The reason for this is simple: Microsoft's proprietary graphics and sound APIs are lightyears ahead of rivals and open source.
Microsoft's gaming APIs are like all Microsoft APIs: lots of quickly slapped-together libraries. That's how immature software markets work. As the market matures, people create open standards and open implementations, and the same is happening with gaming. Maybe Microsoft can squeeze another generation of proprietary APIs and implementations in there, but eventually, they are going to lose control of it. Attempts at a grand unification under a proprietary banner are doomed to failure in the long run.
Getting 3D to work right and perform well under X is still painful. It has to work "out of the box" folks. It may already be too late.
Comments like that show that you just don't have the slightest clue of what you are talking about; you just mindlessly bash X because that's what you have heard.
In reality, 3D and gaming works under X the same way it does under Windows: it is largely completely separate. You use X APIs to create windows and manipulate them, and you use separate APIs to access screen memory and 3D graphics hardware directly. I think that's actually a bad design, but it's a bad design that X copied from Windows. Hopefully, it will get fixed in the long term again, with proper separation of client-server responsibilities for gaming. But that will probably take another 10-20 years.
Scepticism indeed seems warranted here. For one, it is telling that this "breakthrough" has appeared in a low-impact journal.
High-impact journals select for, well, high impact, not for better quality. And there is plenty of junk science in Nature, Science, Cell, and other such journals.
That doesn't mean I believe the nanobacteria results, but I wouldn't believe it any more than if it were published in some other journal.
The whole point of XNA is provide a solid common library, which focuses on common game development tasks.
You mean like OpenGL, OpenAL, and SDL? Who would ever have thought of it. The real question is: why isn't Microsoft supporting such standards? Why do they have to re-invent the wheel? Well, you know the answer yourself, and that's why people are complaining about XNA.
If Microsoft wants to create a gaming standard they should do so through an accepted, open standards process.
By this, I mean that if Microsoft wants to create anything that one might call a "standard", they would have to go through a standards process, with industry-wide input and an open, unencumbered, complete standards document. It does not mean that such a "standard" would then be universally used for games.
Also note that important gaming APIs are already standardized through things like OpenGL. The problem is that Microsoft isn't following those standards. Microsoft is, apparently, more interested in owning a platform than in having standards.
After all, it'd make life easier for many of those who have been trying to achieve (and somewhat suceeded) what Microsoft is proposing for a very long time.
It would also make life much easier if we all got assigned standardized housing units, standardized furniture, standardized clothes, and standardized transportation. The Chinese and Soviets tried it--it doesn't work very well.
Furthermore, Microsoft's isn't proposing a standard, meaning something that can be implemented competitively by different companies, they are proposing that we do what they always want us to do: license their software. Microsoft has proven time and again that the company is incapable of producing an open standard on any significant scale. All Microsoft ever does is what a 19 year old college CS major would do: start hacking on a huge library, ship it, and call it a "de-facto standard". (Not to beat up on Microsoft alone, that's also what Sun has been doing with Java, for example.)
If Microsoft wants to create a gaming standard they should do so through an accepted, open standards process.
Content is what matters.
But the kind of content that gets created and the cost of creating it is intimately linked to the platform and operating software.
What makes me wonder is, that if it wasn't MS to propose such idea, would people have had the same reaction?
Probably not, but that is entirely reasonable. I think people intuitively know that "universal platform" plans are bad for them. They get uneasy about it when Microsoft proposes it because Microsoft has demonstrated that they can, in fact, force such a bad idea down their throats, if people don't fight it early enough.
I'll answer to this one. People have no clue, what a gaming or computing platform means. Their needs is the *end result*. PEOPLE do not care how it get's there. People do not care how a fridge freezes water into ice cubes. Even more they do not give a rats bum what company makes the ICE MAKER, they just want ICE for their drink.
If you bothered to look around, you'd see that there are dozens of manufacturers of ice makers. Some are attached to fridges, some aren't. They come in a huge variety of decors. Some are DIY isntallation, others require professional installation.
People may not care whether it uses ammonia refrigeration, freon refrigeration, environmentally friendly refrigerants, magnetic refrigeration, or Peltier elements, but they sure care about whether it complies with local regulations, how much it costs, how much power it needs, how big it is, how noisy it is, how dangerous it is, and how long it lasts.
Yes, even something as dull and seemingly well-defined as an "ice maker" isn't standardized because even for something as dull and well-defined as an "ice maker", there are lots of different requirements.
It wants to own the entire standard of gaming across every platform.
Microsoft's managers still hang on to the silly dream that they can create a single platform that works for everybody. They can't. First, technically, people have needs and interests that are far too diverse to be served by any single platform. Second, even if it was technically feasible, any market like that is far too large not to attract competition--that's, after all, the purpose of a free market economy.
