Actually as others have pointed out sueing for wrongfull termination means the violated the law in dissmissing you (say because you were black, or had put in for the new familly medical leave).
Your only real recourse in most states if they fire you for no reason other than they felt like it is to collect unemployment earlier and of course to tell everyone you know what a crappy company they are.
The technology prediction was pretty much a straight extrapolation of existing trends. And I definately said hardware to exclude software, that is almost certainly the harder part.
I should have been clearer in my second paragraph. I should have made it clear I was speaking of things we could do IF we wanted to. Both flying cars and more frequent lunar trips could have happened, but we didn't want to bad enough. Technically the flying cars exist, but only in crude prototypes IIRC, so they don't quite count.
But your point apears close to mine: It's all guesswork at this point. I think sooner than 100 years is more likely if we decide to work on it, but it's still just educated guesswork.
There's nothing there to errode. You have no inherent right to a job, or to keep one once you've got it.
Your job related rights are things like getting paid the agreed amount for work done, not being called racist names nor being sexually harrased, that sort of thing.
But you never had the right not to be fired for say being a crossdresser in your free time, or just simply being of a different political orientation than the boss.
Of course the counter might be 'hostile workplace environment'. Especially if it's his supervisors starting the conversation.
But those that think 1st aplies to your job, it doesn't. You are only protected in a small range of cases (such as calling osha and telling them about violations).
Let's turn this around. Suppose you a bussines owner. Do you really think someone should have the right to force you to keep paying them indefinately when he's rude and obnoxious?
While I do think it's a bit slimy to fire someone for thier off duty behaviours, the employers do have to consider being tarred as the people that employ that jerk who does leagle, but highly socially unacceptable, things in his spare time.
The current system isn't to badly balanced, though it's a bit shifted for the employer at the moment.
This seems a fairly good place to point out that the first amendment is an injunction against the government, not against private companies and individuals. Though there are laws that extend limited protections, such as whistle-blower laws.
So yes your employer can fire you for saying things he doesn't want to hear, but the government can't lock you up for your opinions (in theory, exceptions do exist).
Not shure where you got the 100years from. Most predictions place the hardware complexity ariving in about 15-20. Some experts were guessing about mid century up to 2075 for everything to come together.
Given the general rule of thumb is to ask the experts for a reasonable guestimate and to then devide by half, my guess would be about 2030.
Just a guess though.
Unfortunately this assumes 'the press' or 'free speach' is limited to a selected club. It can't be or the 1st amendmant is meaningless.
The minute you start having special rules and liscences to define who is the press or who gets free speach, those rules quickly become "those who only say what we want them to say"
I can't honestly believe so many people have failed to understand the 1st amendment. It was specifically meant to EXCLUDE the sorts of things being said here, namely government definition of what can be said.
Perhaps these people are not 'in the club', but they are most definately covered by the first amendment and are the 'press'.
Whether or not this protects them from Apples desire to learn the names of thier sources is a bit different though. Depends on the laws in question.
I'm pulled a bit both ways on whether they should have the right to keep quite on thier sources. I simply lack enough data to have an opinion on that part yet.
For the same reason hundreds, if not thousands, of overwiegth half drunk guys sit around the tv durring sporting events yelling at the coaches who can't hear them about how stupid they are as if they would be better coaches themselves despite having no experience beyond drooling over the chearleaders in highschool.
It's fun to play armchair quarterback/general/laywer/whatever for some sub-segments of society.
Eighter assuming alein civilisations would be highly visible and expanding or not, same assumptions from opposite ends.
I never said they were there, I just said fermi's paradox has bigger assumptions (more than drakes equation because the unknowns are guaranteed >0, as at least one planet has life and a civilisation on it), and missed to many possible explanations, to be anything more than speculations. And books and articles argue-ing drakes equation have been written as well as have been about fermi's paradox.
The real 'paradox' is in fact that while reason based on what little we know shows that life should be visibly abundant, we have not found it outside our own planet. Given how compelling the arguments are on both sides it becomes clear the we have reasoned from a false premis somewhere on one side or the other and lack the data needed to pinpoint the error. Untill we have that data assuming one side or the other correct is just that, an assumption.
