Note that there are about 70 sextillion stars in the universe. That's a 7 with 22 zeroes. Even if only one in a billion stars has a planet orbiting it with intelligent life on it, that still means there are 70000000000000000 such planets in the universe.
Ofcourse, distances between galaxies are so large we can only reasonably search within our own galaxy, the milky way. The guesses here go from 3 billion stars to 100 billion stars. With the previously mentioned 1 intelligent species homeworld per billion stars this would result in 3 to 100 such homeworlds.
The odds ofcourse of intelligent life evolving are not known, because we don't understand yet how life evolved to the finest detail. So most guesses have to be taken with a grain of salt. Still, the odds can be pretty slim and still result in intelligent life being pervasive in the galaxy.
Also, you have to take into account the age of civilizations. If an intelligent civilization developed 1 billion years ago around alpha centauri, it would be long gone by now, so we wouldn't be able to pick up their communications. Why wouldn't the civilization keep existing? Simple, the older a civilization get the likelier it becomes it destroys itself in one way or another. And if somehow a civilization doesn't destroy itself, it would either turn inwards (not communicate with the rest of the universe) or turn outwards (colonise the rest of the universe). Since we haven't seen any alien colonists schedule up an interplanetary zoning meeting with Bush, it seems unlikely there are any colonising civilizations out there. Although, I did like the idea from Star Trek where they only made young civilizations aware of the existance of the federation once the civilization developed intersolar travel.
Given the size of the universe, it's indeed pretty likely there is intelligent life out there. I fully expect we will find at least one intelligent extraterrestrial lifeform before our species disappears. What I'm curious about is how this is going to be retrofitted into religion, which very much assumes we are $DEITY's chosen ones.
Validate your css too. If you're not using css, hello to you from the 21st century.
And also, improve accessibility. The validator only checks whether your html complies with the standards, but doesn't guarantee usability. Implementing these relatively simple (albeit numerous) accessibility guidelines ensures your site will work correctly in just about every browsing tool on the platform, whether it be lynx, jaws (browser for the blind), or the entire safari.
Power IS freedom. The freedom to decide who can use your software is the power software creators have. The FSF wants that power to be in the hands of the users instead of large corporations.
Software is just a bunch of bytes, believe me, it does not want to be free. It's the people that want it to be free, and when you want something you can't have, you're powerless.
I wonder how long it will take before consumers sit up and go "WTF Mate?"
I wonder how long it will take before people will realise how insulting the word "consumer" is as a label for a customer. Businesses used to deal with customers, and treat them well, now they deal with consumers, and so all they feel they need to do is produce stuff for consumption (and are insulted when people refuse to consume it, as exemplified by the RIAA). This dehumanization of business is what makes the corporate world suck so much nowadays.
Exactly. The music industry's original reason for existance was lowering the barrier to access to music. Before records became commonplace the only way to listen to music was to see a live performance. In short, you had to dedicate either a lot of time or a lot of money if you wanted to enjoy music. Then the record industry came along and suddenly people could affordably listen to their favourite music whenever they wanted, as often as they wanted. It led to the decline of live music (live music used to be EVERYWHERE), but it made music more popular.
The inherent problem with the music industry is that they have forgotten they should be making it easier to listen to music. Obtaining music nowadays is no easier than it was 30 years ago, and in fact, it's become slightly harder due to raised pricing (more than inflation), the reduction of music sampling opportunities (less music on the radio, no in-store sampling), and the introduction of technologies which make it more difficult to listen to bought music the way you want (the various copy protection systems). This is why itunes is so successful. It makes sampling and obtaining music dramatically easier, while at the same time lowering prices.
If I was a music industry exec I'd be spending all my time finding ways to make it easier for customers to buy my product. But then, that's just crazy talk.
He was probably referring to the ppro 150. It had the p6 core that would later go into the mass market pII. I still run my website on a ppro/200. Good hardware.
