Does anybody know what the chances that something like this might be possible in BeOS's future? From what I know, Palm doesn't seem to be actually using the BeOS technology; rather, they bought the company for the engineers.
Perhaps with enough of a fund we might be able to get BeOS source released! Granted, it would likely have to be a much bigger fund than 100,000 euros, but I'd be willing to wager that there are more people interested in BeOS than in Blender, nifty though Blender is.
This might be our last chance to save BeOS. If anyone has any information about Palm's plans, please say so.
Cute. It's probably not worth my time to respond, but I still stand by what I said. My point is that the numbers weren't crucial to what I was saying.
They were just my speculation. Whether they are spot on or off by a cosmically insignificant (but very large to your very small mind) amount has absolutely no bearing on the meat of what I was saying.
Anyway, if you jiggle the numbers--give us 1,000,000 years, for all I care, in the cosmic sense that's little more than 30,000, really--you can fine tune it to your liking. The point is the same regardless of how you feel about the numbers I provided.
If life in the rest of the galaxy does not follow the basic "rule of survival" that it expands its numbers to fill its container and then spills over, then it is likely so different from us that we would not be able to distinguish it as alive.
All of the life on Earth, for all of its wide diversity, follows this rule.
While it's possible of course, and it's a delightful philosophical quandary, it's largely irrelevant. If it does not seem alive to us and we can never communicate with it or even interact with it, isn't that the same as being completely alone? It's equally daunting as a prospect, at the very least.
What's more likely is that we are in partial agreement. It is amazing that we've gotten this far, and so it is almost a folly to expect that any other life would reach sentience.
That's what I was saying before--if there were intelligent life, it would have found us by now.
This is to respond to the other two responses to my comment, as well.
I didn't say that FTL travel will be possible. If it turns out that it is, I would guess something closer to 10,000 years, perhaps less.
I said "leapfrogging" across the galaxy for a reason. Think of it as distributed colonization. We'll be crisscrossing the galaxy one star at a time in many different places at once. And with each new planet colonized you open not one but many avenues to continue human distribution.
30,000 years is a VERY long time. The whole of recorded human history spans about 1/6th of that, and much of that history has occured within the last 300th of it.
There's a bit more to it than that. While I agree with you that we're still lacking important experimental data (that is, we haven't actually visited anywhere to take a look), we can do some intelligent guesswork.
After all, philosophy has its place too. Without getting our minds around the possiblities, we will have very little success in conducting our search (or even convincing those with resources to finance the searching, though more likely than not, if life is found, it will be an accident during an economic/political endeavor).
If you play it by the numbers, then yes, life should occur frequently. By even the paltry data we've already collected, life should be abundant and soon even reachable.
This has a unintended but frightening implication, however.
Humans have existed as a sapient, technological species for approximately 30000 years (and that's generous, really). That means that in the cosmic equivalent of a the beginnings of a heartbeat, we've gone from caves to extraplanetary exploration, and our technology curve will only accelerate from here on out.
Considering that it took almost no time to get here, it will take even less time to get to point where we would be leapfrogging across the galaxy, colonizing everywhere. Within the next 30,000 years we'll have had more than enough time to have distributed explorers to every inhabitable/explorable planet in the galaxy.
The question, then, is why hasn't anyone found Earth yet, if the probability for life is so high? Either every civilization gets wiped out long before they can begin galactic exploration (without exception--a pretty difficult thing to imagine, unless you're an apocalyptic environmentalist), or, perhaps more frightening in an indirect sense, there simply aren't any other intelligent civilizations in the galaxy.
You'd think that even if ancient astronauts had found Earth, we would have uncovered at least SOME sort of artifact. After all, playing the probabilities, if one civilization found us, it would be overwhelmingly likely that many, many others would be able to, and would. So far we've got nothing.
It's a difficult reality to accept, but it may very well be that we're alone in the galaxy, and perhaps even in the universe.
Is it just that it doesn't have MS in front of it?
In part, yes. However, you could substitute the name of any other company for the letters MS and it would be equally true. What makes this different from and better than Passport is that it's a project backed by a consortium of companies rather than the brainchild of a single company.
Companies exist solely to make money. They don't make services to facilitate business for other companies unless they're going to get something out of it in the long run. It's more likely to be a benign service for facilitating commerce in general if it's backed by many companies.
None of them will make money from it directly, though they'll benefit from its simply being. Microsoft doesn't benefit from making business easier for everyone else. Passport has no purpose as a product if MS doesn't directly make cashmoney from it somehow. That is why it's creepy.
It's much better to have the corporate weight distributed. Each one is money hungry, sure, but none of them wants to be culpable for any of the others' malfeasance. They'll police each other on these matters, certainly.
Also, if they want to find out your purchasing habits they already can and do. If you're worried about that but you still want to do business online, you're going to be in for a rude awakening.
Even if this service doesn't provide an ideal situation, an alternative to a proprietary service is always worthwhile. If nothing else, it gives the proprietary services more work to do, which means better products for the consumers.
It's also good to have someone competing with MS Passport for the authentication game, lest we further our nation's decline into corporate plutocracy. The internet is less of a ghetto and more of an integrated part of the actual world we live in--this is no longer a shadow world, but a real extension of our lives wherein our security is just as important as it is anywhere else.
I confess that the PDF itself was a bit cumbersome (i.e., I didn't read all/most of it), but from what I could tell this appears to be a pretty well thought out project. I encourage everyone to support it however possible, as that's the only way projects like this sustain themselves.