But on to what has been the biggest problem with your stance all allong.
The absence of proof being proof of absence is a known fallacy and insisting otherwise does not give it credence.
No. I have plenty of proof that all observations made of the universe can be explained without the need for extra assumptions.
Observing and not finding is certainly evidence.
At this point I have to assume you are next going to argue 2+2=9. If you can't understand that the CONCEPT of lack of proof not being proof of the opposite being a KNOWN fallacy, same as saying 2+2=9, then I suspect any further attempt at explaining or discussing anything is a waste of time if you cannot accept this simple fact. This simple fact has been my major point.
There is NO need to explain the lack of proof to show it is NO proof of the lack.
Just because you've seen no black swans doesn't mean there are none. It only means you haven't seen any.
The reason I characterized your reply as not paying attention is because AFTER giving several good reason why an alien civilisation might be hard to detect I mention them in summary then you said you couldn't think of any.
Quasars, although billions of light years away at the closest, are also putting out energy levels that excede the some galaxies. If we haven't mapped out all of them, how the heck would we have found much weaker signals even if much closer (with comparable to weaker recieved signal strength). You have to look at something to see it and we quite simply have NOT looked in meaningfull way wrt life at most of the sky.
I'm not missing the 13-16 billion years of age of the universe, nor the last 8-10 billion years in which heavier elements (presumed needed for intelligent life) have been around. I'm just not assuming that it's the only factor, nor so overwhelming as to dominate like you think.
The problem is all that time to expand niegther guarantees expansion nor wastefullness on the part of expandind races nor miraculously makes us diligent and wise enough to spot them. And your (and Fermi's) use of it misses that time to grow is also time for disaster to strike. And it wouldn't even have to strike a whole civilisation, just a big enough chunk near enough to us not to long ago. We've had more than just the one mass extinction that meteorite caused. Something along the lines of a good supernova could concievably wipe out a healthy chunk of life including not quite sterilizing earth should we be on the fringe of the 'blast radius'. The result would be us in a rather underpopulated area.
If your going to use Fermi's 'paradox' one could just as easily counter with drakes equation. Both use pure speculation and assumption.
The absence of proof being proof of absence is a known fallacy and insisting otherwise does not give it credence.
Beside that we're barely looking and we can't even say for certain what we should be looking for. We can reasonably speculate as to what WE would do, and phyisical laws do impose some guidelines (though we provably don't have all those figured out, could be some interesting things in the parts we don't know that changes the whole picture wrt this discussion).
The biggest problem with trying to guess anything about an alein life, let alone civilisation, is that it would be alien. We only have ONE example of a populated planet. Guessing is all we can do as to what an alien civilisation might do. Perhaps they'll all have agoraphobia so bad even thinking of space kill them from fear. Maybe they don't care to spread. Maybe they spoted us first and are deliberately hiding. Maybe we've looked right at the crowning achievement of thier race and not even recognized it, there are a few things out there we've managed to explain away with our understanding of physics as natural phenomena, perhaps we're wrong, maybe quasars are actually local navigation beacons that just look really far away.
BOTH of us are just speculating untill we do have evidence one way or the other.
Problem is that congress is likely to take the easy fix to your suggestion. Raise the cost of filling a patent. Raise it enough and only significantly sized corporations can afford them (nearly the case now). It neatly sidesteps most of your plan and has the added benifit of awarding thier sponsors by leaving them an easy way to squash the little guy while apearing to the 'peepuhl' to be doing something about the problem.
In fact the other main problem with patents is they cost to much for a real independant inventor to register one in many cases. Add this to the cost of bringing something to market on your own and most inventors might as well sell the idea to a corp and let them patent it anyway.
I dunno this almost makes sense, which means it probably doesn't work that way in court.
A real full blown lawyer should speak to this (IANAL), but I believe the limits on what a court can rule on is in part due to exactly what's brought before them in a sometimes very nitpicky way.
The Evil patent holder in this case might only need be carefull about how he argues his case and wind up invalidating the +2 and -1 patents while keeping his own +1 patent even if it's brought up and shown to be utterly rediculous simply because that specific patent isn't the item at issue.