A better system is to make the sender do the optin. When you send someone running such a system an email, you get an automated reply saying you're not on the approved list yet, and to reply to get added to it (so your mail only goes through to the inbox if you reply). Any spammers that reply you can still manually add to a blacklist. Although, to be honest, I doubt spammers would reply automatically, because they would be paying the bandwidth for receiving all the confirmation mails, and as a result spam would become uneconomical.
For an example implementation, take a look at ASK.
Note that you would need to reply only once to from then on be able to send mail normally to a person running this, so it wouldn't add large barriers to email traffic, while at the same time dramatically cutting spam volumes.
One catch here is that mailing lists would need to be added to the whitelist manually. But on the other hand, mailing lists are dying anyway in the wake of the rss revolution.
Bandwidth limits are cable speeds down, and 16KB/sec up. Volume limits are 10 gig total, of which 15 percent (or 1.5 gig) up in the last 30 days. Go over the limit in a 30 day period and you get thrown on narrowband, which is about the same speed as a 33.6 modem, until the volume over the last 30 days sinks below the limits again. If for some reason you need more volume, you can rent it in 1 gig blocks for 1 euro / block / month, of which again 15 percent can be upload, up to a maximum of 20 blocks (30 gig total, 4.5 gig up).
It's a pretty fair deal, for the price. And there's no way you can be thrown off for using up more than your share. If you dl too much, it's narrowband for you, but that doesn't have any consequences for your account other than making it really slow for a while.
I don't get why all isp's don't adopt this kind of system, if they're going to impose volume limits anyway.
The default settings are indeed to have it turn on for 5 seconds whenever you press a button, or use the thumbwheel. You can change this by going to the top-level menu (press menu until it doesn't go higher), and then settings -> backlight -> [whatever setting].
The only time I turn it off is when i'm playing solitaire. Having the screen on for half an hour seriously drains the battery. Otherwise I don't notice the battery drain from having the screen turn on everytime i change volume or put on a new album.
The problem is not that saddam isn't a bad man. The problem is that if you define iraq as rogue because of what saddam did in the 80's, half the planet is rogue. China is rogue, because of what they're doing in tibet, and how they disregard basic human rights like freedom of speech. Saudi-arabia is rogue, because of government ties to terrorism. Israel is rogue, for what they're doing to the palestinians (not that the palestinians are angels, but two wrongs don't make a right). And so on...
Some people might even call the US rogue, for blatantly disregarding basic laws like the international rights of pow's and human rights in how they treat captured "enemy combatants". Examples of infringed rights: pow's have a right to be returned to their country after the cessation of major hostilities. Most people captured in afghanistan haven't been returned, even if there's no proof they did anything else than defend their country. Another example: the way people in guatanamo bay are presumed guilty and are refused a fair trial (the lucky ones will go before military tribunals, but I wouldn't expect impartiality from those, the unlucky ones will just stay locked up indefinitely). Let me quote from the declaration of human rights: Article 9.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
Article 10.
Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.
Article 11.
(1) Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.
(2) No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.
To sum up my point, cleaning up the world brute-force would be nothing short of WWIII. It's an inherently flawed strategy. You cause much more damage than the problems you're trying to fix. Any solution towards world peace needs to be political (look back in history, how many times has piece resulted from a treaty, and how many times has it resulted from total military victory?). And I wouldn't go around putting blame on other countries, because every country in the world is rogue in some way or other.
Besides, why is it ok that politicians lie? As a people, we shouldn't accept that, and we should hold them accountable. It was right to go after clinton for lying while president, it's right to go after bush for the very same reason now. A leader of the world should never, ever, knowingly lie, even if the truth is embarassing or damaging. If we can't trust our leaders, who can we trust?
Rhis was very visible in the local version of one of the big brother seasons, where they completely cut off any and all access to the outside world and knowledge of time. You could see people getting up and going to bed a little later each day, while they still believed to be following the same routine. Eventually big brother had to step in and inform them of the time, because they were sleeping during live broadcasts.
