their property (which is ostensibly the rationale here) doesn't make stealing their stuff moral.
Worst of all, this tariff is handed out without - to my knowledge - any study of who is most impacted by the downloading of free music. I'm sure there are a lot of indy bands out there that haven't ever seen a penny from this program, despite probably deserving it more than a big name band or artist.
Sometimes, people just need the money. I've never controlled an entire AH, but I know people that have, and I've cornered certain markets myself, like Jade, Copper Bars, etc.
It's good for a quick profit, but it's usually hard to maintain.
Trying to get 1000g for level 60 and maintain all your equipment and skills calls for more than just grinding and farming, I think. At least if you want to get it done in a reasonable amount of time.
I'd like to understand where your vehemence is coming from.
Was your mother an Apple Lisa, and didn't give you enough love as a child?
Did a Powerbook kill your father?
Did you have an untimely breakup with an iMac?
Did Steve Jobs come to your house, kick you down the stairs, pee in the corner, and then burn all your childhood toys?
I mean, really. Apple is just a company and the Mac is just another computer. It works well for a lot of people, myself included. Why go insane over it?
Oh, give me a break. Considering the kind of stuff that gets glossed over in the American media (Jeff Gannon, anyone? You may not even know who he is because the media has so thoroughly ignored the issue), I don't think that the CBC should be called out as an agency that ignores, obfuscates or smooths over any political controversies. They've reported openly on the Sponsorship scandal, the Gun Registry fiasco, and every other scandal in recent memory. They lean a little left, but they'll take whatever government to task that happens to be available for criticism.
Don't malign Canadian media. Canadians are apathetic about politics because:
1) We don't care 2) Most of this stuff is niggly shit that isn't WORTH caring about 3) We have better things to do than worry about every conspiracy theorist out there that says the government is going to curtail our rights.
Now screw off and criticise your own media for the shoddy job it does of damn near everything. The Briar is on.
Yes, you're right. I think part of the problem is my mis-naming of the terms. Really, what I referred to as CISC should just be called 'Pentium 4', however it does things. From what I understand, it's instruction path is narrow and deep. Very fast, but bad for branch misprediction.
PPC970 (G5) is wide and shallow. Concurrent execution of many instructions, slower, better for branch misprediction.
CISC and RISC don't really have any standout examples any more (from what I know). Both Intel and IBM have hybrid chips that fall strongly into neither category.
It's true the RISC-based chips have lower clockrates, but I think what's ended up happening is that because the instructions are simpler, they line more of them up side by side.
So, to use the previous example, the CISC guy is a superman. He's speedy. He can carry 8 boxes across the room every 1/2 second. If he screws up, though, it takes longer for him to recover. He's plenty fast.
On the other hand, the RISC chip is like 8 guys that can all carry boxes across the room, but it takes them a whole second to get there. They can carry a couple boxes each, though, so they get the job done just as fast without anybody breaking a sweat. If one of them screws up, it takes a little less time to recover from it.
This analogy is so grossly simplified that I don't think that between trying to use it and my admitedly limited knowledge of processor architectures I can make it work. Still, I don't think I'm too far off.:)
Even on my windows PC, I use keyboard modified clicks all the time, especially in a web browser.
I know what you're getting at, but I still have an image of people using their mouse in a way that requires their hands to fly off their keyboard and put them behind their back before they can use the mouse. When I reach for the mouse, my left hand is usually still on the keyboard anyway. Ctrl-clicking (or Command-clicking) is fairly natural to me.
I think keyboard shortcuts are the best way to do things, and I like that almost all of them are system configurable, though I really don't like the way Apple does it to be honest. After years of being an Emacs user, getting things done with keystrokes is definitely the way to go. Now if I can only get quicksilver to properly reference menu items in a M-x type fashion, I totally win.
The least you could do is tell people what story you're referring to.
Vacuum Diagrams is a collection of short stories about a race called the Xeelee, and how humanity discovers them, moves to the stars and is nearly destroyed. The stories have an epic scope - several million years - but are quite entertaining. One of the most enjoyable reads I've ever had.
I'd describe what a 'great attractor' or 'neutrino birds' are, but that would give a way a lot of the story.
Fair enough. But even given a number as large as that, over the course of time, if the probablity is non-zero, it becomes more and more likely to happen.
First of all, even if the probability is as large as you say, you don't have to run the 'experiment' one trillion-trillion-trillion times to get one instance occuring. It could happen on the first try, and that happening is no more unlikely than your 'experiment' turning up results the 15th trillion time.
Moreover, as time passes, as long as you have a finite probability that something will happen, it starts to become more unlikely that it WON'T happen. Given the amount of time that the universe has been here (we think), at a certain point, it's almost impossible that life WOULDN'T occur.