Now if I'm not significantly off base somewhere I should at least be showing some ignorance here (most definately IANAL, nor is this leagle anything but speculation and perhaps utter nonsense), but I've seen simularly schizophrenic(sp?) seeming things out of our (USA) and other leagle systems and wouldn't be surpised if such a tactic had some major pitfalls hidden in it for the untrained.
If you follow some of those links, one of the ways it get's installed is by pretending to be a windows media viewer update. It says it's a critical update and is triggered by the mechanism in windows media for authorising play of a media file.
So what happens is user downloads a wmv or some such and tries to play it. Depending on details they may or may not get notified it can't be played without contacting the net. Then they get a nice litle dialog box informing them a critical update for windows media player is available with an 'ok' button that when pressed installs the malware in question.
They use simular tactics to get installed in other cases. In one situation thier install process involves them apearing to certify another program spyware free!
Even a cluefull user could be taken in by the first one (I saw the screen shot before reading far into the article and thought they had somehow got MS to help them spread via windows automatic update or some such) If they are not paying pretty close attention.
I don't know what to say to make my point at this juncture, especially if your not even really paying atention to what I said.
You say our eyesight is so good we could miss them? Yet we're still finding new quasars to point out just one type of very high eneregy object. And not only that we simply are not looking for life with but a tiny fraction of our ability.
Space is very huge, I can understand how you fail understand just how trully huge it is, the human mind cannot as readilly grasp such hugeness as it can other things. Your failure to grasp this doese not invalidate the very fact that it's raw size gives us to much to search to say nothing is there. IF we made a solid search for life of just the milkyway galaxy THE priority of the human race it would be many centuries before we had done so with just our current technology (over 200 billion stars spread out over a disc 300pc by 30kpc).
And while CURRENTLY we're detectable against the background noise we're reducing that fairly quickly, and indeed any civilazation that values efficiency at all would tend towards zero wastage. And thus would only be detectable by a civilization near thier own level or higher. So really the only civilizations we could detect are those within a fairly narrow band of technological capability, or those that didn't care about wastefullness, or those trying to get our attention.
We're getting harder to detect by the year, or will be shortly, as we get more efficient. We are not looking for life very hard, and We are not trying very hard to be spotted ourselves. If you are going to extrapolate from a statistical sample of one (admittedly the only thing we can do, and quite fun, but we should should remember it means it's all a guess), then try not to compound the unknown errors by only extrapolating on one side of an argument while ignoring the contradicting data.
The only thing our not having stumbled across an other civilization proves is we haven't stumbled across another civilization. It niegther proves there are none or that there are many.
That actually depends on how you define 'english'. If you define it simply as the language spoken in England, them by definition anyone there speaks it rather well.
However some mean a specific form of english, and in this particular conext (how well Americans speak it) they're often refering to how closely to the english of the time when Europeans, especially British, first settled the americas in the 1500-1600's. In that case it's my understanding the honors go to a subsection of America (or at least did about a decade ago when I saw this discussed on nova or some such). There are villages and such in the appallation(sp?) mountains that have been sufficiently isolated that thier language use has drifted less than in the rest of the english speaking world.
Our sight is still very limited. Shure we can dectect some interesting things, but only where we specifically look and within some rather sharp limits. Space is a lot bigger than big.
Not necessarily just nanotech. The more efficient your technology the less wastage you have, without significant wastage of energy what exactly are we going to detect? No guarantee an alien species would have as strong a preference for efficeincy as we do, but considering how fast we're reducing our relative levels of waste I'd not be suprised by finding out more advanced civilisation don't really was enough to make the huge glaring mess we'd need to spot them.
I might be more concerned if we were looking hard for aliens and finding nothing. But we've barely scratched the surface, and this is the big teller as to why any conclusions would pre-mature. We simply haven't looked that much. Seti@home is nice and all, but it's just one tiny section of the em spectrum covering a small portion of the sky looking for what are current assumptions believe an alien signal would look like.
It'd be like a hunter deciding there were no deer in the road because there's no blindingly obvious evidence in his bedroom, before he's even open his eyes all the way.
