> 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.
I agree. The otherwise terrific mind of Fermi assumes the other civilizations find us interesting and or worthy of contact. What if we're like "just another anthill"? A couple aliens might be stealthily studying us for their homework: "Carbon based forms ruled by "homo", self appointed "sapiens sapiens": stupid, dangerously linked to remains of animal istincts, on the verge of extinction. Do not approach." - end of story.
Being 25 km from the old iron curtain, I know people who where involved in "stay behind" operations and they do not hide it. So my opinion is that most "stay behind" operatives were not involved in false flag operations, but merely preparing resistance to a soviet attack. False flags operations carried on by gladio smeared their reputation. It's interesting to notice that post '89 red brigades have a good presence in the north east of Italy, so one thinking gladio operatives getting "unemployed" because of the end of the cold war have been infiltrating red brigades has another coincidence to work on.
BTW I also think a soviet attack would have been replied to with tactical nukes.
If terrorists justify everything, terrorists are an irresistible weapon for a dishonest government.
In Italy the communist BR have appeared in two occasions lately. Some years ago they killed two people, D'Antona and Biagi, the second one was working on a law on new type of flexible work contracts. Result, the Biagi bill gets passed with nobody daring to make a discussion. Same kind of laws in france wrecked the government caused unrest.
Ten days ago a police operation finds terrorists who were plotting against berlusconi et al. Media start talking about terrorism again and a national demonstration in Vicenza against the planned increase of american military presence in the nearby base, having a sizable percentage of leftists, becomes a terrorist threat.
People who started protesting because their city, Vicenza, is already too crowded first get commies using the occasion to burn flags, then they are looked upon the police as potential terrorists. Checkmate.
Right, so the CIA gave SAM only to good mujaheddins, while osama had links with the bad ones and had nothing to do with CIA. The world is so simple after all, sorry for having muddied it up.
>I'm sorry, Osama worked for the CIA? As we know, Wikipedia contains all knowledge at this point...
I suggest you never assume that, anyway let's do it now: from wikipedia on the SAM stinger
"The CIA helped supply nearly 500 Stingers (some sources claim 1500-2000) to the mujahideen guerrillas fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan during the 1980s, where they have been used quite succesfully. Also, as part of its effort to overthrow Angola's government, the Reagan administration provided Stingers to UNITA anti-communist fighters in the late 1980s. In both cases, efforts to recover missiles after the end of hostilities proved incomplete. There has been speculation that the reason the Stinger has not been used in further attacks is because the batteries that are needed for the launcher to function have expired."
So, he might have not been in the paybook (and that WP is unable to tell) but he and the USA were on the same side, and he became dangerous because the USA exploited faith for geopolitical reasons. So i just can substitute CIA for USA in the original post if you prefer.
I'd rather not start a debate on why communism is evil and corporations and banks having indirectly killed millions in africa are fine, so let's say al qaeda uses a linux infrastructure. Does that mean you would boycott linux for that? Why not boycott oil, arms, the CIA whom osama used to work for?
>Is this not what people on slashdot have been saying for years!?
Personally, I said I won't be buying new music anymore not to support the labels who terrorize us about P2P.
I also should have stated sometimes that I believe the labels fear p2p because it's a channel for promotion they can't control as easily as they do for traditional channels.
For your point to stand, you need radios to play unheard music for the sake of discovery, an artistic stance. That happens more easily with internet radios who can better control their costs. So it is an advantage of radio vs downloading after searching by name, not of radio music vs internet music, IMHO.
And SCO having come out with this suspicion early makes it difficult for them to prove it, IBM would be alert if it were a conspiracy and cover their tracks. So it would have made a huge difference to fly low until having some proof and then come up with the fact. As of now, it's like saying SCO is obviously a puppet of... er, nevermind:)
I see nothing obvious. Saving knowledge is one thing. But saving patents? Patents do not represent knowledge well. Too generic, overlapping, unable to describe the invention in sufficient detail sometimes. Had they saved knowledge, and it would be possible to store industrial secrets too, just crypt it with an algorhithm that requires seriously effort to crack, and update the encryption strength as moore law goes. So for the owner of the industrial secret you have a free backup vault. For humanity, if the secret is worthwhile after doomsday theyll proceed to crack the encryption.