Incidentally, if you decide to take the femtosecond as the smallest tick of time where something can be decided (and it's still pretty big compared to units of Planck time - I picked it because I know that we can generate femtosecond pulses of light), around 10^32 femtoseconds have passed since the creaion of the universe. That's a lot of chances for life to 'spontaneously' arise as we see it.
I think this is along the right track. We have a very large universe, and a lot of time on our hands. 15 billion years have passed since we think the Universe began.
If you can get behind those concepts, the 'spontaneous' generation of life seems almost a given. Yes, it may be a very improbable event, but it's NO LESS PROBABLE than any other event in the universe. Generally speaking, if humans can do something, the universe will have done it first. We can't quite create DNA and life in a petri dish, but every year that goes by, our biologists figure out a little bit more.
If something is a one in a billion chance, it's really only a matter of time before it happens. Don't exclude possibilities because they seem extremely unlikely. Extremely unlikely is just another way of saying definitely possible.
Slashdot Mirror
This is unreasonable. Do you know WHY template programming is so powerful? It's because the template system is a fully functional programming language in and of itself. It's like a scripting language tacked on to the back of another language. It damn well better be better than anything else out there.
It would be like pairing Java and Python together. Absurdly powerful, but there's a lot of programmer-time overhead in learning and using the systems properly together.
They were also used in the mail client built in to Opera, called M2.
I've used both, and the Opera implementation is faster.
Knowing the iterative process of marketing, those were probably the first few slogans that they actually tested on a focus group.
Seriously, that's not my problem. I don't believe in such things, so why is the government trying to make me live my life in a way that conforms with OTHER people's religous beliefs?
If a person doesn't believe in same-sex marriage, that's fine. They don't have to marry someone of their gender. People that DO want to marry people of the same gender should be permitted to do so, and I still haven't heard a reasonable argument why not. All of them come back to someone believing that it's not right - but that's an unreasonable argument to use. Would it be reasonable to OUTLAW pork if the country were run by Jews? No! The Jewish could just NOT EAT THAT, and the rest of us should be allowed to decide for ourselves.
The government shouldn't be in the business of legislating morality. It's your choice to have sex before marriage, cheat on your spouse, or any number of other things that are considered morally reprehensible by some.
A lot of this argument boils down to semantics in the end, I find. A lot of people are concerned with the term 'marriage'. They feel that they're somehow giving something up by letting homosexuals get married, which I personally find a fairly ridiculous position. However, if everyone was joined in a civil union, and the actual 'marriage' was the blessing in the church, they'd complain a lot less.
It'll be different 20 years from now, mark my words. The newer generation approves of same-sex unions in greater numbers than the older generations. Two or three generations from now, nobody'll understand what we were fighting about.
At least there's a good reason for that. Consanguinuity is a problem further on down the line genetically. I've never quite understood why you can't marry and adopted sibling, but that's just another one of those stupid things, I guess.
Telling everyone that they can do what they want as long as it's not the thing they actually want to do isn't really freedom, especially when what is happening isn't a burden or problem to other people around it. Again, what possible reason could the state have for not permitting such an action? It harms nobody. It's essentially a much cheaper version of getting a lawyer to draw up the contract for you. Gays and Lesbians can get married in the United Church, so they can even have their weddings blessed.
There's no rational reason that I've heard to let these laws stand.
Your example is perhaps technically correct, but often, we don't obey the word of the law, but the spirit of the law.
In any case, it's still discriminatory, because you're essentially being told that you can't marry the person of your choosing. It's like being told that as a hetero male, you can marry any woman you like, as long as it's not one specific woman.
If I choose to enter into a contract with another man, that's my choice, right? Why would you want to prevent people from entering the marriage contract with people of the same sex? What possible purpose does that serve?
Well, it's obvious that having a mother and a father isn't SUFFICIENT to having a good family life. Most of us come from hetero families, and a lot of us had screwed up childhoods.
The big difference with Gay parents is that you're pretty much guaranteed that they wanted the child in their lives in the first place. It's easy for a couple to 'accidentally' have a child, and not really be very interested, prepared or capable of raising the child. With an adoptive family, they at least do a cursory check to see that you're qualified.
Actually, it's well established that many creatures in the world engage in homosexual sex quite frequently. Dolphins will have sex with other male dolphins' blowholes, and many primates apparently have sex to celebrate finding large quantities of food.
Besides, just because nothing else does it isn't really much of an excuse. Human are an aberration in many ways. I don't know many ocelots that post on slashdot, or doves that program computers. Don't use animals as any sort of excuse or explanation. Humans are different in many ways.
I suppose. But I can't think of a good solution for this. On one hand, you need to protect players in the event of a legitimate network outage. On the other hand, someone's always going to be an ass.
