Considering that our population keeps expanding, the pressure to find "more space" somewhere is going to be rather pressing in a few hundred years. Either by that point we'll have figured out a better way to get energy from our existing resources, and we'll have energy to burn on space exploration, or we won't have, and space exploration will be a lost cause.
If it's the former, then there is no reason that we wouldn't expand at least to the limits of our solar system (e.g a Dyson Sphere or some similar energy system), or beyond, because once we get to the point where moving to the edge of the solar system is no big deal, then the extra hop to the next system won't seem that bad either.
The problem is, expansion is driven by population pressure. The kind of space travel you're theorizing wouldn't do a damn thing to relieve local population pressure, so it would be more of a sort of species level masturbation, to send out ships to make colonies that are so far away that you'd never be able to engage in any sort of trade or cultural exchange.
Well, it's a population pressure thing. If there is no limit to your expansion, you'll expand to your limit.
Not that I don't think Fermi is full of it. All the "There can be no intelligent life if they haven't already a) been found by us or b) taken over the galaxy, theories are pretty foolish. There could be intelligent life inside 10 light years from us, and we wouldn't know it now; hell, we could be living on a planet seeded with life by an advanced society and we wouldn't know it...Maybe the dinosaurs were killed off by an automated terraformer. =P
Basic probability also suggests that it is extremely unlikely that we are an isolated occurrence...You'd have to buy into Creationism to think that such as we could never have happened anywhere else.
Still doesn't matter, because, after you've checked the ID and verified they are who they say they are, they leave, and then later, someone logs on using the login information you gave to the person who presented their ID.
How do you know it's the same person? There have been more than a few password hacking scams; how do you know that the user today is the same as the user yesterday?
I'm not sure how you can call MySpace and YouTube monopolies...Both companies are leaders in a crowded field, with a very low barrier to entry. MySpace is cool now, but "cool" is ephemeral, and I'll wager that they are as well, to be replaced by the next big thing with the kiddies. YouTube has the potential to survive, but it's so mainstream it leaves plenty of room for niche competitors.
I'm tired of everyone blaming their children's behavior on everyone but themselves. It is not MySpace's job to be your babysitter. It is your job to monitor your child's behavior, and if your child meets a guy online, travels three states away and then gets raped, my question is, "WTF were you doing that whole time?"
So every site, including this one, that posts anything that anyone finds objectionable, or that some (bad) parent blames for their child's misbehavior or misadventure should be held legally accountable? Nice way of passing off all your responsibility on to a third party. I'm wondering where you draw the line...If a guy chats up your daughter in the mall, should mall security have the authority to shoot on site, or would you just shock her with a nice taser jolt from the electric chastity belt you're making her wear?
And, even better, you want the government to have the authority to do witch hunts through ISP subscriber lists trying to find illegal material, and you don't see anything at all wrong with that? Very nice.
There are certainly a lot of privacy advocates here, and I'm generally considered a bit fringe because I don't believe in a right to privacy anywhere outside of your personal property/personal space.By comparison, you're not even on the same planet with the rest of us. Take your distopian nanny state and go move to china or n. korea if you don't like it here.
I think most people here rightly believe that the best way to deal with your children is not to go all "big brother" on them, and install monitoring software and cameras, but instead to take the time to foster the sort of relationship with your child that makes those measures unnecessary.
That being said, I don't know of anyone here who disputes that parents have the right to do those things should they choose to do so.
And the internet is held to a vastly different standard of proof from a physical building...In the case of a physical building you can quite easily require identification from every person before they gain entrance. On the internet, there is no way to make sure that the information which you collected accurately represents the person who is using your service. No way. To hold MySpace accountable for user created content when they have no possible way of accurately identifying their userbase is absurd.
To hold them accountable would literally kill the internet in this country, because every site could be held liable for every post, and, even more frightening, all real world actions that occur because of that post.
So headline should have been, "Cancer cured for 10th time this decade...In mice."