Didn't USA build a doomsday vault for patents? It scares me a lot more than the doomsday vault for seed. Because it means that somebody might actually have a plan to rule the post apocalyptic world, and when that somebody is powerful enough, there's interest for the apocalypse to begin.
People naively assume that since the climate ruins the entire planet, nobody really wants climate changes to happen. This is just a random assumption. A polluted planet means man is not free to breath air, drink water, procreate. And those who have the knowledge to make food water air or babies in that polluted world, rule it.
> Come to think about it, I suppose the fact that our collective genome is stuck on this planet is akin to putting all your eggs in a single fragile basket.
I am cynical but the escape to space seems not really a good idea. If we're not capable of keeping one planet in good health for the climate, the life varieties, and our fellow humans, we don't really deserve to colonize other places.
This is akin to asking what will i do with the money won at a lottery. Because the possibilities of getting out a global climate disaster (and related wars) are comparable.
> If Microsoft never made anything people wanted to buy, well... no one would have bought itYeah... no one ever wanted to buy Windows... (wait a minute...)
Atari made something people wanted to buy, the ST, because it had midi.
Commodore made something people wanted to buy, the VIC20, C64, Amiga, because they had games and wonderful stuff could be done with the hardware.
Microsoft on the other hand had his os chosen by ibm who made stuff people wanted to buy or sales reps were able to sell well. Then ripped off apple with windows and began the dominance into the corporate/SOHO world, because cloned PCs were cheaper than the rest.
The only occasion where people really wanted windows PCs: after commodore went belly up, 3d cards arrived, and new generation games were available for PCs. A mere platform for the hardware makers to try their new wonders. After that Gates simply kept the monopoly with every conceivable mean.
Apple and sony can be blamed for trying to keep the user in pay-me land. But they usually make stuff that works and that people actually want to buy. No comparison IMHO.
Also, if the design is under industrial secret and patented, who can guarantee there aren't backdoors built in? For example it can be rigged on proclaiming you innocent if you concentrate on hitting bill gates with a yellow baton (quite easy a thought to enjoy, for me that is)
So this device exposes the intentions of anybody but the makers of the device, their friends, and the secret service.
The strange kind of agreement between Novell and MS seems to point to a scenario like you describe. That makes Novell either: A company trying to hijack Linux by providing kind of a "safest" distro for enterprises A SCO-like proxy to hurt free software
Better do it quick, as I fear in the next year a similar attempt to transfer DRMed stuff will be met with: "You tried to steal intellectual property. I'm alerting the BSA police of your conduct as instructed by PATRIOT ACT IV. Better hide that illegal linux box polluting the home subnet.":)
Problem is, i didn't really care about microsoft. Bought a bundled office back in 1997, seen the first bomb on my new mac after 5 minutes, uninstalled it, manually removed files that the installer forgot about, started realizing people weren't bashing microsoft for nothing.
Then at work I had to use XP and the hate slowly mounted.
Incorrect. Microsoft came out with XMLHTTP in 1999 with IE5 and Outlook Web Access. Mozilla then copied it in 2002. Granted, it only became widely popular in 2005, but claiming that Microsoft embraced it is ridiculous. They had the first public implementation and everything else was based on that. I was about to reply that it was only a joke. But the gap between 1999 and 2006, which is the year microsoft came up with a framework to harness xmlhttp and other ajax stuff, which was released after open source products, could seriously be interpreted as a renewed interest for an underestimated technology. (well it was not underestimated, before it was copied by mozilla it was simply yet another microsoft-only protocol).
The fact that they kept the stuff in their code base for all the time is irrelevant. Removing bloat is not a priority for people accustomed to offer backwards compatibility by keeping old code instead of coming up with extensible and modular document formats. See the specification for the new office formats.
>...but Melinda Gates was born and raised in Texas.
I was probably joking. Funny, Melinda is a name derived from the greek, the greek root meaning something sweet, used for honey and... apple Melon (greek), malum (latin), mela (italian, we have Melinda brand apples too).
"Forget what their position has done on a business level, how about on a moral level. Perhaps I am just naive."
Kudos for asking the simple yet crucial question. In fact putting the accent on the business level of the decision is more evil than letting China have its way with censorship. That is a kind of propaganda for a money-based [a]moral system. Perhaps I'm just paranoid.
Slashdot Mirror
Make contact
Riding in a spaceship 1984
Picking up a signal
Never heard before
I Wanna be your lover
I Wanna be your lover
I Wanna be your lover
Not just be your friend
> 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.