I'm sorry just because we haven't found anything yet with our very limited looking proves only that we don't know.
For an alien civilisation to be spottable enough for us to be likely to spot them by chance (or nearly so) they would have to be at least as inefficient as us and/or in just the right place (likely very close) OR specifically targeting us for notice.
But to tell the truth you eigther have to eplain away the lack of life despite or the lack of detection on purely speculative grounds.
As far the chemistry and phyics go. What does a spread spectrum signal look like? It looks like background noise with some pretty sophisticated equipment and knowing pretty much what your looking for (or equiment set to recieve the specific signal). Spread spectrum was originally devised to have high resistance to jamming in WWII. Now would any other civilisation have NO reason to develope technologies that tend not to leave traces for various reasons. If our own tech is hard for us to spot as other than normal noise, how much harder would a more advanced civilisations be?
I find the sheer number of different reasons why an alien civilisation would not be highly visible and thus spotted by near random chance a better explanation than expecting them to make so much noise we couldn't miss them despite the raw hugeness of space.
O.K. that's a bit more substantial. The assumtions are that a) we would know such footprints if we detected them and b) We have the capability and will to detect them.
The answer to A is maybe, the answer to B is only in a rather limited sense on both sub-parts.
It's not a bad hypothesis, it does however currently lack good testability as we don't know what if any actions other intelligent life would take, indeed we only have ourselves (a sample of ONE) to tell us what such life would be like.
Of course there is also the (pretty weak IMHO) idea (not even really worthy of a hypothesis) that at least one intellegent civilisation (perhaps even a secretive subset of our own if you belive some of the UFO/Art Bell crowd) has decided to prevent us from detecting any such and has the ability to do so. But I only through that out because it amuses me, not because I grant it any credibility.
My original retort was based on the well accepted principal that failure to prove does not axiomatically disprove.
While I'll agree there is a lack of evidence, and some reasoned thinking as to why that might not be so if there was intelligent life elsewhere, it's not conclusive or even a strong argument because of the large number of assumptions based on a sample of ONE. When you add in our limitations it weakens even further.
An equally weak counter is the fact that space is huge with many stars. We already know that at least some percentage of stars have planets. Given that once (but only once that we can show) life has arrisen on a planet, and given the likely number of 'chances', for only one planet to develope life seems unlikely.
We have a huge haystack to search for a needle we can only poorly define with poor eyesight and have anly piddled around about finding it. I find it no suprise we've had no luck yet.
Yep, but only for a limited area and through bad reasoning.
Sorry but buying software is NOT like hiring a contractor to remodle your house or build a deck.
Plus part of the reason it was held was the guy had seen it TWICE before buying the same damn thing a third time.
Most uluas are sprung after the transaction is complete. In the case presented the judge decided the transaction was like hiring someone to work on your home and the eula is like when something costs more because more work is needed. A case where the transaction is on going.
Since I'm NOT in that jurisdiction I will continue to assume a sane judge would hold with first sale and other well established practices.
I suspect the judge was overly sympathetic to ProCD as they were essentially being abused by a technicality so he invented the excuse to slap down a jerk without thinking through the consequences.
I was talking about a local case where a man had some pictures clipped from the NEWSPAPER, from department store ADS. They decided he was viewing them for prurient interest and therefore he was guilty of possesion of child porn.
These where normal department store ads of teens in pajamas and such.
I was NOT talking about downloading pics of 8 year olds being molested or whatever, just normal ads shipped with most newspapers.
PURE thoughtcrime where they even get to decide what 'your thoughts' are (as in they CONVICT based on thier opinion as to what your thoughts are).
Problem is this is thought-crime. When what a person is THINKING is what makes something a crime something is wrong. Lets just start with the fact that since there is no way to show the thoughts a person has in there head you have no possible proof of guilt, so it's eigther a non starter or a convienient way to incarcerate someone on a whim.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually as others have pointed out sueing for wrongfull termination means the violated the law in dissmissing you (say because you were black, or had put in for the new familly medical leave).
