Gates could easily afford to build his own spacecraft and his own space station but instead he's going to use some cheap Russian company to make the trip. That's certainly not what I'd do if I had the money.
> Because we know it exists in at least one location
Which tells us nothing except that it is possible for life to exist. The fact that life exists here tells us absolutely nothing about the likelihood of life arising apart from its being greater than zero because for obvious reasons we are sampling from a biased distribution, being alive ourselves.:-)
> Do you have any idea how many billions of stars are in our galaxy, and how many billions of galaxies are in the observable universe?
As it happens, yes. But I also know that combinatorial explosions can generate numbers vastly larger than the number of things in the physical universe and the number of ways of arranging matter is described by a combinatorial explosion. Who knows how many of those combinations involve life, but it has the potential to be incredibly small. Small in a way that the size of the universe doesn't touch in bigness.
> If you are saying, "no one knows for sure. Don't say you're sure the chances are good if you can't prove they are," then that is certainly valid.
> The root cause of this is that the Apple iTunes store sells only standard definition video
I don't remember seeing the picture broken up into big compression blocks when I watched TV in standard def. I don't remember seeing boiling bands of color across features that should be uniformly colored when watching standard def. I don't remember the color space being so badly off with standard def that the visual effects of Battlestar Galactica suddenly started looking like cardboard cutouts stuck on my TV. iTunes video quality watched on a full size TV (SD or HD) is utter crap, worse than VHS.
I can't believe I just said that - I'm a self-confessed Apple fanboy. But this is one area where they need to fix what they are doing.
> Chances are very good that other life of some sort exists.
On what basis are you saying this? It doesn't simply follow from the universe being big if the chances of life appearing at any given location is small enough. How do you know that this isn't the case?
Right. But (1) these lists give a convenient excuse to spread articles over multiple pages so as to present more advertising and (2) these lists are easy to compile and simply aren't worthy of any half decent journalist. Just like TV, it's easy to find yourself in a situation where the program being shown is crap, and you have something much more interesting to do, but at each moment in time you think "there's no loss in watching just for a few seconds more". If someone actually pointed out to you it was crap you'd snap out of it and realise "what am I watching this drivel for?" and go and do that something interesting. I'm just trying to be that person.
This story is simply a scam to get you to read 5 or 6 pages of advertising. It's even scammier because it has the ulterior motive of trying to get you to switch off your adblockers. Again...there are millions of geeks out there doing interesting stuff, how come the/. editors considered this story to be more interesting?
I regularly observe sunspots. I've hardly seen a sunspot for months. We're actually at solar minimum right now. Of course tha article is about a long term average, but the timing of the article is a bit peculiar!
The article says:
> Over the past 20 years, however, the number of sunspots has remained roughly constant
This is a weird statement. In last 20 years we've had two solar cycles and the number of sunspots has varied dramatically over the period as it usually does. You could interpret this statement as saying that relative to the cyclic average the number has remained constant - but that's certainly not how it reads, and 20 years is a bit of a short time over which to make such a judgement.
Why would a studio exec buy a Porsche? Porsche's are what software developers buy when they come into a bit of money. Studio execs earn more than just a bit of money.
> Oh, and stop using betamax as a comparison point.
Hear, hear! I know they say "Those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it" but I've always thought that those who know their history are doomed to always see similar events in terms of each other and conclude that whatever happened in one is likely to happen in the other. History is way more complicated than that.
Given that all inertial frames are equally good, why not just pick the one that's popular with readers of the article? Seems fair to me, after all you need some coordinate system if you're going to communicate physics. In fact, I'm a bit confused by what you mean by "the one that actually makes a tiny bit of sense". The only one I can think of is an inertial frame of the supernova itself. In that frame, here and now is also tens of millions of years later than when the supernova happened. But maybe you have another one in mind.
> Why do you think it is proper to judge a foreign country in terms of our history?
Because that's the nature of making a judgement. If my neighbour thinks it's fine to have sex with children and I don't I'll judge them by my standards. You don't give up making ethical judgements about someone simply because they have different standards. Similarly it seems entirely reasonable to me for people of one culture to critique the ethics of another. And it seems entirely reasonable for people of a culture to use convenient landmarks in their own history to express those critiques.
This isn't simply an article about Second Life, it's an article about the semantics of the words 'money' and 'gamble' that may have consequences for us all in the near future, regardless of the merits of the game itself.
The entire reason is because they are human; there is no other reason.
Damn! I think I chose the wrong person to try to pick a fight with. You see, I mostly agree with you.