Someone else in this thread mentioned that Diablo II hardcore players would quaff potions and Alt-F4 the game if things got bad. That's just the way it's going to be, I guess.
I agree, and there should be very strict guidelines for how that sort of thing is handled.
If your connection drops, you should be put into a safe state. Unable to move, but also unassailable.
I don't really think much of PvP at random in the world. I think it should be done in duels, or tightly controlled areas like the theoretically up-and-coming WoW Battlegrounds.
Spawn deaths suck, so maybe creatures wouldn't be allowed to respawn in attack range of you. Or maybe the notion of permadeath will make people more careful.
Lastly, I don't see any reason at all to have low level characters entering areas that are so overwhelmingly beyond their capabilities. And again, maybe with a few warning signs and indicators that the upcoming area isn't safe for low level characters, people will be careful enough to not wander into places where they shouldn't be.
I've thought about permadeath in games before, and it does add something that you can't get out of games where death has little consequence.
Without permadeath, there's no notion of sacrifice, daring, or true adventure. If you and your group run into a giant dragon that's going to destroy your sorry asses, your Paladin can't tell the rest of you to run away from the dragon while he holds it off and gives you time to escape. You can't have a hero in the game, because there's no actual danger. Dying is just the thing that costs you a few minutes of time and some minor frustration.
Now that said, I'm not sure that the addition of such a game concept is essential to good gameplay - in fact, it's provably not essential, since there are lots of great games that don't have permadeath.
The balance is trying to find a way to include permadeath to really make the game exciting, but not have it so often that people become frustrated at rerolling new characters. And, there should be at least some reward (a heroes list, or something) for being brave enough to throw away some of your time for the sake of adventure.
Largely, I agree with you. I think we're just arguing over some small points.
I can see your point that home taping isn't theft. However, I think that from the point of view of the people that came up with the levy, it IS theft. Never before have they tried to reclaim the supposed lost income of artists in any way. If what you were doing was in no way theft (from their point of view), I don't think they'd be trying this.
Then again, the music industry is one corrupt, money-grubbing industry. I despise their lobby, and I think they're bad for commerce and the customer. If they could get money out of you for listening to the radio, I'm sure they'd try.
The reason why I think this would be compensation for purported 'stealing' is because this was a measure specifically brought in to address piracy, and because it's levied against those that never use the media to copy music.
My first point is a matter of public record.
My second point is based on the erroneous assumption that anyone buying a CD that can be used to copy music is using it to copy music. My company buys thousands of blank CDs a year to put data on, but still pays the levy. If the levy were truly to provide an alternate means of revenue, then it wouldn't be necessary to charge people that don't copy music.
To use your analogy, I'm being charged money for being in a bar where there's no live music playing.
It's because of the lack of guarantee that an artist is being paid for music that wasn't explicitly purchased that both the levy (IMO) and the act are immoral. I'm all for paying artists - I buy music off the ITMS regularly and I don't download music from anywhere else anymore - but I'm also for only punishing those that deserve it.
Sorry, I guess I wasn't clear. Part of what I was saying was that the view of the tariff is that you're stealing, and it's trying to compensate for that. Whether or not you think the action is moral, or classified as stealing isn't the issue - I'm just trying to show what perspective the law is taking.
:)
If you don't think your actions are stealing, that's fine by me. I'm not trying to convince you otherwise.
While I think I agree with the core of what you're saying - we shouldn't be punished if we don't do anything wrong - your argument is specious.
It's not moral to burn music for free in Canada because of the tariff. If we put a tariff on bullets to pay grieving family members, it wouldn't suddenly make it moral to go out and shoot other people. The tariff doesn't really impact the morality of the situation at all. Compensating someone because you've stolen their property (which is ostensibly the rationale here) doesn't make stealing their stuff moral.
Worst of all, this tariff is handed out without - to my knowledge - any study of who is most impacted by the downloading of free music. I'm sure there are a lot of indy bands out there that haven't ever seen a penny from this program, despite probably deserving it more than a big name band or artist.
Sometimes, people just need the money. I've never controlled an entire AH, but I know people that have, and I've cornered certain markets myself, like Jade, Copper Bars, etc.
It's good for a quick profit, but it's usually hard to maintain.
Trying to get 1000g for level 60 and maintain all your equipment and skills calls for more than just grinding and farming, I think. At least if you want to get it done in a reasonable amount of time.
I'd like to understand where your vehemence is coming from.
Was your mother an Apple Lisa, and didn't give you enough love as a child?
Did a Powerbook kill your father?
Did you have an untimely breakup with an iMac?
Did Steve Jobs come to your house, kick you down the stairs, pee in the corner, and then burn all your childhood toys?
