I don't think Fermi is talking about mere visits, but colonization. If so, we wouldn't have to worry about them missing us, because if they had come, they would have stayed.
To quote the wikipedia article:
"The second cornerstone of the Fermi paradox is a rejoinder to the argument by scale: given intelligent life's ability to overcome scarcity, and its tendency to colonize new habitats, it seems likely that any advanced civilization would seek out new resources and colonize first their star system, and then surrounding star systems. As there is no evidence on Earth or anywhere else of attempted alien colonization after 13 billion years of the universe's history, either intelligent life is rare or assumptions about the general behavior of intelligent species are flawed."
The problem with our being the first intelligent life in the galaxy is that there are a lot of other areas of science at stake in saying that humanity is in no way special. The scientists, therefore, refuse to admit that we could be the first. We are one of many, and not particularly close to being the first or the last.
I think basic probability actually makes it extremely unlikely that there be any life at all. However, if you take the opposite view, and agree that there is nothing particularly special about humankind, you almost have to take Fermi at face value. What is wrong about saying that, if we are somewhere in the middle of the history of the universe (not special, like for instance, not the first group of intelligent beings because that would be special) then we should be far ahead of some civilizations, and far behind others. The ones that we are far behind will be sufficiently advanced by now that they will either have had to have been wiped out by disaster, or have populated the entire universe.
As to the basic probability argument. HOW does basic probability suggest that it is extremely unlikely that we are an isolated occurrence. What probability are you using? I think you will eventually give the "if a thousand monkeys are typing on a thousand typewriters they will eventually type the works of shakespeare argument" which doesn't hold true under modern probability.
I'm willing to have an honest discussion, this is not meant to flame. Let's talk about the probabilities involved. What basic tenents of probability are you referring to?
I think so. I'm waiting for the better shooter games and such to come out, but its just like any other console, with worse graphics and better controls. Personally I prefer the gameplay in for instance Madden on the Wii to any sports game on any other console. For someone like me, who is not a true gamer, but a recreational time waster, the wii remains really fun.
Yeah, I was recently talking to a professional demographer about something similar to this. To make a long story short I suggested that for the purposes of a study he is doing that he use adopted children who's biological parents had made their information available. He was STRONGLY (to put it mildly) against this. He said that any kind of user choice like that is seen by demographers as very bad and called it "self selecting," I suppose implying that the very fact that some people are opting-in to the demographic that they may share other sorts of non-random traits. I agree that there will probably be a lot of bias in the voting user group. Bias that probably cannot be measured.
I love wikipedia, but it does have one important issue: it is increasingly banned from use in various forms of research, for instance, as a work cited in a research paper for school. Whether that is appropriate or not (I have mixed feelings on the subject myself) has no bearing on the fact that it is happening. Something like this, with accountable "expert" editorial control could prove to be a resource as powerful as wikipedia that also has the added benefit of being recognized by the larger acedemic community.
Again, let me stress this, I'm not saying that the bans on wikipedia articles are right, just that they are happening. The main argument for the bans (whether flawed or not) seems to what is said to be a "lack of editorial control" (again, I'm not arguing this personally) and I think something like this could appease those currently banning wikipedia which is altogether a great resource for research.
I have to respectfully disagree. I also work on OS X every day. Reliability-wise, my OS X machine has crashed one time in 2 years. That cannot be said for ANY of the Windows machines I have used (they seem to do well if they crash 1 time in 1 week). It may be because there are fewer driver conflicts. But I'd rather get my main (crashable) hardware from Apple and not have driver conflicts and let the rest of the devices be USB and/or FireWire since they don't seem to have any problems. I don't think it is merely a slight win by OS X.
Also, my linux box that I'm typing this on hasn't crashed either. It is a PC with the same hardware problems Windows would have-so if the reason Windows is buggy is that it has more hardware to support, shouldn't my linux box be crashing as well?
I'm not a complete fanboy. I think Vista looks pretty neat. I use Linux every day. I hated Mac OS 9 and earlier. Even Jaguar didn't really look good to me, but I have to say I love Tiger, and it's not because I'm only loyal to Apple. It has the right mixture of ease of use, elegance, and power.