So I'll just amplify on what you say instead. It seems a little implausible to me that humans accorded rights simply because they are human. Giving humans rights is considered a big deal. One of the biggest deals that there is given the wars that have been fought over it. So it's highly unlikely that all discussion simply stops at "because they are human.".
The word 'reason' is somewhat overworked. Some truths are considered truths because they follow within some system of deduction. Eg. all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal. But some truths we accept for reasons that go outside the system. For example it's convenient to say "people with red hair have rights" for the simple reason that if you deny it you'll have a riot on your hands. There is no fact of the matter. You can't bring to bear high tech equipment to analyse redheads closely and see if they have rights. You give them rights not because the proposition "redheads have rights" follows by some kind of deduction, but because of physical consequences outside of your deduction system. Accepting that, I have no difficulty understanding your "because they are human". We can accept this simply vecause if we deny rights to chimps, they won't riot. On the other hand, if one day there are enough humans who like chimps, we will have to also say "because they are chimps", or we'll have humans rioting on their behalf.
> I have a hard time believing that chimps would be granted any rights in today's society, especially considering that roughly half of the population argues in favor of a woman's "right" to have her unborn child killed.
I'd put a lot of money on there being a high correlation between people who are pro-choice and people who'd like to see chimps granted rights. I'd put a small amount of money on you knowing this before you started to write your post and that in fact you're being disingenuous.
> Read my reply above, I said this in a jokey way!
What? We should trawl our way back up to another post of yours where you explain that some post that you wrote earlier that looked like some kind of lame comment was actually written in a jocular style that was too subtle for us to notice on first reading. Wow! I don't think I can get to the 'back' button fast enough.
> what I mean is that, as a class, a species must have the capability
What you've done is make whether or not someone has rights depend on the properties of a class. So, for example, little Jimmy, who's severely mentally handicapped, has rights because Joe and Fred down the road are able to recognize rights. Maybe we should apply this principle in other domains too. For example various racial and religious minorities are disproportionately represented in prisons. Maybe other members of these groups outside of prison should also be punished too, after all they are members of the same class. I'm accusing you of a kind of philosophical laziness. You find it too hard to determine why mentally handicapped people should be accorded rights, but chimps shouldn't be, so you've taken the easy option of just saying "such and such is a member of this class". Thankfully our society doesn't work like that and members of minority groups still have the right to a trial to determine the validity of their individual case even if members of their class are well represented in prison already.
Slashdot Mirror
...wouldn't have to strap myself to a pipe with a wire whenever I decided to work with CMOS components. Sounds pretty useful.
Ebay is your friend.
Oh man. You have a lot to learn about buying gifts for women.
Gates could easily afford to build his own spacecraft and his own space station but instead he's going to use some cheap Russian company to make the trip. That's certainly not what I'd do if I had the money.
Ah yes...the infallible Bush gut instinct at work again.
Which tells us nothing except that it is possible for life to exist. The fact that life exists here tells us absolutely nothing about the likelihood of life arising apart from its being greater than zero because for obvious reasons we are sampling from a biased distribution, being alive ourselves. :-)
> Do you have any idea how many billions of stars are in our galaxy, and how many billions of galaxies are in the observable universe?
As it happens, yes. But I also know that combinatorial explosions can generate numbers vastly larger than the number of things in the physical universe and the number of ways of arranging matter is described by a combinatorial explosion. Who knows how many of those combinations involve life, but it has the potential to be incredibly small. Small in a way that the size of the universe doesn't touch in bigness.
> If you are saying, "no one knows for sure. Don't say you're sure the chances are good if you can't prove they are," then that is certainly valid.
Looks like we're actually in total agreement.
I don't remember seeing the picture broken up into big compression blocks when I watched TV in standard def. I don't remember seeing boiling bands of color across features that should be uniformly colored when watching standard def. I don't remember the color space being so badly off with standard def that the visual effects of Battlestar Galactica suddenly started looking like cardboard cutouts stuck on my TV. iTunes video quality watched on a full size TV (SD or HD) is utter crap, worse than VHS.
I can't believe I just said that - I'm a self-confessed Apple fanboy. But this is one area where they need to fix what they are doing.
On what basis are you saying this? It doesn't simply follow from the universe being big if the chances of life appearing at any given location is small enough. How do you know that this isn't the case?
Right. But (1) these lists give a convenient excuse to spread articles over multiple pages so as to present more advertising and (2) these lists are easy to compile and simply aren't worthy of any half decent journalist. Just like TV, it's easy to find yourself in a situation where the program being shown is crap, and you have something much more interesting to do, but at each moment in time you think "there's no loss in watching just for a few seconds more". If someone actually pointed out to you it was crap you'd snap out of it and realise "what am I watching this drivel for?" and go and do that something interesting. I'm just trying to be that person.