This is cool and all, and very interesting, but I've seen a lot of cool and interesting stuff that works great in mice that's fallen flat in human testing. Maybe this will be the one that finally does it.
I would consider myself a scientist, because I am interested in and conversant with science and the scientific method...In my case mainly physics, with a solid grounding in inorganic chemistry and biology.
I am not, however, a researcher specializing in one aspect of scientific inquiry.
It's becoming an important distinction these days because so many "scientists" who are no better qualified than I am, are none-the-less using their status as "scientist" to question the results put out by scientists with in-depth knowledge backed by significant practical experience in the study of their specialty (e.g. a researcher).
I guess what he's saying is that he has better uses for the money...Or maybe that the aerodynamic styling of the PS3 would make it excellent for a white water canoe.
That will never work. Understanding natural language is hugely difficult for people, and mind-bogglingly difficult for computers. You have to account for the fact that meaning is contextual, meaning is not fixed, and that people make mistakes in their use of language.
There is a whole branch of philosophy dedicated to theory of language, and I'd recommend books, but they're by and large so hopelessly abstruse that it would be little more than intellectual hazing if you don't already have pretty solid knowledge of the subject.
Look at computer translation software...Even special purpose driven, it produces extremely clunky translations.
What we really need is not a search engine that can figure out what we want, but instead a search engine that returns extremely accurate results for what we tell it we want. That puts the linguistic burden on us, and we're much better equipped to handle it.
I'm right there with you...I don't care if WP screws itself. I think the vast majority of its users just like having a quick, accurate, reference, and I think the prima donna's who cling to the idea of their own wondefulness are in for a rude awakening when someone else does it better, and for profit at the same time.
The money issue is very real, however, and regardless of the feelings of the volunteers, it will have to be addressed.
Wikipedia is in a really good position right now because of it's massive pile of content and it's early lead...However, as it stands there is a lot of room for a source to move in that is more authoritative, and if WP doesn't move to improve their article accuracy, someone else is going to jump in and take that niche for themselves.
Re:Ethics Rules and Devil's Advocate
on
SCO Vs. Groklaw
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Not where they're likely to get caught...This guy would be a lawyer at the top of his field, taking a very stupid risk with the rest of his career. Working for IBM, he'd have to be at least slightly conversant in tech law.
I just don't see it. If they wanted to do this, they could easily feed the information to someone else, and then they wouldn't even have to do the work themselves.
I'm not trying to play to smart people, I'm trying to play to stupid people. Working out a clever plan for them would be a waste of time, and they probably wouldn't get it. I'm half convinced most of 'em hate the theory of global warming simply because they're afraid that someone's gonna shut down nascar.
I still think he's an idiot, but I reference him as kind of a conservative bellwether: "Even this moron who is as conservative as they come thinks that this crap is happening! You should too!"
Come right down to it, the anti-science conservatives are really just a big personality cult, so pointing out that their little cult is coming into line with everyone else ought to help out a little bit.
Crichton has made his living writing books about science going too far, whether it's dinosaurs or robots, or nanotech, or time fricking travel. Every book has the same theme of rogue science, and you quote him basically saying the same thing, and I'm supposed to think that this guy is in any way science friendly? Jesus, he's like the modern day reincarnation of Mary Shelly.
You can always pick out the whackjob conservatives because, to them, Al Gore invented Global Warming. You can just feel the "I hate Al Gore" vibe.
But that's just a bit dated now. W talked about Global Climate change in his State of the Union. More than a hundred countries world wide have acknowledged that there is something to the issue, and thousands of scientists have piled up mountains of data supporting the hypothesis that the climate is changing, and it is widely accepted that human activity has something to do with it.
So grow a brain. This is science, not politics, and just because your "team" doesn't believe in science doesn't mean it ain't true.