One more thing (an anecdote): A guy I met who recently switched from Windows to OS X said to me: "At first I didn't like OS X. Then I stopped trying to think of it as another Windows and I started thinking about where things would be located in the OS if they were put in the *right* place. After that, everything made sense."
I've had to reset my permissions once to fix a slight safari weirdness glitch (don't even remember what it was now). I've been running clean, other than that, since I bought the computer a few years ago. Contrast that with my Windows XP machine which crashed a few times even though I reinstalled the OS a month ago and haven't yet connected it to the internet except to download SP2. Of course, that isn't Vista. It could be way better than XP. I was pretty excited about it, but after the reports about tilt bits and what not, I'm not so sure anymore.
All an all however, the dude who says resetting permissions is a bad thing doesn't know what he is talking about. It takes like 10 seconds, I've had to do it once in 2 years, and it is way better than reformat/reinstall or regedit or the myriad of other ways you have to maintain a windows machine. I would point out that Windows machines need to be defragged to keep running smoothly. What's up with that?
Oh, shoot, I wasted my moderator points. I could have just buried other peoples rants. Darn.
My previous joking aside, that is a good testament to the work being done by the VxWorks and other real-time OS folks-I just figured it was all written in-house, but thinking about it now, as you pointed out, would be next to impossible to fund. It seems that these days most things requiring some sort of OS, from PDAs to Cellphones, to your car's chip, to NASA spacecraft are using off the shelf components. It's just too hard a problem to start from scratch, especially when there are good alternatives out there.
I totally agree. All an OS does is let you set a desktop background, and for the trouble they seem to have, who needs one? I mean, if I could only run firefox, and no OS wouldn't that be better?
From the article: "Will this undercut Apple's iTV?"
It could, but there are rumors floating around that the when the iTV is announced (presumably today, possibly as I type this) a deal with Netflix will also be announced. Then I think the iTV would probably be more compelling.
Also, to those who say "just put a tv tuner card in your PC." That works for us geeks. But my roommate hated having a running PC next to the TV so much we just quit doing it. Normal people don't want a PC sitting in the living room. Both Slingbox and the iTV are much more consumer-friendly in that regard.
Yeah, I forgot to preview first and haven't posted on/. in awhile so I was expecting it (erroneously) to keep my line breaks. I know widgets aren't copied completely from Apple, but as to their being included in Vista I would think that Konfabulator had much less to do with that then OS X. I mean, I don't think that the Vista team is too concerned about how well Yahoo Widgets are doing as a platform these days. To be fair, I use Yahoo Widgets more than the OS X widgets-partly because they work on both Windows and Mac.
Thanks for the reply though. I remembered the line break this time.:)
I would say it's more of a, "there is nothing here that hasn't been done-they just copied Apple" rather than a "there's no substance, there's nothing good..."
However, I would contend, why is this such a problem for everybody (Mac & Windows fans alike)? I'm an Apple user/lover/fanboy/whatever-you-want-to-call-me but I feel like the new Vista is (as long as it eventually proves to be decently secure, the jury is out on that) a good thing for everybody.
Windows fanboys need to admit that Microsoft has copied Apple. Clearly it has. You can't say that "Gadgets" aren't a response to "Widgets". You can't say that the transparent windowing effects and the 3d stacking features aren't a response to OS X's transparent windowing effects and expose. Just admit it and move on.
Apple fanboys on the other hand, need to admit that this is a good thing for everybody. Users expect things like bundled "Life" software (a.k.a. iLife) to come with the OS now. Microsoft is merely doing what consumers want. Unlike the IE bundle back in the day, which was clearly a push to put Netscape out of the browser business, this new form of bundling that both Apple and Microsoft are now doing is a plus for consumers. We want to have software to manage our digital lives that are freely available to us on our platform. The iLife sweet gives that to Mac users. Why shouldn't MS do the same for its users? Every company in every industry learns good and bad practices from other copanies in its industry. If Apple is doing something right, MS should copy if it can't improve. If MS is doing something right, Apple should copy. As consumers we benefit when there is competition from these companies to make the best product possible. If Microsoft came out with another boring old PC OS with none of the features it has added what reason would Apple have to innovate?
I for one will probably never own Vista, but I am glad its out there, and I am glad it is copying/improving(I know, debatable but still) on Apple.