This story is simply a scam to get you to read 5 or 6 pages of advertising. It's even scammier because it has the ulterior motive of trying to get you to switch off your adblockers. Again...there are millions of geeks out there doing interesting stuff, how come the /. editors considered this story to be more interesting?
The article says:
> Over the past 20 years, however, the number of sunspots has remained roughly constant
This is a weird statement. In last 20 years we've had two solar cycles and the number of sunspots has varied dramatically over the period as it usually does. You could interpret this statement as saying that relative to the cyclic average the number has remained constant - but that's certainly not how it reads, and 20 years is a bit of a short time over which to make such a judgement.
Neat! Where do I sign up for Bad Math 101?
Why would a studio exec buy a Porsche? Porsche's are what software developers buy when they come into a bit of money. Studio execs earn more than just a bit of money.
People who do care about the quality of the sound and image. That was easy. Next question please.
Mmmm...I'm guessing you never went to school so you don't know how it works.
Hear, hear! I know they say "Those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it" but I've always thought that those who know their history are doomed to always see similar events in terms of each other and conclude that whatever happened in one is likely to happen in the other. History is way more complicated than that.
Given that all inertial frames are equally good, why not just pick the one that's popular with readers of the article? Seems fair to me, after all you need some coordinate system if you're going to communicate physics. In fact, I'm a bit confused by what you mean by "the one that actually makes a tiny bit of sense". The only one I can think of is an inertial frame of the supernova itself. In that frame, here and now is also tens of millions of years later than when the supernova happened. But maybe you have another one in mind.
Because that's the nature of making a judgement. If my neighbour thinks it's fine to have sex with children and I don't I'll judge them by my standards. You don't give up making ethical judgements about someone simply because they have different standards. Similarly it seems entirely reasonable to me for people of one culture to critique the ethics of another. And it seems entirely reasonable for people of a culture to use convenient landmarks in their own history to express those critiques.
This isn't simply an article about Second Life, it's an article about the semantics of the words 'money' and 'gamble' that may have consequences for us all in the near future, regardless of the merits of the game itself.
So I'll just amplify on what you say instead. It seems a little implausible to me that humans accorded rights simply because they are human. Giving humans rights is considered a big deal. One of the biggest deals that there is given the wars that have been fought over it. So it's highly unlikely that all discussion simply stops at "because they are human.".
The word 'reason' is somewhat overworked. Some truths are considered truths because they follow within some system of deduction. Eg. all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal. But some truths we accept for reasons that go outside the system. For example it's convenient to say "people with red hair have rights" for the simple reason that if you deny it you'll have a riot on your hands. There is no fact of the matter. You can't bring to bear high tech equipment to analyse redheads closely and see if they have rights. You give them rights not because the proposition "redheads have rights" follows by some kind of deduction, but because of physical consequences outside of your deduction system. Accepting that, I have no difficulty understanding your "because they are human". We can accept this simply vecause if we deny rights to chimps, they won't riot. On the other hand, if one day there are enough humans who like chimps, we will have to also say "because they are chimps", or we'll have humans rioting on their behalf.
You may joke but some people think that Taking Children Seriously makes sense!
I'd put a lot of money on there being a high correlation between people who are pro-choice and people who'd like to see chimps granted rights. I'd put a small amount of money on you knowing this before you started to write your post and that in fact you're being disingenuous.
What? We should trawl our way back up to another post of yours where you explain that some post that you wrote earlier that looked like some kind of lame comment was actually written in a jocular style that was too subtle for us to notice on first reading. Wow! I don't think I can get to the 'back' button fast enough.
So being able to find files quickly is just a 'perceived need' and nobody actually needs it?
What you've done is make whether or not someone has rights depend on the properties of a class. So, for example, little Jimmy, who's severely mentally handicapped, has rights because Joe and Fred down the road are able to recognize rights. Maybe we should apply this principle in other domains too. For example various racial and religious minorities are disproportionately represented in prisons. Maybe other members of these groups outside of prison should also be punished too, after all they are members of the same class. I'm accusing you of a kind of philosophical laziness. You find it too hard to determine why mentally handicapped people should be accorded rights, but chimps shouldn't be, so you've taken the easy option of just saying "such and such is a member of this class". Thankfully our society doesn't work like that and members of minority groups still have the right to a trial to determine the validity of their individual case even if members of their class are well represented in prison already.