The big, giant, should be intuitive answer that you omitted is that FTL travel is impossible, therefore, even if there are other civilizations out there they will never be able to reach us.
No Fermi assumed an average expansion rate of about 0.1c in his back of a table napkin calculations. No FTL there.
Fermi's question (often called the Fermi Paradox) is not why can't we detect their radio transition but why aren't they here. The argument is instellar travel should be possible at about an average expansion rate of say 0.1c the Galaxy is about 10^4 light yr diameter.
On the assumption life and technological civilizations are widespread in the galaxy, then in it is very unlikely that we are the oldest technological civilization. Many should be more than 10^5 yr older than us (a short time in the evolution of the galaxy). They should have reached us by now. Fermi asked "Where are they ?".
There are three current answers to Fermi's Question:
1. The cosmologist Brandon Carter has produced a calculation based on Bayes theorem that the life span of technological civilizations is less than 10^4 yr. So civilizations don't last long enough to develop instellar travel and the outlook for us is not so good.
2. That though life may be comparatively widespread in the universe. the evolution of organisms capable of producing a technological civilization is very, very rare. We may be the only one.
3. They are already here, hiding out in the asteroid belt and on the dark side of the moon observing us. The alien civilization is so advanced an benevolent it does not want to make contact until they think we are sufficiently advanced not to have our civilization damaged by contact. This idea was put forward a few years ago by a group on the internet called the Group of 50 who were fifty signatories to a statement calling for the aliens to contact them by email. They reckoned as internet traffic was channeled through communication satellites that the aliens were monitoring it. No they weren't total nuts, the group was founded by an emeritus U. of Toronto astronomy prof. and consisted faculty, grad students and other interested people mostly from around North America. I don't know if they got an email from them yet (I haven't looked at their site in years, don't know if it still exists), but they had a neat scheme to check out if an email was genuine, not from some nut or hoaxer, they would ask the aliens to set of a small but visible flash on the surface of the moon at some prearranged time.
Some serious academics to the idea of aliens already here seriously enough to do an infra-red search study of the asteroids. If there was an alien colony on an asteroid it's energy use should cause it to be an infra-red emitter. The result was published in a peer reviewed astronomy journal. The result was negative, oh I guess there not here then.
Dr. Bob Sutor, IBM VP for Standards and Open Source is a keen Second Lifer. He refers to it quite often in his blog. Recently he has discussed the problems of getting the latest version running on Ubuntu Feisty on his laptops in his blog here:
Where he posts an image of Second Life running under Feisty. Since the image apparently shows his avatar we now know what the IBM dress code is in virtual worlds - Muscle Tee shirts and sunglasses.
Mandrake tried to do what Ubuntu does, but it tried to do it years and years before Ubuntu existed. It did a decent job of starting on the path toward a newbie friendly desktop Linux distribution. Unfortunately, it has had times where the entire system was unstable, where the hardware either didn't work as expected or didn't work at all. I don't recommend Mandriva because I don't trust it to stay as stable as it appears to be in it's current incarnation and also because I know that people have an easier time finding other users with similar questions and issues if they use Ubuntu.
I was a relatively happy Mandrake user having worked my way through releases 8, 9 and 10. I had noticed that there appeared to be greater instability after the installation had been in use some time. Eventually, a couple of years back, I had a unrecoverable failure on the hardrive. Mandrake had problems with this before but I had always been able to recover it with my data. This time Mandrake not only wouldn't recover the system it failed at all my attempts to reformat the disk.
At first I thought I had a hardware problem with the disk. Just on the off chance I thought I would try the copy of Ubuntu Breezy I had got through Shippit and was using to show off Linux at work with demonstrations of the live disk. It worked. It recognized my XFS partitions, installed itself and saved the data in my Home directory. It had no further problems with that drive which was working fine right up until I replaced it with a larger drive six months later. Everything just worked. I was a convert. Alright a few releases on I have had a few minor issues, but overall Ubuntu provides a great, productive working desktop. Certainly it is a lot better than XP which I use at work.
With Feisty installed on new but cheap and basic hardware it flies along. I have a beautiful fast 3D desktop using Compiz which I am willing to bet is a lot better than Aeroglass on Vista (dunno for sure as I haven't tried it). So thats my Ubuntu conversion story.
Just return the mail to the sender pointing out that they have sent you a document in an unsupported format and request that they send it to you in either ODF or.doc/.xls.
Then you force them to face the problem they are causing. If they persist, start sending them documents in.odt/.ods format to let them know what it is like.
When something is measured, it collapses it... What causes the collapse?