The thing is, he didn't have a counter argument, he didn't have any new research, he didn't have any explanations. All he did was go through some existing data, pull out anomolies, and highball predictions, and say, "See, this is all crap." He even made some pretty amatureish errors, like pointing out a few places on the globe where temperatures have been trending down, and calling that a counter argument! "Global Warming" is a popular name for this sort of climate change, but I don't think you'll find many scientists who would say that all temperatures are going up all the time, only that the global average is trending up.
I'm not wedded to global warming...It's like "Dark Matter"...I don't think they're right, but I think they're on to something, and I definitely think it merits more study. And I think Crichton, who may know something about medicine, but is hardly a climate specialist, and who produced a work that I found to be pretty substandard in support of what was clearly a personal bias based on nothing, intentionally skewed his fact reporting to make the data support his pet theory.
Heinlein and Card attacked politics and ethics, which is perfectly within their see as writers.
Crichton attacked science for political reasons. Politics and Science are not the same thing, and I pretty much find it unacceptable for anyone to attack science, not because they have some concrete reason to believe that a mistake is being made, but simply because they don't care for the truth.
Because the government here in the states has proven again and again that if you want funding to study global warming or evolution all you've got to do is step up with your hand out and they'll give you all the money you'll ever need.
Crichton cherry picked the research for his little global warming stance, intentionally skewing wherever possible. That's pretty much the opposite of "thoughtful research".
It's pretty much obvious to the whole world that things are getting warmer, and the vast majority of scientists from around the world are of the opinion that the change is related to human behavior. Even if you think they're wrong, you have got to take into account the fact that it's you against the whole fricking world, and while the world has been wrong before, that's the exception, not the rule.
What do Crichton's past biased comments on global warming have to do with the fact that he's now opining about something else? He shot his credibility, and now he's taking a stance on an important issue which will now suffer for his participation.
I love how people like to talk about controversial, yet widely accepted scientific truths as "religions". See, when a scientist who has tons of documentation and has spent his whole life working on the case that people are causing climate change gets pissed off because a fiction writer "disproves" it all, putting the smack down on years of attempts to educate the public about the danger, it's because it's a "religion", not because someone is just shoveling a load of inaccurate crap.
On the other hand, when an actual religion gets slapped down for trying to get a load of inaccurate crap taught in schools, it's because science is "biased" and "unfair".
Nothing like having someone who is proven to have no intellectual credibility take up a position that you agree with. This is an unfortunate one as well, because it directly affects drug and biotech firms, and they are all serious patent offenders with deep pockets. They'll tear him apart as a proven intellectual pimp, and it'll hurt the whole damn issue.
Crichton's popularity or lack thereof has more to do with the abysmal crap he's been writing than with his ridiculous stance on global warming...Did you read Prey? What a crapfest. The evil nanotech clouds are defeated by spraying them with a mysterious gunk infection that had somehow infiltrated into the cleanrooms where they were manufactured, but which, magically, didn't effect them when they're out roaming around in the fricking world.
If god himself passed down this information on gleaming tablets 20 miles on a side, the RIAA and the MPAA wouldn't believe it for a second. Likewise the reverse; downloaders don't believe that piracy hurts legitimate artists, and they won't no matter what the evidence says.
Frankly, it's obviously somewhere in the middle. I doubt that p2p does much damage to music sales, but it has to have SOME impact...I mean, when I get some stupid pop song stuck in my head and I download it instead of buying it, that's a few bucks that won't go to the damn RIAA, and I have enough disposable cash that I might have bought it, if I had no other option.
On the flip side, I tend to download songs off CDs I already own, so I don't have to get out the sharpie to scribble over the stupid data track, so I can rip it. That's the definition of a no damage situation.
Neither side is ever going to compromise on this; the **AA's are as convinced we're screwing them as we are that they're screwing us. Eventually they'll just wither away and die due to changing distribution models, and that will be the end of that.
Slashdot Mirror
Colonization != Conquest
Considering that our population keeps expanding, the pressure to find "more space" somewhere is going to be rather pressing in a few hundred years. Either by that point we'll have figured out a better way to get energy from our existing resources, and we'll have energy to burn on space exploration, or we won't have, and space exploration will be a lost cause.