Your only real recourse in most states if they fire you for no reason other than they felt like it is to collect unemployment earlier and of course to tell everyone you know what a crappy company they are.
Mycroft
The technology prediction was pretty much a straight extrapolation of existing trends. And I definately said hardware to exclude software, that is almost certainly the harder part.
I should have been clearer in my second paragraph. I should have made it clear I was speaking of things we could do IF we wanted to. Both flying cars and more frequent lunar trips could have happened, but we didn't want to bad enough. Technically the flying cars exist, but only in crude prototypes IIRC, so they don't quite count.
But your point apears close to mine: It's all guesswork at this point. I think sooner than 100 years is more likely if we decide to work on it, but it's still just educated guesswork.
Mycroft
However in almost every case your employer also has the right to say "sorry, you don't work here anymore, get out." and make it stick.
Mycroft
There's nothing there to errode.
You have no inherent right to a job, or to keep one once you've got it.
Your job related rights are things like getting paid the agreed amount for work done, not being called racist names nor being sexually harrased, that sort of thing.
But you never had the right not to be fired for say being a crossdresser in your free time, or just simply being of a different political orientation than the boss.
Mycroft
Of course the counter might be 'hostile workplace environment'. Especially if it's his supervisors starting the conversation.
But those that think 1st aplies to your job, it doesn't. You are only protected in a small range of cases (such as calling osha and telling them about violations).
Let's turn this around. Suppose you a bussines owner. Do you really think someone should have the right to force you to keep paying them indefinately when he's rude and obnoxious?
While I do think it's a bit slimy to fire someone for thier off duty behaviours, the employers do have to consider being tarred as the people that employ that jerk who does leagle, but highly socially unacceptable, things in his spare time.
The current system isn't to badly balanced, though it's a bit shifted for the employer at the moment.
Mycroft
This seems a fairly good place to point out that the first amendment is an injunction against the government, not against private companies and individuals. Though there are laws that extend limited protections, such as whistle-blower laws.
So yes your employer can fire you for saying things he doesn't want to hear, but the government can't lock you up for your opinions (in theory, exceptions do exist).
Mycroft
Not shure where you got the 100years from.
Most predictions place the hardware complexity ariving in about 15-20. Some experts were guessing about mid century up to 2075 for everything to come together.
Given the general rule of thumb is to ask the experts for a reasonable guestimate and to then devide by half, my guess would be about 2030.
Just a guess though.
Mycroft
Actually, considering most robots move, we would be having animated objects raise our kids.
Mycroft
What makes you think it's a zero sum game?
Usually economics are not a zero sum game and I doubt it is in this case.
Mycroft
Unfortunately this assumes 'the press' or 'free speach' is limited to a selected club. It can't be or the 1st amendmant is meaningless.
The minute you start having special rules and liscences to define who is the press or who gets free speach, those rules quickly become "those who only say what we want them to say"
I can't honestly believe so many people have failed to understand the 1st amendment. It was specifically meant to EXCLUDE the sorts of things being said here, namely government definition of what can be said.
Perhaps these people are not 'in the club', but they are most definately covered by the first amendment and are the 'press'.
Whether or not this protects them from Apples desire to learn the names of thier sources is a bit different though. Depends on the laws in question.
I'm pulled a bit both ways on whether they should have the right to keep quite on thier sources. I simply lack enough data to have an opinion on that part yet.
Mycroft
For the same reason hundreds, if not thousands, of overwiegth half drunk guys sit around the tv durring sporting events yelling at the coaches who can't hear them about how stupid they are as if they would be better coaches themselves despite having no experience beyond drooling over the chearleaders in highschool.
It's fun to play armchair quarterback/general/laywer/whatever for some sub-segments of society.
Mycroft
I never said they were there, I just said fermi's paradox has bigger assumptions (more than drakes equation because the unknowns are guaranteed >0, as at least one planet has life and a civilisation on it), and missed to many possible explanations, to be anything more than speculations. And books and articles argue-ing drakes equation have been written as well as have been about fermi's paradox.