No in the MWI the wavefunction does NOT collpse. This is the whole point of the MWI, in the Copenhagen interpretation the wave function collapses on a measurement to a single state. In the MWI a measurement splits the world into two different states there is no collpse of the wavefunction.
The Copenhagen interpretation abolishes physical reality and brings in the idealist concept of a conscious observer collapsing the wavefunction. The MWI restores physical reality in quantum mechanics.
Let's take the Schrodinger cat thought experiment:
<cat alive|cat dead>
This gives rise to the density matrix:
cat alive...................... cat alive + cat dead
cat alive - cat dead..... cat dead
The CI supporters would say the MWI didn't explain why we don't see the off diagonal mixed states. But the modern approach to the measurement problems in MWI uses the concept of decoherence which is the interaction of the isolated quantum states with the macro environment. It has been shown that the mixed states are destroyed by interference when decoherence from interaction with the environment occurs. Thus in this experiment the world is split into two, one where the cat is alive and one where it is dead.
The decoherence approach in conjunction with the MWI abolishes the necessity of observers and restores the independent physical reality abolished the the CI. The proliferation of many worlds is the price we have to pay for physical reality and the unitary evolution of the wavefunction.
Russian citizens can still access fair and balanced news by (1) accessing Western web sites like CNN and Fox News and (2) tuning into Voice of America and Radio Free Europe
Come of it - even "Peoples' Daily" (I don't know about the Russian media but I do occasionly read the PD online English version) is a more fair and balanced source of news than Fox News etc. Not that it says much for "Peoples' Daily". Just two lots of controlled and manipulated news being put out to support their respective corrupt governments.
Under my current hardware, with Fedora 6, it mounts about 75% of the time. A 25% failure rate for something as common as plugging in a USB drive is fine by me, but is a total showstopper for most people
Well install Ubuntu then. In my experience with Ubuntu it automounts 100% of the time.
The term "god particles" was pushed by the Nobel prizewinning particle physicist Leon Lederman (though he may not have invented the term) he even wrote a popular book with this name. He was Director of Fermilab back in the early nineties during the push to get congressional funding for the Superconducting Super Collider which was designed to find the Higgs Boson.
I think he pushed the term to try to get approval from the religious right in congress who were typically suspicious about funding big science. They SSC ended not getting funding anyway. Primarily because of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the congressman no longer felt the need to pony up for any big project the physicists proposed as which they thought would give them technical superiority over the Soviets (and maybe the new super weapon of mass destruction). So the funding motion fell.
The religious right was certainly not going to fund the cathedrals of science. Anyway Lederman was not really using the term in the sense that Christians or religious Jews would, but rather in the same way that Einstein used the word "God" to mean the totality of physical law.
Yes the RIAA protection racket is more like the Mafia than Microsoft's protection racket. Ballmer "You need protection or nasty things could happen to you and your customers, so take this big wad of money and we'll protect you"
The best way IMHO to really beat the RIAA is to not consume their products in any form. If DRM prevents you from making a backup copy, don't buy the CD, don't download, listen to something else.
Don't buy any CD's at all from RIAA member labels. I buy CD's but only from independent non RIAA labels
1984 called, it wants its Newspeak back. We have a right to medicine? Suppose all the pharmaceutical companies closed their doors tomorrow. Where would your right to medicine come from then? The only way people can have a right to any good or service is if the government can FORCE somebody else to provide it through taxation. When you are forced to work to support others involuntarily, that is the definition of slavery.
More garbage from you bankrupt right-wing pseudo "libertarians". If the pharmaceutical companies shut their doors tomorrow then we the workers who work in them (like me) should take them over and run them for the benefit of the people. Thats my left libertarian/anarcho-socialist side. On the other hand my social democratic side says I am happy to pay taxes if they are used to provide health services and effective drugs to people who need them. I am not happy to pay taxes for the wars of agression and imperial domination carried out by Bush and his brown nosers Blair, Harper and Howard.
It boils down to this right "libertarians" believe in freedom for capital, left libertarians believe in freedom for people. The original poster was right about right wing "Libertarians":
Libertarians want the right to economically enslave others. When all resources are privately owned, all non-owners are defacto slaves, and it is this goal that libertarians work towards: the enslavement of the poor, worldwide
Bohm's ideas are interesting. But to me the simplest way to recover reality in quantum mechanics is to tkae it at face value and accept that unitarity is never broken. Forget all the crap of the Copenhagen interpretation forget about state vector reduction. There is no "collapse" of the wavefunction its linear evolution is reality.