Most people think big brother is a travesty, but I think it's pretty interesting as a social experiment. You can learn a lot about people by watching it.
There are a lot of ways to imagine a system of time travel that preserves causality. For example, what if it's impossible to make changes that impact you being born and sent back through time? What if every change you make that you think will ensure you don't exist actually ensures that you do indeed exist?
Another way of viewing it is like imagining time as a branching tree. If you travel back in time, you would go to a common ancestor of a lot of different timelines. Making a change would branch the time tree, but would not prevent you travelling back from your original branch. This would also neatly explain why we haven't seen any time travellers. If you can't travel back in time in a way that allows you to travel back to your own time, who would want to? And even if someone did, they would branch the time tree in such a way that we, on an unpolluted branch, would never see them.
Spain and morroco are indeed on separate tectonic plates. However, they only move 10mm towards eachother each year, and the subduction is not happening between spain and morroco, but south of greece and farther to the east. So, my personal guess is that plate movement for this tunnel can be reasonably safely disregarded (no fault lines to mess things up).
The belgian railway system used to be horribly bad, even though it was and is state-run. It only improved once they started running it as a business and started setting performance goals (like percentages of trains that have to be on time). I guess my point is that whether a train network is state-run or privately owned doesn't matter all that much, just that the government supervises it correctly and ensures there are minimum quality standards.
Note that the smuggling of people from france to the UK happens on trucks riding on cargo trains, not on passenger trains (which have excellent security making it too difficult to get on them illegally). Before the chunnel was built people were smuggled via trucks too, except they used ferries instead. That the volume in smuggling picked up is more due to the fact that the rest of Europe has unified ID's now (which are hard to forge), and britain doesn't (meaning once an illegal alien gets into the UK, you can't identify them as such because you can't ask people for their non-existing id's). I'm sure once the ID card gets launched in the UK, people smuggling will decrease due to more illegal aliens getting caught and sent back.
why does copyright extend BEYOND the physical existance of the creator?
Simple, if that wouldn't have been the case, people would have been murdered in the past.
Conversely, by ensuring that copyright extends past the author's death, we've ensured there is motive for killing your successful book-writing father. Which way do more people get killed?
Do you think people will find ways around geography? Then please explain how I, in Europe, can log into the US version of the itms right now, because I'd really like to circumvent those access limitations and get me some of that itms goodness.
If the itms gets launched in different countries it'll be a different store anyway. They won't offer the same selection as in the US, because artists won't be signed with the same label/music company.
We have this system in Belgium. Multiple parties can *gasp* share power. What happens is that after the elections the parties negotiate a majority, where every party gets some of their demands, but not all (the larger a party, the more weight they have to get their demands met). Then the government is formed based on which parties agreed to be part of the majority. This deal dictates policy until the next election. This also ensures that government is always backed up by parliament (because in a sense, government IS parliament). I know it sounds unworkable to you, but believe me: it works.
Ofcourse, on hotly contested issues the majority will break up and all the parties will vote separately, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Scientific theories are our best guesses at predicting the real world. Saying "god exists" is not a theory, because it does not make predictions about reality. No predictions made means you can not disprove it. That's the difference between religion and science. Religion can't be disproven.
There is an inherent flaw with the way modern patent offices are set up. They charge money to allow you to file it, when the obvious solution is to charge money when a patent is rejected. Think about it, if it was in the best interests of the PTO to reject patents (because it raked in the dough), only truly innovative things would get patented.
Slashdot Mirror
Note that there are about 70 sextillion stars in the universe. That's a 7 with 22 zeroes. Even if only one in a billion stars has a planet orbiting it with intelligent life on it, that still means there are 70000000000000000 such planets in the universe.