I mean, really. Apple is just a company and the Mac is just another computer. It works well for a lot of people, myself included. Why go insane over it?
Oh, give me a break. Considering the kind of stuff that gets glossed over in the American media (Jeff Gannon, anyone? You may not even know who he is because the media has so thoroughly ignored the issue), I don't think that the CBC should be called out as an agency that ignores, obfuscates or smooths over any political controversies. They've reported openly on the Sponsorship scandal, the Gun Registry fiasco, and every other scandal in recent memory. They lean a little left, but they'll take whatever government to task that happens to be available for criticism.
Don't malign Canadian media. Canadians are apathetic about politics because:
1) We don't care
2) Most of this stuff is niggly shit that isn't WORTH caring about
3) We have better things to do than worry about every conspiracy theorist out there that says the government is going to curtail our rights.
Now screw off and criticise your own media for the shoddy job it does of damn near everything. The Briar is on.
Yes, you're right. I think part of the problem is my mis-naming of the terms. Really, what I referred to as CISC should just be called 'Pentium 4', however it does things. From what I understand, it's instruction path is narrow and deep. Very fast, but bad for branch misprediction.
PPC970 (G5) is wide and shallow. Concurrent execution of many instructions, slower, better for branch misprediction.
CISC and RISC don't really have any standout examples any more (from what I know). Both Intel and IBM have hybrid chips that fall strongly into neither category.
It's true the RISC-based chips have lower clockrates, but I think what's ended up happening is that because the instructions are simpler, they line more of them up side by side.
:)
So, to use the previous example, the CISC guy is a superman. He's speedy. He can carry 8 boxes across the room every 1/2 second. If he screws up, though, it takes longer for him to recover. He's plenty fast.
On the other hand, the RISC chip is like 8 guys that can all carry boxes across the room, but it takes them a whole second to get there. They can carry a couple boxes each, though, so they get the job done just as fast without anybody breaking a sweat. If one of them screws up, it takes a little less time to recover from it.
This analogy is so grossly simplified that I don't think that between trying to use it and my admitedly limited knowledge of processor architectures I can make it work. Still, I don't think I'm too far off.
Even on my windows PC, I use keyboard modified clicks all the time, especially in a web browser.
I know what you're getting at, but I still have an image of people using their mouse in a way that requires their hands to fly off their keyboard and put them behind their back before they can use the mouse. When I reach for the mouse, my left hand is usually still on the keyboard anyway. Ctrl-clicking (or Command-clicking) is fairly natural to me.
I think keyboard shortcuts are the best way to do things, and I like that almost all of them are system configurable, though I really don't like the way Apple does it to be honest. After years of being an Emacs user, getting things done with keystrokes is definitely the way to go. Now if I can only get quicksilver to properly reference menu items in a M-x type fashion, I totally win.
That's what I meant. Sorry if I wasn't clear.
Vacuum Diagrams is a collection of short stories about a race called the Xeelee, and how humanity discovers them, moves to the stars and is nearly destroyed. The stories have an epic scope - several million years - but are quite entertaining. One of the most enjoyable reads I've ever had.
I'd describe what a 'great attractor' or 'neutrino birds' are, but that would give a way a lot of the story.
Fair enough. But even given a number as large as that, over the course of time, if the probablity is non-zero, it becomes more and more likely to happen.
First of all, even if the probability is as large as you say, you don't have to run the 'experiment' one trillion-trillion-trillion times to get one instance occuring. It could happen on the first try, and that happening is no more unlikely than your 'experiment' turning up results the 15th trillion time.
Moreover, as time passes, as long as you have a finite probability that something will happen, it starts to become more unlikely that it WON'T happen. Given the amount of time that the universe has been here (we think), at a certain point, it's almost impossible that life WOULDN'T occur.
Incidentally, if you decide to take the femtosecond as the smallest tick of time where something can be decided (and it's still pretty big compared to units of Planck time - I picked it because I know that we can generate femtosecond pulses of light), around 10^32 femtoseconds have passed since the creaion of the universe. That's a lot of chances for life to 'spontaneously' arise as we see it.
I think this is along the right track. We have a very large universe, and a lot of time on our hands. 15 billion years have passed since we think the Universe began.
If you can get behind those concepts, the 'spontaneous' generation of life seems almost a given. Yes, it may be a very improbable event, but it's NO LESS PROBABLE than any other event in the universe. Generally speaking, if humans can do something, the universe will have done it first. We can't quite create DNA and life in a petri dish, but every year that goes by, our biologists figure out a little bit more.
If something is a one in a billion chance, it's really only a matter of time before it happens. Don't exclude possibilities because they seem extremely unlikely. Extremely unlikely is just another way of saying definitely possible.