If it's the former, then there is no reason that we wouldn't expand at least to the limits of our solar system (e.g a Dyson Sphere or some similar energy system), or beyond, because once we get to the point where moving to the edge of the solar system is no big deal, then the extra hop to the next system won't seem that bad either.
The problem is, expansion is driven by population pressure. The kind of space travel you're theorizing wouldn't do a damn thing to relieve local population pressure, so it would be more of a sort of species level masturbation, to send out ships to make colonies that are so far away that you'd never be able to engage in any sort of trade or cultural exchange.
Well, it's a population pressure thing. If there is no limit to your expansion, you'll expand to your limit.
Not that I don't think Fermi is full of it. All the "There can be no intelligent life if they haven't already a) been found by us or b) taken over the galaxy, theories are pretty foolish. There could be intelligent life inside 10 light years from us, and we wouldn't know it now; hell, we could be living on a planet seeded with life by an advanced society and we wouldn't know it...Maybe the dinosaurs were killed off by an automated terraformer. =P
Basic probability also suggests that it is extremely unlikely that we are an isolated occurrence...You'd have to buy into Creationism to think that such as we could never have happened anywhere else.
Still doesn't matter, because, after you've checked the ID and verified they are who they say they are, they leave, and then later, someone logs on using the login information you gave to the person who presented their ID.
How do you know it's the same person? There have been more than a few password hacking scams; how do you know that the user today is the same as the user yesterday?
I'm not sure how you can call MySpace and YouTube monopolies...Both companies are leaders in a crowded field, with a very low barrier to entry. MySpace is cool now, but "cool" is ephemeral, and I'll wager that they are as well, to be replaced by the next big thing with the kiddies. YouTube has the potential to survive, but it's so mainstream it leaves plenty of room for niche competitors.
I'm tired of everyone blaming their children's behavior on everyone but themselves. It is not MySpace's job to be your babysitter. It is your job to monitor your child's behavior, and if your child meets a guy online, travels three states away and then gets raped, my question is, "WTF were you doing that whole time?"
So every site, including this one, that posts anything that anyone finds objectionable, or that some (bad) parent blames for their child's misbehavior or misadventure should be held legally accountable? Nice way of passing off all your responsibility on to a third party. I'm wondering where you draw the line...If a guy chats up your daughter in the mall, should mall security have the authority to shoot on site, or would you just shock her with a nice taser jolt from the electric chastity belt you're making her wear?
And, even better, you want the government to have the authority to do witch hunts through ISP subscriber lists trying to find illegal material, and you don't see anything at all wrong with that? Very nice.
There are certainly a lot of privacy advocates here, and I'm generally considered a bit fringe because I don't believe in a right to privacy anywhere outside of your personal property/personal space.By comparison, you're not even on the same planet with the rest of us. Take your distopian nanny state and go move to china or n. korea if you don't like it here.
I think most people here rightly believe that the best way to deal with your children is not to go all "big brother" on them, and install monitoring software and cameras, but instead to take the time to foster the sort of relationship with your child that makes those measures unnecessary.
That being said, I don't know of anyone here who disputes that parents have the right to do those things should they choose to do so.
And the internet is held to a vastly different standard of proof from a physical building...In the case of a physical building you can quite easily require identification from every person before they gain entrance. On the internet, there is no way to make sure that the information which you collected accurately represents the person who is using your service. No way. To hold MySpace accountable for user created content when they have no possible way of accurately identifying their userbase is absurd.
To hold them accountable would literally kill the internet in this country, because every site could be held liable for every post, and, even more frightening, all real world actions that occur because of that post.
Excellent ruling.
So headline should have been, "Cancer cured for 10th time this decade...In mice."
This is cool and all, and very interesting, but I've seen a lot of cool and interesting stuff that works great in mice that's fallen flat in human testing. Maybe this will be the one that finally does it.