Ofcourse, distances between galaxies are so large we can only reasonably search within our own galaxy, the milky way. The guesses here go from 3 billion stars to 100 billion stars. With the previously mentioned 1 intelligent species homeworld per billion stars this would result in 3 to 100 such homeworlds.
The odds ofcourse of intelligent life evolving are not known, because we don't understand yet how life evolved to the finest detail. So most guesses have to be taken with a grain of salt. Still, the odds can be pretty slim and still result in intelligent life being pervasive in the galaxy.
Also, you have to take into account the age of civilizations. If an intelligent civilization developed 1 billion years ago around alpha centauri, it would be long gone by now, so we wouldn't be able to pick up their communications. Why wouldn't the civilization keep existing? Simple, the older a civilization get the likelier it becomes it destroys itself in one way or another. And if somehow a civilization doesn't destroy itself, it would either turn inwards (not communicate with the rest of the universe) or turn outwards (colonise the rest of the universe). Since we haven't seen any alien colonists schedule up an interplanetary zoning meeting with Bush, it seems unlikely there are any colonising civilizations out there. Although, I did like the idea from Star Trek where they only made young civilizations aware of the existance of the federation once the civilization developed intersolar travel.
Given the size of the universe, it's indeed pretty likely there is intelligent life out there. I fully expect we will find at least one intelligent extraterrestrial lifeform before our species disappears. What I'm curious about is how this is going to be retrofitted into religion, which very much assumes we are $DEITY's chosen ones.
Validate your css too. If you're not using css, hello to you from the 21st century.
And also, improve accessibility. The validator only checks whether your html complies with the standards, but doesn't guarantee usability. Implementing these relatively simple (albeit numerous) accessibility guidelines ensures your site will work correctly in just about every browsing tool on the platform, whether it be lynx, jaws (browser for the blind), or the entire safari.
I prefer the nickname "BlockF**ker"
Censoring what you're saying in a thread about the evilness of censorship. Now that is funny.
Power IS freedom. The freedom to decide who can use your software is the power software creators have. The FSF wants that power to be in the hands of the users instead of large corporations.
Software is just a bunch of bytes, believe me, it does not want to be free. It's the people that want it to be free, and when you want something you can't have, you're powerless.
I wonder how long it will take before consumers sit up and go "WTF Mate?"
I wonder how long it will take before people will realise how insulting the word "consumer" is as a label for a customer. Businesses used to deal with customers, and treat them well, now they deal with consumers, and so all they feel they need to do is produce stuff for consumption (and are insulted when people refuse to consume it, as exemplified by the RIAA). This dehumanization of business is what makes the corporate world suck so much nowadays.
Exactly. The music industry's original reason for existance was lowering the barrier to access to music. Before records became commonplace the only way to listen to music was to see a live performance. In short, you had to dedicate either a lot of time or a lot of money if you wanted to enjoy music. Then the record industry came along and suddenly people could affordably listen to their favourite music whenever they wanted, as often as they wanted. It led to the decline of live music (live music used to be EVERYWHERE), but it made music more popular.
The inherent problem with the music industry is that they have forgotten they should be making it easier to listen to music. Obtaining music nowadays is no easier than it was 30 years ago, and in fact, it's become slightly harder due to raised pricing (more than inflation), the reduction of music sampling opportunities (less music on the radio, no in-store sampling), and the introduction of technologies which make it more difficult to listen to bought music the way you want (the various copy protection systems). This is why itunes is so successful. It makes sampling and obtaining music dramatically easier, while at the same time lowering prices.
If I was a music industry exec I'd be spending all my time finding ways to make it easier for customers to buy my product. But then, that's just crazy talk.
He was probably referring to the ppro 150. It had the p6 core that would later go into the mass market pII. I still run my website on a ppro/200. Good hardware.
A better system is to make the sender do the optin. When you send someone running such a system an email, you get an automated reply saying you're not on the approved list yet, and to reply to get added to it (so your mail only goes through to the inbox if you reply). Any spammers that reply you can still manually add to a blacklist. Although, to be honest, I doubt spammers would reply automatically, because they would be paying the bandwidth for receiving all the confirmation mails, and as a result spam would become uneconomical.