My bad. I was thinking of sleep, not hibernation. Not sure how long hibernation takes to wake up-never used it-actually I'm not seeing it in my system prefs. Maybe Macs don't do that, or maybe the laptops don't. I dunno.
I'm not sure how to check the wtmp files to see the information exactly, but I basically only reboot my Powerbook G4 when there is a system patch that requires a restart, which occurs about once a month. Other than that my system never crashes (apps occasionally crash, system does not). I probably restart an average of once a month.
I just tested it, and my G4 Powerbook takes less than 2 seconds to wake from hibernation, another split second to enter my password, and my apps are instantly accessible. I suppose if a user wants an "instant on" hibernation feature, he can buy a Mac.
"converting iTunes music into unrestricted formats like MP3 is already trivial"
There is a reason to get excited about iTunes music being cracked. Converting a digital signal to analog and back to digital (the trivial way to convert an iTunes file to MP3) is lossy (unless you have really good sound equipment you are going to get noise from the wiring). The ability to go directly from digital copy to digital copy is much better.
Do you know this is how it works for a fact? From their explanation it looks like it might apply some sort of learning algorithm (say, a neural network) to the face recognition. There is a lot of good work being done in this area right now.
I think that there will always be a way for determined people to get past automatic identification systems. False fingerprints, fake ID's, and clay face masks (as proposed above) are good examples. Face recognition, however, could do a better job than a airport security officer at catching more people, however. I mean, he might memorize the faces of the FBI's top 10 most wanted list. But if they do any of the things that would trick get face recognition, it will probably trick him as well. Good face recognition, however, could potentially have the FBI's top 10,000 most wanted. If any of those guys happened to jump a flight to somewhere without thinking to disguise their face they could be recognized by the software. The security guard, however, would not have even known they were wanted.
I agree that this isn't an end all solution, but I think that it is not necessarily without application or usefulness.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think Fermi is talking about mere visits, but colonization. If so, we wouldn't have to worry about them missing us, because if they had come, they would have stayed. To quote the wikipedia article: "The second cornerstone of the Fermi paradox is a rejoinder to the argument by scale: given intelligent life's ability to overcome scarcity, and its tendency to colonize new habitats, it seems likely that any advanced civilization would seek out new resources and colonize first their star system, and then surrounding star systems. As there is no evidence on Earth or anywhere else of attempted alien colonization after 13 billion years of the universe's history, either intelligent life is rare or assumptions about the general behavior of intelligent species are flawed."
The problem with our being the first intelligent life in the galaxy is that there are a lot of other areas of science at stake in saying that humanity is in no way special. The scientists, therefore, refuse to admit that we could be the first. We are one of many, and not particularly close to being the first or the last.
I think basic probability actually makes it extremely unlikely that there be any life at all. However, if you take the opposite view, and agree that there is nothing particularly special about humankind, you almost have to take Fermi at face value. What is wrong about saying that, if we are somewhere in the middle of the history of the universe (not special, like for instance, not the first group of intelligent beings because that would be special) then we should be far ahead of some civilizations, and far behind others. The ones that we are far behind will be sufficiently advanced by now that they will either have had to have been wiped out by disaster, or have populated the entire universe.
As to the basic probability argument. HOW does basic probability suggest that it is extremely unlikely that we are an isolated occurrence. What probability are you using? I think you will eventually give the "if a thousand monkeys are typing on a thousand typewriters they will eventually type the works of shakespeare argument" which doesn't hold true under modern probability.
I'm willing to have an honest discussion, this is not meant to flame. Let's talk about the probabilities involved. What basic tenents of probability are you referring to?
I think so. I'm waiting for the better shooter games and such to come out, but its just like any other console, with worse graphics and better controls. Personally I prefer the gameplay in for instance Madden on the Wii to any sports game on any other console. For someone like me, who is not a true gamer, but a recreational time waster, the wii remains really fun.
Yeah, I was recently talking to a professional demographer about something similar to this. To make a long story short I suggested that for the purposes of a study he is doing that he use adopted children who's biological parents had made their information available. He was STRONGLY (to put it mildly) against this. He said that any kind of user choice like that is seen by demographers as very bad and called it "self selecting," I suppose implying that the very fact that some people are opting-in to the demographic that they may share other sorts of non-random traits. I agree that there will probably be a lot of bias in the voting user group. Bias that probably cannot be measured.