I would consider myself a scientist, because I am interested in and conversant with science and the scientific method...In my case mainly physics, with a solid grounding in inorganic chemistry and biology.
I am not, however, a researcher specializing in one aspect of scientific inquiry.
It's becoming an important distinction these days because so many "scientists" who are no better qualified than I am, are none-the-less using their status as "scientist" to question the results put out by scientists with in-depth knowledge backed by significant practical experience in the study of their specialty (e.g. a researcher).
If only you could get A on LA with V...The OSS version would be LAVM(ono).
Bah, it's no use...This system is already doomed like Postgres because it has no cool acronym.
I guess what he's saying is that he has better uses for the money...Or maybe that the aerodynamic styling of the PS3 would make it excellent for a white water canoe.
Gotta be one or the other...
That will never work. Understanding natural language is hugely difficult for people, and mind-bogglingly difficult for computers. You have to account for the fact that meaning is contextual, meaning is not fixed, and that people make mistakes in their use of language.
There is a whole branch of philosophy dedicated to theory of language, and I'd recommend books, but they're by and large so hopelessly abstruse that it would be little more than intellectual hazing if you don't already have pretty solid knowledge of the subject.
Look at computer translation software...Even special purpose driven, it produces extremely clunky translations.
What we really need is not a search engine that can figure out what we want, but instead a search engine that returns extremely accurate results for what we tell it we want. That puts the linguistic burden on us, and we're much better equipped to handle it.
I'm right there with you...I don't care if WP screws itself. I think the vast majority of its users just like having a quick, accurate, reference, and I think the prima donna's who cling to the idea of their own wondefulness are in for a rude awakening when someone else does it better, and for profit at the same time.
The money issue is very real, however, and regardless of the feelings of the volunteers, it will have to be addressed.
Wikipedia is in a really good position right now because of it's massive pile of content and it's early lead...However, as it stands there is a lot of room for a source to move in that is more authoritative, and if WP doesn't move to improve their article accuracy, someone else is going to jump in and take that niche for themselves.
Not where they're likely to get caught...This guy would be a lawyer at the top of his field, taking a very stupid risk with the rest of his career. Working for IBM, he'd have to be at least slightly conversant in tech law.
I just don't see it. If they wanted to do this, they could easily feed the information to someone else, and then they wouldn't even have to do the work themselves.
I'm not trying to play to smart people, I'm trying to play to stupid people. Working out a clever plan for them would be a waste of time, and they probably wouldn't get it. I'm half convinced most of 'em hate the theory of global warming simply because they're afraid that someone's gonna shut down nascar.
I still think he's an idiot, but I reference him as kind of a conservative bellwether: "Even this moron who is as conservative as they come thinks that this crap is happening! You should too!"
Come right down to it, the anti-science conservatives are really just a big personality cult, so pointing out that their little cult is coming into line with everyone else ought to help out a little bit.
Crichton has made his living writing books about science going too far, whether it's dinosaurs or robots, or nanotech, or time fricking travel. Every book has the same theme of rogue science, and you quote him basically saying the same thing, and I'm supposed to think that this guy is in any way science friendly? Jesus, he's like the modern day reincarnation of Mary Shelly.
Did Al Gore write Prey? I had no idea!
You can always pick out the whackjob conservatives because, to them, Al Gore invented Global Warming. You can just feel the "I hate Al Gore" vibe.
But that's just a bit dated now. W talked about Global Climate change in his State of the Union. More than a hundred countries world wide have acknowledged that there is something to the issue, and thousands of scientists have piled up mountains of data supporting the hypothesis that the climate is changing, and it is widely accepted that human activity has something to do with it.
So grow a brain. This is science, not politics, and just because your "team" doesn't believe in science doesn't mean it ain't true.