The real 'paradox' is in fact that while reason based on what little we know shows that life should be visibly abundant, we have not found it outside our own planet. Given how compelling the arguments are on both sides it becomes clear the we have reasoned from a false premis somewhere on one side or the other and lack the data needed to pinpoint the error. Untill we have that data assuming one side or the other correct is just that, an assumption.
But on to what has been the biggest problem with your stance all allong.
At this point I have to assume you are next going to argue 2+2=9. If you can't understand that the CONCEPT of lack of proof not being proof of the opposite being a KNOWN fallacy, same as saying 2+2=9, then I suspect any further attempt at explaining or discussing anything is a waste of time if you cannot accept this simple fact. This simple fact has been my major point.
There is NO need to explain the lack of proof to show it is NO proof of the lack.
Just because you've seen no black swans doesn't mean there are none. It only means you haven't seen any.
Mycroft
The reason I characterized your reply as not paying attention is because AFTER giving several good reason why an alien civilisation might be hard to detect I mention them in summary then you said you couldn't think of any.
Quasars, although billions of light years away at the closest, are also putting out energy levels that excede the some galaxies. If we haven't mapped out all of them, how the heck would we have found much weaker signals even if much closer (with comparable to weaker recieved signal strength). You have to look at something to see it and we quite simply have NOT looked in meaningfull way wrt life at most of the sky.
I'm not missing the 13-16 billion years of age of the universe, nor the last 8-10 billion years in which heavier elements (presumed needed for intelligent life) have been around. I'm just not assuming that it's the only factor, nor so overwhelming as to dominate like you think.
The problem is all that time to expand niegther guarantees expansion nor wastefullness on the part of expandind races nor miraculously makes us diligent and wise enough to spot them. And your (and Fermi's) use of it misses that time to grow is also time for disaster to strike. And it wouldn't even have to strike a whole civilisation, just a big enough chunk near enough to us not to long ago. We've had more than just the one mass extinction that meteorite caused. Something along the lines of a good supernova could concievably wipe out a healthy chunk of life including not quite sterilizing earth should we be on the fringe of the 'blast radius'. The result would be us in a rather underpopulated area.
If your going to use Fermi's 'paradox' one could just as easily counter with drakes equation. Both use pure speculation and assumption.
The absence of proof being proof of absence is a known fallacy and insisting otherwise does not give it credence.
Beside that we're barely looking and we can't even say for certain what we should be looking for. We can reasonably speculate as to what WE would do, and phyisical laws do impose some guidelines (though we provably don't have all those figured out, could be some interesting things in the parts we don't know that changes the whole picture wrt this discussion).
The biggest problem with trying to guess anything about an alein life, let alone civilisation, is that it would be alien. We only have ONE example of a populated planet. Guessing is all we can do as to what an alien civilisation might do. Perhaps they'll all have agoraphobia so bad even thinking of space kill them from fear. Maybe they don't care to spread. Maybe they spoted us first and are deliberately hiding. Maybe we've looked right at the crowning achievement of thier race and not even recognized it, there are a few things out there we've managed to explain away with our understanding of physics as natural phenomena, perhaps we're wrong, maybe quasars are actually local navigation beacons that just look really far away.
BOTH of us are just speculating untill we do have evidence one way or the other.
Mycroft
Problem is that congress is likely to take the easy fix to your suggestion. Raise the cost of filling a patent. Raise it enough and only significantly sized corporations can afford them (nearly the case now). It neatly sidesteps most of your plan and has the added benifit of awarding thier sponsors by leaving them an easy way to squash the little guy while apearing to the 'peepuhl' to be doing something about the problem.
In fact the other main problem with patents is they cost to much for a real independant inventor to register one in many cases. Add this to the cost of bringing something to market on your own and most inventors might as well sell the idea to a corp and let them patent it anyway.
Mycroft
I dunno this almost makes sense, which means it probably doesn't work that way in court.
A real full blown lawyer should speak to this (IANAL), but I believe the limits on what a court can rule on is in part due to exactly what's brought before them in a sometimes very nitpicky way.
The Evil patent holder in this case might only need be carefull about how he argues his case and wind up invalidating the +2 and -1 patents while keeping his own +1 patent even if it's brought up and shown to be utterly rediculous simply because that specific patent isn't the item at issue.