I agree. The otherwise terrific mind of Fermi assumes the other civilizations find us interesting and or worthy of contact. What if we're like "just another anthill"? A couple aliens might be stealthily studying us for their homework: "Carbon based forms ruled by "homo", self appointed "sapiens sapiens": stupid, dangerously linked to remains of animal istincts, on the verge of extinction. Do not approach." - end of story.
Being 25 km from the old iron curtain, I know people who where involved in "stay behind" operations and they do not hide it. So my opinion is that most "stay behind" operatives were not involved in false flag operations, but merely preparing resistance to a soviet attack. False flags operations carried on by gladio smeared their reputation.
It's interesting to notice that post '89 red brigades have a good presence in the north east of Italy, so one thinking gladio operatives getting "unemployed" because of the end of the cold war have been infiltrating red brigades has another coincidence to work on.
BTW I also think a soviet attack would have been replied to with tactical nukes.
If terrorists justify everything, terrorists are an irresistible weapon for a dishonest government.
In Italy the communist BR have appeared in two occasions lately. Some years ago they killed two people, D'Antona and Biagi, the second one was working on a law on new type of flexible work contracts. Result, the Biagi bill gets passed with nobody daring to make a discussion. Same kind of laws in france wrecked the government caused unrest.
Ten days ago a police operation finds terrorists who were plotting against berlusconi et al. Media start talking about terrorism again and a national demonstration in Vicenza against the planned increase of american military presence in the nearby base, having a sizable percentage of leftists, becomes a terrorist threat.
People who started protesting because their city, Vicenza, is already too crowded first get commies using the occasion to burn flags, then they are looked upon the police as potential terrorists. Checkmate.
Well you can't say it's not suitable for mission critical environments either :P
Right, so the CIA gave SAM only to good mujaheddins, while osama had links with the bad ones and had nothing to do with CIA. The world is so simple after all, sorry for having muddied it up.
>I'm sorry, Osama worked for the CIA? As we know, Wikipedia contains all knowledge at this point...
I suggest you never assume that, anyway let's do it now: from wikipedia on the SAM stinger
"The CIA helped supply nearly 500 Stingers (some sources claim 1500-2000) to the mujahideen guerrillas fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan during the 1980s, where they have been used quite succesfully. Also, as part of its effort to overthrow Angola's government, the Reagan administration provided Stingers to UNITA anti-communist fighters in the late 1980s. In both cases, efforts to recover missiles after the end of hostilities proved incomplete. There has been speculation that the reason the Stinger has not been used in further attacks is because the batteries that are needed for the launcher to function have expired."
So, he might have not been in the paybook (and that WP is unable to tell) but he and the USA were on the same side, and he became dangerous because the USA exploited faith for geopolitical reasons. So i just can substitute CIA for USA in the original post if you prefer.
I'd rather not start a debate on why communism is evil and corporations and banks having indirectly killed millions in africa are fine, so let's say al qaeda uses a linux infrastructure. Does that mean you would boycott linux for that? Why not boycott oil, arms, the CIA whom osama used to work for?
>Is this not what people on slashdot have been saying for years!?
Personally, I said I won't be buying new music anymore not to support the labels who terrorize us about P2P.
I also should have stated sometimes that I believe the labels fear p2p because it's a channel for promotion they can't control as easily as they do for traditional channels.
For your point to stand, you need radios to play unheard music for the sake of discovery, an artistic stance. That happens more easily with internet radios who can better control their costs. So it is an advantage of radio vs downloading after searching by name, not of radio music vs internet music, IMHO.
And SCO having come out with this suspicion early makes it difficult for them to prove it, IBM would be alert if it were a conspiracy and cover their tracks. So it would have made a huge difference to fly low until having some proof and then come up with the fact. As of now, it's like saying SCO is obviously a puppet of... er, nevermind :)
I see nothing obvious. Saving knowledge is one thing. But saving patents? Patents do not represent knowledge well. Too generic, overlapping, unable to describe the invention in sufficient detail sometimes.
Had they saved knowledge, and it would be possible to store industrial secrets too, just crypt it with an algorhithm that requires seriously effort to crack, and update the encryption strength as moore law goes. So for the owner of the industrial secret you have a free backup vault. For humanity, if the secret is worthwhile after doomsday theyll proceed to crack the encryption.