All solutions to the wavefunction are equally real. Quantum superpositions are destroyed by decoherence with the environment, while while the classical world comes from the interaction of pure states of the density matrix with the environment. In other words Schrodinger's cat is dead in one world and alive in an other and no world has a state of cat both dead and alive at the same time.
"But if it keeps releasing "upgrades" that serve to only make your computer slower and slower then it will be soon."
It is the software equivalent to Moore's law, your software halves in speed every new release. Of course this law applies to FOSS as well as to MS and proprietary software. Compare Gnome 2.0 to Gnome 1.0 or Firefox 2.0 to 1.0.
Indeed I write this on a six year old computer running Firefox 2.0.0.3 on Gnome 2.14.1. In the past I have indeed run Gnome 1.0 and Firefox 1.0 on this system and I remember the difference. Damn I am going to have to buy a new system. Maybe I can buy one cheap that not up to running Vista bloatware.
"AIUI (I'm not an evolutionary biologist, although my girlfriend is)... Although some of the characteristics of our species are apparently or allegedly tracable to interbreeding events, for instance I've heard that red/ginger hair among Europeans can be linked to Neanderthalis genes."
You are certainly not an evolutionary biologist and if your girlfriend is you certainly haven't been listening to here unless she is a student of that neanderthal Wolpert.. You don't live in Ann Arbour by any chance?
Most paleoanthopologist think that modern humans are descended from a small population in Africa that spread out and colonized the entire world displacing earlier archaic types of homo such as erectus and neanderthalensis with whom they could not interbreed. There is good genetic evidence based on the sequencing of mitochondrial DNA from the bones of neanderthal specimens to show that we are not the product of interbreeding with neanderthals.
The differences in appearance are a result of selective evolutionary pressures working on populations of modern humans. For example the pale pinko-grey skin of northern europeans like myself is due the lack of sunlight in these northern climes. Vitamin D is produced through the action of sunlight on cells just below our skins. Having a dark skin in Africa and othour tropical regions protects against damage from strong sunlight and the occurence of skin cancer, while enough sunlight penetrates to produce vit D. However the first dark skinned modern humans to penetrate into the gloomy north would tend towards vit D deficiency and there would be a selective pressure towards lighter skinned individuals, able to produce enough vit d, surviving to reproduce. Nothing todo with inbreeding with archaics, simple eh?
Some people are dumb, particularly Americans who don't understand the meaning of the word liberal. The origin of the word liberal derives from the British Liberal party who when it first adopted the name in the 19th century when they stood for free-trade and unbridled capitalism as opposed to the Tories or conservatives as they are also called who stood for tariffs and government regulation to keep grain prices high to benefit agricultural landowners.
Nowadays liberal by and large means a neo-con in sheep's clothing. Personally I think all professional politicians whether they are described as liberal or conservatives should be hung up from the nearest lamppost by their balls (I guess we will have to think of a different part of their anatomy for Hilary and Condi, but then again maybe not).
Back to the article, professor Geist argues that unregulated new media on the Internet will increase Canadian content available rather than reduce it. This is opposed to the arguments put forward by the big Canadian media corporations and other special interest groups who are using it as an excuse to to try and grab hold of new revenue streams. Two opposed sides whose positions have nothing to do with the much misused word "liberal". Here in Canada we have a big L Liberal Party who in government turns onto craven conservatives but in opposition (like now) shift rapidly to the left (though not with out the odd bit of "law and order waffle" so as not to alienate the rednecks) to prevent being outflanked by the New Democrats and the Greens. They are all corrupt and bought and sold by the corporations like pork-belly futures, just as in the U.S.
TCO is Meaningless. There is no accepted measure of TCO. It is not a normal accounting procedure and it appears to have been developed in the computing industry probably by Microsoft.
There is a real accounting procedure used by corporate accounts that could provide a comparison and that is Return on Investment (ROI).
Slashdot Mirror
No Fermi assumed an average expansion rate of about 0.1c in his back of a table napkin calculations. No FTL there.
On the assumption life and technological civilizations are widespread in the galaxy, then in it is very unlikely that we are the oldest technological civilization. Many should be more than 10^5 yr older than us (a short time in the evolution of the galaxy). They should have reached us by now. Fermi asked "Where are they ?".
1. The cosmologist Brandon Carter has produced a calculation based on Bayes theorem that the life span of technological civilizations is less than 10^4 yr. So civilizations don't last long enough to develop instellar travel and the outlook for us is not so good.
2. That though life may be comparatively widespread in the universe. the evolution of organisms capable of producing a technological civilization is very, very rare. We may be the only one.