Now if I'm not significantly off base somewhere I should at least be showing some ignorance here (most definately IANAL, nor is this leagle anything but speculation and perhaps utter nonsense), but I've seen simularly schizophrenic(sp?) seeming things out of our (USA) and other leagle systems and wouldn't be surpised if such a tactic had some major pitfalls hidden in it for the untrained.
Mycroft
If you follow some of those links, one of the ways it get's installed is by pretending to be a windows media viewer update. It says it's a critical update and is triggered by the mechanism in windows media for authorising play of a media file.
So what happens is user downloads a wmv or some such and tries to play it. Depending on details they may or may not get notified it can't be played without contacting the net. Then they get a nice litle dialog box informing them a critical update for windows media player is available with an 'ok' button that when pressed installs the malware in question.
They use simular tactics to get installed in other cases. In one situation thier install process involves them apearing to certify another program spyware free!
Even a cluefull user could be taken in by the first one (I saw the screen shot before reading far into the article and thought they had somehow got MS to help them spread via windows automatic update or some such) If they are not paying pretty close attention.
Mycroft
I don't know what to say to make my point at this juncture, especially if your not even really paying atention to what I said.
You say our eyesight is so good we could miss them? Yet we're still finding new quasars to point out just one type of very high eneregy object. And not only that we simply are not looking for life with but a tiny fraction of our ability.
Space is very huge, I can understand how you fail understand just how trully huge it is, the human mind cannot as readilly grasp such hugeness as it can other things. Your failure to grasp this doese not invalidate the very fact that it's raw size gives us to much to search to say nothing is there. IF we made a solid search for life of just the milkyway galaxy THE priority of the human race it would be many centuries before we had done so with just our current technology (over 200 billion stars spread out over a disc 300pc by 30kpc).
And while CURRENTLY we're detectable against the background noise we're reducing that fairly quickly, and indeed any civilazation that values efficiency at all would tend towards zero wastage. And thus would only be detectable by a civilization near thier own level or higher. So really the only civilizations we could detect are those within a fairly narrow band of technological capability, or those that didn't care about wastefullness, or those trying to get our attention.
We're getting harder to detect by the year, or will be shortly, as we get more efficient. We are not looking for life very hard, and We are not trying very hard to be spotted ourselves. If you are going to extrapolate from a statistical sample of one (admittedly the only thing we can do, and quite fun, but we should should remember it means it's all a guess), then try not to compound the unknown errors by only extrapolating on one side of an argument while ignoring the contradicting data.
The only thing our not having stumbled across an other civilization proves is we haven't stumbled across another civilization. It niegther proves there are none or that there are many.
Mycroft
That actually depends on how you define 'english'. If you define it simply as the language spoken in England, them by definition anyone there speaks it rather well.
However some mean a specific form of english, and in this particular conext (how well Americans speak it) they're often refering to how closely to the english of the time when Europeans, especially British, first settled the americas in the 1500-1600's. In that case it's my understanding the honors go to a subsection of America (or at least did about a decade ago when I saw this discussed on nova or some such). There are villages and such in the appallation(sp?) mountains that have been sufficiently isolated that thier language use has drifted less than in the rest of the english speaking world.
Mycroft
Don't you mean:
0.6<x<1.7
?
Mycroft
Our sight is still very limited. Shure we can dectect some interesting things, but only where we specifically look and within some rather sharp limits. Space is a lot bigger than big.
Not necessarily just nanotech. The more efficient your technology the less wastage you have, without significant wastage of energy what exactly are we going to detect? No guarantee an alien species would have as strong a preference for efficeincy as we do, but considering how fast we're reducing our relative levels of waste I'd not be suprised by finding out more advanced civilisation don't really was enough to make the huge glaring mess we'd need to spot them.
I might be more concerned if we were looking hard for aliens and finding nothing. But we've barely scratched the surface, and this is the big teller as to why any conclusions would pre-mature. We simply haven't looked that much. Seti@home is nice and all, but it's just one tiny section of the em spectrum covering a small portion of the sky looking for what are current assumptions believe an alien signal would look like.