The only way any company can maintain dominance in a market like Microsoft does is through monopolistic practices. Microsoft could get away with that once because they succeeded when people didn't understand what was happening--but that isn't going to work again, under the scrutiny of competitors and anti-trust enforcement.
If, on average, such planets turn out to be separated by a thousand years of travel time, I don't think you'll see much settling going on, exponential growth of population or not.
I think we aren't going to get interstellar travel at all. I was just making a hypothetical argument that if we did, it would be bad.
Nope; merely that the fraction is a few orders of magnitude greater than 10^-11. That's still a whole lot less than "most."
You fixate on the term "most" as if I was trying to make a numerical estimate and then try to disprove that. But I was simply making the point that I think that your apparently implicit assumption of inevitable technological development of species is wrong.
No matter whether "most" intelligent species are potentially expansionist or not, no matter whether there are a lot of intelligent species or a few, I think expansionist species simply don't survive long enough to achieve interstellar travel even if manned interstellar travel were feasible. You can multiply with 10^6 or 10^11 and it won't happen. By comparison, the around 10^10 humans we have on earth don't spontaneously turn into fire-breathing Godzillas or start flying. And among the around 10^25 molecules in your living room, none will spontaneously tunnel through your living room wall during your lifetime or the lifetime of the sun. Even given very large numbers, things behave predictably and reproducibly.
I think that it is a type of hubris that leads us as humans to imagine that we can "destroy" a planet. We can certainly make it a much less pleasant place to live, but very little that we do is likely to have perceptible consequences on a geological time scale.
Here, you are missing the point, too. I'm concerned with ecologic destruction and its effect on the human population: a few hundred people settle, they grow to a population of 10^10, they destroy their environment, and then a large number of them live and die under horrible conditions. Until we have figured out how to live sustainably on earth, we are just going to replicate our mistakes on every planet we settle. Whether the planet becomes "livable" again a few million years later makes no difference to the misery and suffering that that kind of behavior causes.
Second, in the process of settling a planet, its own natural biosphere would be irrevocably and perpetually altered and contaminated, taking away its opportunity for its own evolution.
And what leads you to believe that the bandwidth at which we actually process information will remain forever fixed?
I actually do believe that there are pretty hard intrinsic limits to the bandwdith with which minds can process information, regardless of what you do with the hardware or software they are based on.
But, assuming for the moment, that we can speed up brains, what new capabilities does that give us? If you speed up brains by a factor of 10, that gives you the same computational power as 10 generations of brains. But now those brains are even more out of sync with the speed of the real world: your particle accelerator won't get built 10 times sooner and some PCR reaction won't work 10 times faster just because your brain is 10 times as fast. And, unlike the 10 generations of brains, the fast brains will never start out with a fresh perspective on things.
Fewer people suffering would be good enough for me, at least to begin with.
And what inventions or discoveries from space travel are going to have any impact on human suffering?
Human suffering is not a question of technology, resources, or wealth, it's a question of sociology and psychology.
So based upon that argument, we should by now have conquered the entire solar system.
Well, no: we don't have the technology for manned interplanetary travel at a reasonable cost yet. Furthermore, there are no other planets worth settling in this solar system, so, in effect, we have "conquered" the solar system, such as it is.
Ultimately, limits to exponential growth must be found, and must be found much sooner than we will be able to occupy any significant fraction of the universe. Note also that a limitation is speed of travel, combined with the expansion of the universe, implies a limited accessible volume.
I'm just saying that if, through some miracle, we manage to get technology for practical interstellar travel before we kill ourselves, then biological growth patterns mean that we will push out at roughly whatever speed we can travel. And our behavior and psychology mean that we will leave in our wake dying colonies and destroyed planets. Whether that will encompass only a few planets, or the entire galaxy, or even beyond doesn't change that I would find that kind of behavior repulsive. I think most people would, in fact (think of the villains in independence day), they just don't think about the fact that that is how we have behaved in the past when presented with a new frontier and how we would behave in the future.
Similarly, even if only a small percentage of stars have expansionist cultures (continuing the cancer analogy), you have to multiply that by 10^11.
You are assuming that species that strongly desire to expand will mostly succeed. I didn't claim that. In fact, I think species that have a strong desire to expand (ourselves included) will almost certainly kill themselves long before they become capable of interstellar travel. I was just giving a hypothetical argument that should we miraculouslyh achieve interstellar travel, the consequences would still be dire.
Genetic modification of the brain.
Modification to accomplish what?
Direct interfacing with computers.
For what purpose? Eyes, voice, and fingers are versatile input/output devices, and their bandwidth is matched to the bandwidth at which we actually process information.