3. They are already here, hiding out in the asteroid belt and on the dark side of the moon observing us. The alien civilization is so advanced an benevolent it does not want to make contact until they think we are sufficiently advanced not to have our civilization damaged by contact. This idea was put forward a few years ago by a group on the internet called the Group of 50 who were fifty signatories to a statement calling for the aliens to contact them by email. They reckoned as internet traffic was channeled through communication satellites that the aliens were monitoring it. No they weren't total nuts, the group was founded by an emeritus U. of Toronto astronomy prof. and consisted faculty, grad students and other interested people mostly from around North America. I don't know if they got an email from them yet (I haven't looked at their site in years, don't know if it still exists), but they had a neat scheme to check out if an email was genuine, not from some nut or hoaxer, they would ask the aliens to set of a small but visible flash on the surface of the moon at some prearranged time.
Some serious academics to the idea of aliens already here seriously enough to do an infra-red search study of the asteroids. If there was an alien colony on an asteroid it's energy use should cause it to be an infra-red emitter. The result was published in a peer reviewed astronomy journal. The result was negative, oh I guess there not here then.
This old punk says, I hope the internet destroys Elton John's muzak.
http://www.sutor.com/newsite/blog-open/?p=1633
Where he posts an image of Second Life running under Feisty. Since the image apparently shows his avatar we now know what the IBM dress code is in virtual worlds - Muscle Tee shirts and sunglasses.
Zimbra
I was a relatively happy Mandrake user having worked my way through releases 8, 9 and 10. I had noticed that there appeared to be greater instability after the installation had been in use some time. Eventually, a couple of years back, I had a unrecoverable failure on the hardrive. Mandrake had problems with this before but I had always been able to recover it with my data. This time Mandrake not only wouldn't recover the system it failed at all my attempts to reformat the disk.
At first I thought I had a hardware problem with the disk. Just on the off chance I thought I would try the copy of Ubuntu Breezy I had got through Shippit and was using to show off Linux at work with demonstrations of the live disk. It worked. It recognized my XFS partitions, installed itself and saved the data in my Home directory. It had no further problems with that drive which was working fine right up until I replaced it with a larger drive six months later. Everything just worked. I was a convert. Alright a few releases on I have had a few minor issues, but overall Ubuntu provides a great, productive working desktop. Certainly it is a lot better than XP which I use at work.
With Feisty installed on new but cheap and basic hardware it flies along. I have a beautiful fast 3D desktop using Compiz which I am willing to bet is a lot better than Aeroglass on Vista (dunno for sure as I haven't tried it). So thats my Ubuntu conversion story.
And how many of these are shipped with FreeDOS ?
Then you force them to face the problem they are causing. If they persist, start sending them documents in .odt/.ods format to let them know what it is like.
No in the MWI the wavefunction does NOT collpse. This is the whole point of the MWI, in the Copenhagen interpretation the wave function collapses on a measurement to a single state. In the MWI a measurement splits the world into two different states there is no collpse of the wavefunction.
The Copenhagen interpretation abolishes physical reality and brings in the idealist concept of a conscious observer collapsing the wavefunction. The MWI restores physical reality in quantum mechanics.
Let's take the Schrodinger cat thought experiment: <cat alive|cat dead>
This gives rise to the density matrix:
cat alive ...................... cat alive + cat dead
cat alive - cat dead ..... cat dead
The CI supporters would say the MWI didn't explain why we don't see the off diagonal mixed states. But the modern approach to the measurement problems in MWI uses the concept of decoherence which is the interaction of the isolated quantum states with the macro environment. It has been shown that the mixed states are destroyed by interference when decoherence from interaction with the environment occurs. Thus in this experiment the world is split into two, one where the cat is alive and one where it is dead.
The decoherence approach in conjunction with the MWI abolishes the necessity of observers and restores the independent physical reality abolished the the CI. The proliferation of many worlds is the price we have to pay for physical reality and the unitary evolution of the wavefunction.
In fact millions or even billions of dollars
Well install Ubuntu then. In my experience with Ubuntu it automounts 100% of the time.
I think he pushed the term to try to get approval from the religious right in congress who were typically suspicious about funding big science. They SSC ended not getting funding anyway. Primarily because of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the congressman no longer felt the need to pony up for any big project the physicists proposed as which they thought would give them technical superiority over the Soviets (and maybe the new super weapon of mass destruction). So the funding motion fell.
The religious right was certainly not going to fund the cathedrals of science. Anyway Lederman was not really using the term in the sense that Christians or religious Jews would, but rather in the same way that Einstein used the word "God" to mean the totality of physical law.