It'd be like a hunter deciding there were no deer in the road because there's no blindingly obvious evidence in his bedroom, before he's even open his eyes all the way.
I'm sorry just because we haven't found anything yet with our very limited looking proves only that we don't know.
For an alien civilisation to be spottable enough for us to be likely to spot them by chance (or nearly so) they would have to be at least as inefficient as us and/or in just the right place (likely very close) OR specifically targeting us for notice.
But to tell the truth you eigther have to eplain away the lack of life despite or the lack of detection on purely speculative grounds.
As far the chemistry and phyics go. What does a spread spectrum signal look like? It looks like background noise with some pretty sophisticated equipment and knowing pretty much what your looking for (or equiment set to recieve the specific signal). Spread spectrum was originally devised to have high resistance to jamming in WWII. Now would any other civilisation have NO reason to develope technologies that tend not to leave traces for various reasons. If our own tech is hard for us to spot as other than normal noise, how much harder would a more advanced civilisations be?
I find the sheer number of different reasons why an alien civilisation would not be highly visible and thus spotted by near random chance a better explanation than expecting them to make so much noise we couldn't miss them despite the raw hugeness of space.
Mycroft
O.K. that's a bit more substantial.
The assumtions are that a) we would know such footprints if we detected them and b) We have the capability and will to detect them.
The answer to A is maybe, the answer to B is only in a rather limited sense on both sub-parts.
It's not a bad hypothesis, it does however currently lack good testability as we don't know what if any actions other intelligent life would take, indeed we only have ourselves (a sample of ONE) to tell us what such life would be like.
Of course there is also the (pretty weak IMHO) idea (not even really worthy of a hypothesis) that at least one intellegent civilisation (perhaps even a secretive subset of our own if you belive some of the UFO/Art Bell crowd) has decided to prevent us from detecting any such and has the ability to do so. But I only through that out because it amuses me, not because I grant it any credibility.
My original retort was based on the well accepted principal that failure to prove does not axiomatically disprove.
While I'll agree there is a lack of evidence, and some reasoned thinking as to why that might not be so if there was intelligent life elsewhere, it's not conclusive or even a strong argument because of the large number of assumptions based on a sample of ONE. When you add in our limitations it weakens even further.
An equally weak counter is the fact that space is huge with many stars. We already know that at least some percentage of stars have planets. Given that once (but only once that we can show) life has arrisen on a planet, and given the likely number of 'chances', for only one planet to develope life seems unlikely.
We have a huge haystack to search for a needle we can only poorly define with poor eyesight and have anly piddled around about finding it. I find it no suprise we've had no luck yet.
Mycroft
Yep, but only for a limited area and through bad reasoning.
Sorry but buying software is NOT like hiring a contractor to remodle your house or build a deck.
Plus part of the reason it was held was the guy had seen it TWICE before buying the same damn thing a third time.
Most uluas are sprung after the transaction is complete. In the case presented the judge decided the transaction was like hiring someone to work on your home and the eula is like when something costs more because more work is needed. A case where the transaction is on going.
Since I'm NOT in that jurisdiction I will continue to assume a sane judge would hold with first sale and other well established practices.
I suspect the judge was overly sympathetic to ProCD as they were essentially being abused by a technicality so he invented the excuse to slap down a jerk without thinking through the consequences.
Mycroft
I was talking about a local case where a man had some pictures clipped from the NEWSPAPER, from department store ADS. They decided he was viewing them for prurient interest and therefore he was guilty of possesion of child porn.
These where normal department store ads of teens in pajamas and such.
I was NOT talking about downloading pics of 8 year olds being molested or whatever, just normal ads shipped with most newspapers.
PURE thoughtcrime where they even get to decide what 'your thoughts' are (as in they CONVICT based on thier opinion as to what your thoughts are).
Mycroft
But I wasn't re-read what I said or see below.
Mycroft
Problem is this is thought-crime. When what a person is THINKING is what makes something a crime something is wrong. Lets just start with the fact that since there is no way to show the thoughts a person has in there head you have no possible proof of guilt, so it's eigther a non starter or a convienient way to incarcerate someone on a whim.
Mycroft