I love wikipedia, but it does have one important issue: it is increasingly banned from use in various forms of research, for instance, as a work cited in a research paper for school. Whether that is appropriate or not (I have mixed feelings on the subject myself) has no bearing on the fact that it is happening. Something like this, with accountable "expert" editorial control could prove to be a resource as powerful as wikipedia that also has the added benefit of being recognized by the larger acedemic community.
Again, let me stress this, I'm not saying that the bans on wikipedia articles are right, just that they are happening. The main argument for the bans (whether flawed or not) seems to what is said to be a "lack of editorial control" (again, I'm not arguing this personally) and I think something like this could appease those currently banning wikipedia which is altogether a great resource for research.
I have to respectfully disagree. I also work on OS X every day. Reliability-wise, my OS X machine has crashed one time in 2 years. That cannot be said for ANY of the Windows machines I have used (they seem to do well if they crash 1 time in 1 week). It may be because there are fewer driver conflicts. But I'd rather get my main (crashable) hardware from Apple and not have driver conflicts and let the rest of the devices be USB and/or FireWire since they don't seem to have any problems. I don't think it is merely a slight win by OS X.
Also, my linux box that I'm typing this on hasn't crashed either. It is a PC with the same hardware problems Windows would have-so if the reason Windows is buggy is that it has more hardware to support, shouldn't my linux box be crashing as well?
I'm not a complete fanboy. I think Vista looks pretty neat. I use Linux every day. I hated Mac OS 9 and earlier. Even Jaguar didn't really look good to me, but I have to say I love Tiger, and it's not because I'm only loyal to Apple. It has the right mixture of ease of use, elegance, and power.
One more thing (an anecdote): A guy I met who recently switched from Windows to OS X said to me: "At first I didn't like OS X. Then I stopped trying to think of it as another Windows and I started thinking about where things would be located in the OS if they were put in the *right* place. After that, everything made sense."
I've had to reset my permissions once to fix a slight safari weirdness glitch (don't even remember what it was now). I've been running clean, other than that, since I bought the computer a few years ago. Contrast that with my Windows XP machine which crashed a few times even though I reinstalled the OS a month ago and haven't yet connected it to the internet except to download SP2. Of course, that isn't Vista. It could be way better than XP. I was pretty excited about it, but after the reports about tilt bits and what not, I'm not so sure anymore.
All an all however, the dude who says resetting permissions is a bad thing doesn't know what he is talking about. It takes like 10 seconds, I've had to do it once in 2 years, and it is way better than reformat/reinstall or regedit or the myriad of other ways you have to maintain a windows machine. I would point out that Windows machines need to be defragged to keep running smoothly. What's up with that?
Oh, shoot, I wasted my moderator points. I could have just buried other peoples rants. Darn.
Wow! Now that is what I call user friendly.
Those extra lines of code in Vista are features, not bugs.
Just try not to have a SEGFAULT in the serial controller. :-p
My previous joking aside, that is a good testament to the work being done by the VxWorks and other real-time OS folks-I just figured it was all written in-house, but thinking about it now, as you pointed out, would be next to impossible to fund. It seems that these days most things requiring some sort of OS, from PDAs to Cellphones, to your car's chip, to NASA spacecraft are using off the shelf components. It's just too hard a problem to start from scratch, especially when there are good alternatives out there.
I totally agree. All an OS does is let you set a desktop background, and for the trouble they seem to have, who needs one? I mean, if I could only run firefox, and no OS wouldn't that be better?
(I'm joking)
Seriously, what do we need all these fancy shmancy graphics for anyway?
One crash in ten years? Why don't the NASA guys write consumer operating systems?
"speakers of the Yupik languages self-identify as Eskimo"
Seems like it isn't that insulting.
For more information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo
From the article: "Will this undercut Apple's iTV?"
It could, but there are rumors floating around that the when the iTV is announced (presumably today, possibly as I type this) a deal with Netflix will also be announced. Then I think the iTV would probably be more compelling.