Yes the RIAA protection racket is more like the Mafia than Microsoft's protection racket. Ballmer "You need protection or nasty things could happen to you and your customers, so take this big wad of money and we'll protect you"
Don't buy any CD's at all from RIAA member labels. I buy CD's but only from independent non RIAA labels
More garbage from you bankrupt right-wing pseudo "libertarians". If the pharmaceutical companies shut their doors tomorrow then we the workers who work in them (like me) should take them over and run them for the benefit of the people. Thats my left libertarian/anarcho-socialist side. On the other hand my social democratic side says I am happy to pay taxes if they are used to provide health services and effective drugs to people who need them. I am not happy to pay taxes for the wars of agression and imperial domination carried out by Bush and his brown nosers Blair, Harper and Howard.
It boils down to this right "libertarians" believe in freedom for capital, left libertarians believe in freedom for people. The original poster was right about right wing "Libertarians":
Serves them right for running MS Windows.
There will be "violence in the streets". That was a prediction not a threat.
All solutions to the wavefunction are equally real. Quantum superpositions are destroyed by decoherence with the environment, while while the classical world comes from the interaction of pure states of the density matrix with the environment. In other words Schrodinger's cat is dead in one world and alive in an other and no world has a state of cat both dead and alive at the same time.
Yes - They do have oil, North Sea oil.
"But if it keeps releasing "upgrades" that serve to only make your computer slower and slower then it will be soon."
It is the software equivalent to Moore's law, your software halves in speed every new release. Of course this law applies to FOSS as well as to MS and proprietary software. Compare Gnome 2.0 to Gnome 1.0 or Firefox 2.0 to 1.0.
Indeed I write this on a six year old computer running Firefox 2.0.0.3 on Gnome 2.14.1. In the past I have indeed run Gnome 1.0 and Firefox 1.0 on this system and I remember the difference. Damn I am going to have to buy a new system. Maybe I can buy one cheap that not up to running Vista bloatware.
"AIUI (I'm not an evolutionary biologist, although my girlfriend is)... Although some of the characteristics of our species are apparently or allegedly tracable to interbreeding events, for instance I've heard that red/ginger hair among Europeans can be linked to Neanderthalis genes."
You are certainly not an evolutionary biologist and if your girlfriend is you certainly haven't been listening to here unless she is a student of that neanderthal Wolpert.. You don't live in Ann Arbour by any chance?
Most paleoanthopologist think that modern humans are descended from a small population in Africa that spread out and colonized the entire world displacing earlier archaic types of homo such as erectus and neanderthalensis with whom they could not interbreed. There is good genetic evidence based on the sequencing of mitochondrial DNA from the bones of neanderthal specimens to show that we are not the product of interbreeding with neanderthals.
The differences in appearance are a result of selective evolutionary pressures working on populations of modern humans. For example the pale pinko-grey skin of northern europeans like myself is due the lack of sunlight in these northern climes. Vitamin D is produced through the action of sunlight on cells just below our skins. Having a dark skin in Africa and othour tropical regions protects against damage from strong sunlight and the occurence of skin cancer, while enough sunlight penetrates to produce vit D.
However the first dark skinned modern humans to penetrate into the gloomy north would tend towards vit D deficiency and there would be a selective pressure towards lighter skinned individuals, able to produce enough vit d, surviving to reproduce. Nothing todo with inbreeding with archaics, simple eh?
Some people are dumb, particularly Americans who don't understand the meaning of the word liberal. The origin of the word liberal derives from the British Liberal party who when it first adopted the name in the 19th century when they stood for free-trade and unbridled capitalism as opposed to the Tories or conservatives as they are also called who stood for tariffs and government regulation to keep grain prices high to benefit agricultural landowners.
Nowadays liberal by and large means a neo-con in sheep's clothing. Personally I think all professional politicians whether they are described as liberal or conservatives should be hung up from the nearest lamppost by their balls (I guess we will have to think of a different part of their anatomy for Hilary and Condi, but then again maybe not).
Back to the article, professor Geist argues that unregulated new media on the Internet will increase Canadian content available rather than reduce it. This is opposed to the arguments put forward by the big Canadian media corporations and other special interest groups who are using it as an excuse to to try and grab hold of new revenue streams. Two opposed sides whose positions have nothing to do with the much misused word "liberal". Here in Canada we have a big L Liberal Party who in government turns onto craven conservatives but in opposition (like now) shift rapidly to the left (though not with out the odd bit of "law and order waffle" so as not to alienate the rednecks) to prevent being outflanked by the New Democrats and the Greens. They are all corrupt and bought and sold by the corporations like pork-belly futures, just as in the U.S.
There is a real accounting procedure used by corporate accounts that could provide a comparison and that is Return on Investment (ROI).