For an example implementation, take a look at ASK.
Note that you would need to reply only once to from then on be able to send mail normally to a person running this, so it wouldn't add large barriers to email traffic, while at the same time dramatically cutting spam volumes.
One catch here is that mailing lists would need to be added to the whitelist manually. But on the other hand, mailing lists are dying anyway in the wake of the rss revolution.
I'm signed up for cable internet with telenet
Bandwidth limits are cable speeds down, and 16KB/sec up. Volume limits are 10 gig total, of which 15 percent (or 1.5 gig) up in the last 30 days. Go over the limit in a 30 day period and you get thrown on narrowband, which is about the same speed as a 33.6 modem, until the volume over the last 30 days sinks below the limits again. If for some reason you need more volume, you can rent it in 1 gig blocks for 1 euro / block / month, of which again 15 percent can be upload, up to a maximum of 20 blocks (30 gig total, 4.5 gig up).
It's a pretty fair deal, for the price. And there's no way you can be thrown off for using up more than your share. If you dl too much, it's narrowband for you, but that doesn't have any consequences for your account other than making it really slow for a while.
I don't get why all isp's don't adopt this kind of system, if they're going to impose volume limits anyway.
The default settings are indeed to have it turn on for 5 seconds whenever you press a button, or use the thumbwheel. You can change this by going to the top-level menu (press menu until it doesn't go higher), and then settings -> backlight -> [whatever setting].
The only time I turn it off is when i'm playing solitaire. Having the screen on for half an hour seriously drains the battery. Otherwise I don't notice the battery drain from having the screen turn on everytime i change volume or put on a new album.
One could argue that the cyc project has the capability to grow into HAL-like intelligence, and it's been in operation for years.
The problem is not that saddam isn't a bad man. The problem is that if you define iraq as rogue because of what saddam did in the 80's, half the planet is rogue. China is rogue, because of what they're doing in tibet, and how they disregard basic human rights like freedom of speech. Saudi-arabia is rogue, because of government ties to terrorism. Israel is rogue, for what they're doing to the palestinians (not that the palestinians are angels, but two wrongs don't make a right). And so on...
Some people might even call the US rogue, for blatantly disregarding basic laws like the international rights of pow's and human rights in how they treat captured "enemy combatants". Examples of infringed rights: pow's have a right to be returned to their country after the cessation of major hostilities. Most people captured in afghanistan haven't been returned, even if there's no proof they did anything else than defend their country. Another example: the way people in guatanamo bay are presumed guilty and are refused a fair trial (the lucky ones will go before military tribunals, but I wouldn't expect impartiality from those, the unlucky ones will just stay locked up indefinitely). Let me quote from the declaration of human rights:
Article 9.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
Article 10.
Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.
Article 11.
(1) Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.
(2) No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.
To sum up my point, cleaning up the world brute-force would be nothing short of WWIII. It's an inherently flawed strategy. You cause much more damage than the problems you're trying to fix. Any solution towards world peace needs to be political (look back in history, how many times has piece resulted from a treaty, and how many times has it resulted from total military victory?). And I wouldn't go around putting blame on other countries, because every country in the world is rogue in some way or other.
Besides, why is it ok that politicians lie? As a people, we shouldn't accept that, and we should hold them accountable. It was right to go after clinton for lying while president, it's right to go after bush for the very same reason now. A leader of the world should never, ever, knowingly lie, even if the truth is embarassing or damaging. If we can't trust our leaders, who can we trust?
Rhis was very visible in the local version of one of the big brother seasons, where they completely cut off any and all access to the outside world and knowledge of time. You could see people getting up and going to bed a little later each day, while they still believed to be following the same routine. Eventually big brother had to step in and inform them of the time, because they were sleeping during live broadcasts.