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Does anybody know what the chances that something like this might be possible in BeOS's future? From what I know, Palm doesn't seem to be actually using the BeOS technology; rather, they bought the company for the engineers.
Perhaps with enough of a fund we might be able to get BeOS source released! Granted, it would likely have to be a much bigger fund than 100,000 euros, but I'd be willing to wager that there are more people interested in BeOS than in Blender, nifty though Blender is.
This might be our last chance to save BeOS. If anyone has any information about Palm's plans, please say so.
Cute. It's probably not worth my time to respond, but I still stand by what I said. My point is that the numbers weren't crucial to what I was saying.
They were just my speculation. Whether they are spot on or off by a cosmically insignificant (but very large to your very small mind) amount has absolutely no bearing on the meat of what I was saying.
I stand by what I said.
Anyway, if you jiggle the numbers--give us 1,000,000 years, for all I care, in the cosmic sense that's little more than 30,000, really--you can fine tune it to your liking. The point is the same regardless of how you feel about the numbers I provided.
So I have. Fermi was a smart guy.
I've yet to hear anything really compelling in opposition to his paradox.
If life in the rest of the galaxy does not follow the basic "rule of survival" that it expands its numbers to fill its container and then spills over, then it is likely so different from us that we would not be able to distinguish it as alive.
All of the life on Earth, for all of its wide diversity, follows this rule.
While it's possible of course, and it's a delightful philosophical quandary, it's largely irrelevant. If it does not seem alive to us and we can never communicate with it or even interact with it, isn't that the same as being completely alone? It's equally daunting as a prospect, at the very least.
What's more likely is that we are in partial agreement. It is amazing that we've gotten this far, and so it is almost a folly to expect that any other life would reach sentience.
That's what I was saying before--if there were intelligent life, it would have found us by now.
This is to respond to the other two responses to my comment, as well.
I didn't say that FTL travel will be possible. If it turns out that it is, I would guess something closer to 10,000 years, perhaps less.
I said "leapfrogging" across the galaxy for a reason. Think of it as distributed colonization. We'll be crisscrossing the galaxy one star at a time in many different places at once. And with each new planet colonized you open not one but many avenues to continue human distribution.
30,000 years is a VERY long time. The whole of recorded human history spans about 1/6th of that, and much of that history has occured within the last 300th of it.
There's a bit more to it than that. While I agree with you that we're still lacking important experimental data (that is, we haven't actually visited anywhere to take a look), we can do some intelligent guesswork.
After all, philosophy has its place too. Without getting our minds around the possiblities, we will have very little success in conducting our search (or even convincing those with resources to finance the searching, though more likely than not, if life is found, it will be an accident during an economic/political endeavor).
If you play it by the numbers, then yes, life should occur frequently. By even the paltry data we've already collected, life should be abundant and soon even reachable.
This has a unintended but frightening implication, however.
Humans have existed as a sapient, technological species for approximately 30000 years (and that's generous, really). That means that in the cosmic equivalent of a the beginnings of a heartbeat, we've gone from caves to extraplanetary exploration, and our technology curve will only accelerate from here on out.
Considering that it took almost no time to get here, it will take even less time to get to point where we would be leapfrogging across the galaxy, colonizing everywhere. Within the next 30,000 years we'll have had more than enough time to have distributed explorers to every inhabitable/explorable planet in the galaxy.
The question, then, is why hasn't anyone found Earth yet, if the probability for life is so high? Either every civilization gets wiped out long before they can begin galactic exploration (without exception--a pretty difficult thing to imagine, unless you're an apocalyptic environmentalist), or, perhaps more frightening in an indirect sense, there simply aren't any other intelligent civilizations in the galaxy.
You'd think that even if ancient astronauts had found Earth, we would have uncovered at least SOME sort of artifact. After all, playing the probabilities, if one civilization found us, it would be overwhelmingly likely that many, many others would be able to, and would. So far we've got nothing.
It's a difficult reality to accept, but it may very well be that we're alone in the galaxy, and perhaps even in the universe.
In part, yes. However, you could substitute the name of any other company for the letters MS and it would be equally true. What makes this different from and better than Passport is that it's a project backed by a consortium of companies rather than the brainchild of a single company.
Companies exist solely to make money. They don't make services to facilitate business for other companies unless they're going to get something out of it in the long run. It's more likely to be a benign service for facilitating commerce in general if it's backed by many companies.
None of them will make money from it directly, though they'll benefit from its simply being. Microsoft doesn't benefit from making business easier for everyone else. Passport has no purpose as a product if MS doesn't directly make cashmoney from it somehow. That is why it's creepy.
It's much better to have the corporate weight distributed. Each one is money hungry, sure, but none of them wants to be culpable for any of the others' malfeasance. They'll police each other on these matters, certainly.
Also, if they want to find out your purchasing habits they already can and do. If you're worried about that but you still want to do business online, you're going to be in for a rude awakening.
Even if this service doesn't provide an ideal situation, an alternative to a proprietary service is always worthwhile. If nothing else, it gives the proprietary services more work to do, which means better products for the consumers.
It's also good to have someone competing with MS Passport for the authentication game, lest we further our nation's decline into corporate plutocracy. The internet is less of a ghetto and more of an integrated part of the actual world we live in--this is no longer a shadow world, but a real extension of our lives wherein our security is just as important as it is anywhere else.
I confess that the PDF itself was a bit cumbersome (i.e., I didn't read all/most of it), but from what I could tell this appears to be a pretty well thought out project. I encourage everyone to support it however possible, as that's the only way projects like this sustain themselves.