Also, to those who say "just put a tv tuner card in your PC." That works for us geeks. But my roommate hated having a running PC next to the TV so much we just quit doing it. Normal people don't want a PC sitting in the living room. Both Slingbox and the iTV are much more consumer-friendly in that regard.
Yeah, I forgot to preview first and haven't posted on /. in awhile so I was expecting it (erroneously) to keep my line breaks. I know widgets aren't copied completely from Apple, but as to their being included in Vista I would think that Konfabulator had much less to do with that then OS X. I mean, I don't think that the Vista team is too concerned about how well Yahoo Widgets are doing as a platform these days. To be fair, I use Yahoo Widgets more than the OS X widgets-partly because they work on both Windows and Mac.
:)
Thanks for the reply though. I remembered the line break this time.
I would say it's more of a, "there is nothing here that hasn't been done-they just copied Apple" rather than a "there's no substance, there's nothing good..." However, I would contend, why is this such a problem for everybody (Mac & Windows fans alike)? I'm an Apple user/lover/fanboy/whatever-you-want-to-call-me but I feel like the new Vista is (as long as it eventually proves to be decently secure, the jury is out on that) a good thing for everybody. Windows fanboys need to admit that Microsoft has copied Apple. Clearly it has. You can't say that "Gadgets" aren't a response to "Widgets". You can't say that the transparent windowing effects and the 3d stacking features aren't a response to OS X's transparent windowing effects and expose. Just admit it and move on. Apple fanboys on the other hand, need to admit that this is a good thing for everybody. Users expect things like bundled "Life" software (a.k.a. iLife) to come with the OS now. Microsoft is merely doing what consumers want. Unlike the IE bundle back in the day, which was clearly a push to put Netscape out of the browser business, this new form of bundling that both Apple and Microsoft are now doing is a plus for consumers. We want to have software to manage our digital lives that are freely available to us on our platform. The iLife sweet gives that to Mac users. Why shouldn't MS do the same for its users? Every company in every industry learns good and bad practices from other copanies in its industry. If Apple is doing something right, MS should copy if it can't improve. If MS is doing something right, Apple should copy. As consumers we benefit when there is competition from these companies to make the best product possible. If Microsoft came out with another boring old PC OS with none of the features it has added what reason would Apple have to innovate? I for one will probably never own Vista, but I am glad its out there, and I am glad it is copying/improving(I know, debatable but still) on Apple.
My bad. I was thinking of sleep, not hibernation. Not sure how long hibernation takes to wake up-never used it-actually I'm not seeing it in my system prefs. Maybe Macs don't do that, or maybe the laptops don't. I dunno.
I'm not sure how to check the wtmp files to see the information exactly, but I basically only reboot my Powerbook G4 when there is a system patch that requires a restart, which occurs about once a month. Other than that my system never crashes (apps occasionally crash, system does not). I probably restart an average of once a month.
I just tested it, and my G4 Powerbook takes less than 2 seconds to wake from hibernation, another split second to enter my password, and my apps are instantly accessible. I suppose if a user wants an "instant on" hibernation feature, he can buy a Mac.
"converting iTunes music into unrestricted formats like MP3 is already trivial" There is a reason to get excited about iTunes music being cracked. Converting a digital signal to analog and back to digital (the trivial way to convert an iTunes file to MP3) is lossy (unless you have really good sound equipment you are going to get noise from the wiring). The ability to go directly from digital copy to digital copy is much better.
Do you know this is how it works for a fact? From their explanation it looks like it might apply some sort of learning algorithm (say, a neural network) to the face recognition. There is a lot of good work being done in this area right now.
I think that there will always be a way for determined people to get past automatic identification systems. False fingerprints, fake ID's, and clay face masks (as proposed above) are good examples. Face recognition, however, could do a better job than a airport security officer at catching more people, however. I mean, he might memorize the faces of the FBI's top 10 most wanted list. But if they do any of the things that would trick get face recognition, it will probably trick him as well. Good face recognition, however, could potentially have the FBI's top 10,000 most wanted. If any of those guys happened to jump a flight to somewhere without thinking to disguise their face they could be recognized by the software. The security guard, however, would not have even known they were wanted. I agree that this isn't an end all solution, but I think that it is not necessarily without application or usefulness.