The thing is, he didn't have a counter argument, he didn't have any new research, he didn't have any explanations. All he did was go through some existing data, pull out anomolies, and highball predictions, and say, "See, this is all crap." He even made some pretty amatureish errors, like pointing out a few places on the globe where temperatures have been trending down, and calling that a counter argument! "Global Warming" is a popular name for this sort of climate change, but I don't think you'll find many scientists who would say that all temperatures are going up all the time, only that the global average is trending up.
I'm not wedded to global warming...It's like "Dark Matter"...I don't think they're right, but I think they're on to something, and I definitely think it merits more study. And I think Crichton, who may know something about medicine, but is hardly a climate specialist, and who produced a work that I found to be pretty substandard in support of what was clearly a personal bias based on nothing, intentionally skewed his fact reporting to make the data support his pet theory.
Heinlein and Card attacked politics and ethics, which is perfectly within their see as writers.
Crichton attacked science for political reasons. Politics and Science are not the same thing, and I pretty much find it unacceptable for anyone to attack science, not because they have some concrete reason to believe that a mistake is being made, but simply because they don't care for the truth.
Because the government here in the states has proven again and again that if you want funding to study global warming or evolution all you've got to do is step up with your hand out and they'll give you all the money you'll ever need.
Crichton cherry picked the research for his little global warming stance, intentionally skewing wherever possible. That's pretty much the opposite of "thoughtful research".
It's pretty much obvious to the whole world that things are getting warmer, and the vast majority of scientists from around the world are of the opinion that the change is related to human behavior. Even if you think they're wrong, you have got to take into account the fact that it's you against the whole fricking world, and while the world has been wrong before, that's the exception, not the rule.
What do Crichton's past biased comments on global warming have to do with the fact that he's now opining about something else? He shot his credibility, and now he's taking a stance on an important issue which will now suffer for his participation.
I love how people like to talk about controversial, yet widely accepted scientific truths as "religions". See, when a scientist who has tons of documentation and has spent his whole life working on the case that people are causing climate change gets pissed off because a fiction writer "disproves" it all, putting the smack down on years of attempts to educate the public about the danger, it's because it's a "religion", not because someone is just shoveling a load of inaccurate crap.
On the other hand, when an actual religion gets slapped down for trying to get a load of inaccurate crap taught in schools, it's because science is "biased" and "unfair".
Nothing like having someone who is proven to have no intellectual credibility take up a position that you agree with. This is an unfortunate one as well, because it directly affects drug and biotech firms, and they are all serious patent offenders with deep pockets. They'll tear him apart as a proven intellectual pimp, and it'll hurt the whole damn issue.
Crichton's popularity or lack thereof has more to do with the abysmal crap he's been writing than with his ridiculous stance on global warming...Did you read Prey? What a crapfest. The evil nanotech clouds are defeated by spraying them with a mysterious gunk infection that had somehow infiltrated into the cleanrooms where they were manufactured, but which, magically, didn't effect them when they're out roaming around in the fricking world.
He was great once, but it's been a long time.
If you read down, I admit that yea, I might buy it. Might not, but I tend to impulse buy music, and have some really embarrassing stuff on CD.
If god himself passed down this information on gleaming tablets 20 miles on a side, the RIAA and the MPAA wouldn't believe it for a second. Likewise the reverse; downloaders don't believe that piracy hurts legitimate artists, and they won't no matter what the evidence says.
Frankly, it's obviously somewhere in the middle. I doubt that p2p does much damage to music sales, but it has to have SOME impact...I mean, when I get some stupid pop song stuck in my head and I download it instead of buying it, that's a few bucks that won't go to the damn RIAA, and I have enough disposable cash that I might have bought it, if I had no other option.
On the flip side, I tend to download songs off CDs I already own, so I don't have to get out the sharpie to scribble over the stupid data track, so I can rip it. That's the definition of a no damage situation.
Neither side is ever going to compromise on this; the **AA's are as convinced we're screwing them as we are that they're screwing us. Eventually they'll just wither away and die due to changing distribution models, and that will be the end of that.