Didn't USA build a doomsday vault for patents? It scares me a lot more than the doomsday vault for seed. Because it means that somebody might actually have a plan to rule the post apocalyptic world, and when that somebody is powerful enough, there's interest for the apocalypse to begin.
People naively assume that since the climate ruins the entire planet, nobody really wants climate changes to happen. This is just a random assumption. A polluted planet means man is not free to breath air, drink water, procreate. And those who have the knowledge to make food water air or babies in that polluted world, rule it.
> Come to think about it, I suppose the fact that our collective genome is stuck on this planet is akin to putting all your eggs in a single fragile basket.
I am cynical but the escape to space seems not really a good idea. If we're not capable of keeping one planet in good health for the climate, the life varieties, and our fellow humans, we don't really deserve to colonize other places.
This is akin to asking what will i do with the money won at a lottery. Because the possibilities of getting out a global climate disaster (and related wars) are comparable.
> If Microsoft never made anything people wanted to buy, well... no one would have bought itYeah... no one ever wanted to buy Windows... (wait a minute...)
Atari made something people wanted to buy, the ST, because it had midi.
Commodore made something people wanted to buy, the VIC20, C64, Amiga, because they had games and wonderful stuff could be done with the hardware.
Microsoft on the other hand had his os chosen by ibm who made stuff people wanted to buy or sales reps were able to sell well. Then ripped off apple with windows and began the dominance into the corporate/SOHO world, because cloned PCs were cheaper than the rest.
The only occasion where people really wanted windows PCs: after commodore went belly up, 3d cards arrived, and new generation games were available for PCs. A mere platform for the hardware makers to try their new wonders.
After that Gates simply kept the monopoly with every conceivable mean.
Apple and sony can be blamed for trying to keep the user in pay-me land. But they usually make stuff that works and that people actually want to buy. No comparison IMHO.
Also, if the design is under industrial secret and patented, who can guarantee there aren't backdoors built in? For example it can be rigged on proclaiming you innocent if you concentrate on hitting bill gates with a yellow baton (quite easy a thought to enjoy, for me that is)
So this device exposes the intentions of anybody but the makers of the device, their friends, and the secret service.
You may stop assuming an OSS point release is like a closed source point release, made to gradually fix the bugs you knew were there since version .0
The strange kind of agreement between Novell and MS seems to point to a scenario like you describe. That makes Novell either:
A company trying to hijack Linux by providing kind of a "safest" distro for enterprises
A SCO-like proxy to hurt free software
Therefore, Novell must end the SCO way.
Better do it quick, as I fear in the next year a similar attempt to transfer DRMed stuff will be met with: :)
"You tried to steal intellectual property. I'm alerting the BSA police of your conduct as instructed by PATRIOT ACT IV. Better hide that illegal linux box polluting the home subnet."
I keep hearing about the partiality of slashdotters, but some moderations i got seem to come up with a different picture.
6 45444/= 17295322/
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=217328&cid=17
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=212480&cid
Problem is, i didn't really care about microsoft. Bought a bundled office back in 1997, seen the first bomb on my new mac after 5 minutes, uninstalled it, manually removed files that the installer forgot about, started realizing people weren't bashing microsoft for nothing.
Then at work I had to use XP and the hate slowly mounted.
The fact that they kept the stuff in their code base for all the time is irrelevant. Removing bloat is not a priority for people accustomed to offer backwards compatibility by keeping old code instead of coming up with extensible and modular document formats. See the specification for the new office formats.
> ...but Melinda Gates was born and raised in Texas.
I was probably joking. Funny, Melinda is a name derived from the greek, the greek root meaning something sweet, used for honey and... apple
Melon (greek), malum (latin), mela (italian, we have Melinda brand apples too).
So, contextualizing the story a little:
Microsoft embraces and extends*.
One day, by mistake, Microsoft creates something new.
Microsoft then proceed to bury the mistake until the folks of Mozilla discover and implement it.
Having become a competing technology Microsoft embraces it and AJAX becomes a success.
* Bill's wife is in fact from soviet russia. She embraces and "extends" him.
"Forget what their position has done on a business level, how about on a moral level. Perhaps I am just naive."
Kudos for asking the simple yet crucial question. In fact putting the accent on the business level of the decision is more evil than letting China have its way with censorship. That is a kind of propaganda for a money-based [a]moral system. Perhaps I'm just paranoid.