Most people think big brother is a travesty, but I think it's pretty interesting as a social experiment. You can learn a lot about people by watching it.
There are a lot of ways to imagine a system of time travel that preserves causality. For example, what if it's impossible to make changes that impact you being born and sent back through time? What if every change you make that you think will ensure you don't exist actually ensures that you do indeed exist?
Another way of viewing it is like imagining time as a branching tree. If you travel back in time, you would go to a common ancestor of a lot of different timelines. Making a change would branch the time tree, but would not prevent you travelling back from your original branch. This would also neatly explain why we haven't seen any time travellers. If you can't travel back in time in a way that allows you to travel back to your own time, who would want to? And even if someone did, they would branch the time tree in such a way that we, on an unpolluted branch, would never see them.
Spain and morroco are indeed on separate tectonic plates. However, they only move 10mm towards eachother each year, and the subduction is not happening between spain and morroco, but south of greece and farther to the east. So, my personal guess is that plate movement for this tunnel can be reasonably safely disregarded (no fault lines to mess things up).
But then, IANATG (tectonic geologist).
The belgian railway system used to be horribly bad, even though it was and is state-run. It only improved once they started running it as a business and started setting performance goals (like percentages of trains that have to be on time). I guess my point is that whether a train network is state-run or privately owned doesn't matter all that much, just that the government supervises it correctly and ensures there are minimum quality standards.
Note that the smuggling of people from france to the UK happens on trucks riding on cargo trains, not on passenger trains (which have excellent security making it too difficult to get on them illegally). Before the chunnel was built people were smuggled via trucks too, except they used ferries instead. That the volume in smuggling picked up is more due to the fact that the rest of Europe has unified ID's now (which are hard to forge), and britain doesn't (meaning once an illegal alien gets into the UK, you can't identify them as such because you can't ask people for their non-existing id's). I'm sure once the ID card gets launched in the UK, people smuggling will decrease due to more illegal aliens getting caught and sent back.
And while you're at it, tell them that 100 mbit internet for less than $100 / month is impossible too. They don't seem to have realised that.
The only way to do impossible things is to not know they're impossible.
Buy your stuff on cdbaby. There is a LOT of good music there, and it's all indie.
OK, so you won't find "no doubt" there. But you will find artists that sound like no doubt.
why does copyright extend BEYOND the physical existance of the creator?
Simple, if that wouldn't have been the case, people would have been murdered in the past.
Conversely, by ensuring that copyright extends past the author's death, we've ensured there is motive for killing your successful book-writing father. Which way do more people get killed?
Do you think people will find ways around geography? Then please explain how I, in Europe, can log into the US version of the itms right now, because I'd really like to circumvent those access limitations and get me some of that itms goodness.
If the itms gets launched in different countries it'll be a different store anyway. They won't offer the same selection as in the US, because artists won't be signed with the same label/music company.
We have this system in Belgium. Multiple parties can *gasp* share power. What happens is that after the elections the parties negotiate a majority, where every party gets some of their demands, but not all (the larger a party, the more weight they have to get their demands met). Then the government is formed based on which parties agreed to be part of the majority. This deal dictates policy until the next election. This also ensures that government is always backed up by parliament (because in a sense, government IS parliament). I know it sounds unworkable to you, but believe me: it works.
Ofcourse, on hotly contested issues the majority will break up and all the parties will vote separately, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Scientific theories are our best guesses at predicting the real world. Saying "god exists" is not a theory, because it does not make predictions about reality. No predictions made means you can not disprove it. That's the difference between religion and science. Religion can't be disproven.
There is an inherent flaw with the way modern patent offices are set up. They charge money to allow you to file it, when the obvious solution is to charge money when a patent is rejected. Think about it, if it was in the best interests of the PTO to reject patents (because it raked in the dough), only truly innovative things would get patented.
You know what they say...
Every blue screen has a beige lining.