Loss of the distinction between computers, software, and biological organisms.
Again, what does that change? What does that kind of blending let you do that you can't already do?
And the experience of space travel is likely to provide crucial insights that will benefit the vast majority who (at least for the near future) remain on earth.
Benefit in what way? Live longer? Eat more cake? Have more sex?
"Googol" is a word a guy came up with a long time ago to describe a natural phenomena, or "math" if you will.
Googol is of no relevance to mathematics, physics, or any other science; it doesn't even fall within the standard sequence of SI multipliers (which would be 10^99 or 10^102). "Googol" is essentially a literary term and device.
are nothing more than common theives, is not worth debate. I call a spade a "spade" and these folks are theives. Or perhaps you prefer words with more syllables. How about extortionists? Blackmailers? Criminals?
If their case has no merit, it will get thrown out. If it is frivolous, they have to pay all the costs. But even filing a frivolous lawsuit is not (usually) a criminal offense.
Accusing someone publicly of being a felon or criminal when you know full well that they don't meet the definition, however, may be libel, and there are laws against that.
People have fallen into the habit of denouncing anybody who raises questions about anything as spreading "FUD", as if that were a bad thing.
If the Linux kernel actually violated SCO's copyrights, you bet that you should have fear, uncertainty, and doubts. The problem with SCO's FUD is that SCO has no case; all they have is ever more preposterous legal claims. Furthermore, SCO's lawyers and management must know that. SCO is using unjustified fear, uncertainty, and doubt as a tool to manipulate their own stock price.
But don't let the manipulations of companies like SCO turn you off to critical thinking. Fear, uncertainty, and doubt are crucially important. For example, you should genuinely fear getting locked into proprietary architectures, you should be aware of uncertainty where it exists because uncertainty is expensive in the long run, and you should doubt marketing messages and proclamations of openness that some big vendors want you to swallow uncritically.
Your terms of service almost certainly prohibit it, so you are violating something. Furthermore, you'd have a hard time arguing that you are a telephone company or cable company, and you probably don't comply with the kinds of regulatory requirements they have to comply with, so the "I'm a carrier" excuse won't hold.
And, from your statement, it sounds like you are doing this deliberately, know that you are doing it deliberately, and know the consequences: your connection will be used by spammers, copyright infringers, child pornographers, and other unsavory characters, and people will probably be able to argue that thereby you wilfully contribute to those crimes.
Mickey Mouse is a brand name and Disney goes to great links to protect that. Same with Star Trek and Frodo.
No, not quite. Companies have successfully made copyright claims, in addition to, or instead of, trademark claims, over characters and plots. Furthermore, many of those characters existed long before anybody thought to trademark them. And that still leaves open the question of whether trademarking them should even be allowed.
This is nothing more than a bullshit land grab by theives. Period. They are trying to steal from Google and I wonder what snake put them up to it if they hadn't come up with it themselves...absolute crap.
Ah, well, here we have the makings of a quality discussion: almost no content, but extensive use of emotive words like "stealing", "crap", "bullshit", etc.
And you are so blinded by your emotional outburst and your admiration of Google that you don't even realize that I'm not even attacking Google or defending these people. I'm just making a simple point: these kinds of claims are probably not entirely out of the question under current practice. There is "nothing more" to it, other than that I would wish that current practice would change.
I feel really sorry for you, to be at the point where you hate your own species so much.
Recognizing one's own flaws doesn't mean self-hatred.
I however, love humanity (and all our many flaws),
Contrary to what people may have told you in pop-psychology, addressing problems does not begin with loving your faults. If you are obese, drug addicted, and overly aggressive towards others (the personality traits that we exhibit as a species), you need to work on curbing your appetite, stop taking drugs, and reducing your aggressive tendencies.
and really want to get us into the position where one little thing (natural or man-made) can remove all that we have been, and all that we can be in an instant.
It is highly unlikely that we will be wiped out by a natural disaster any time soon and man-made disasters are within our control.
In any case, I think we don't have a choice--manned interstellar travel isn't going to happen any time soon for technological reasons. I simply painted the hypothetical picture of what would happen if it did to show that it would be pointless--we would just repeat what we are doing on earth on millions or billions of other planets, over and over again. We need to fix ourselves before going anywhere else.
More to the point, Microsoft-owned XENIX and COMMAND.COM are clearly derivative of AT&T's work.
But Microsoft licensed and paid for XENIX, so that's OK.
I'm not so sure that this is such a big Microsoft PR move as it is an attempt by someone to write a controversial book to get sales.
I think it's neither. I think the people at the "Alexis de Tocqueville Institution" really believe the crap they are writing, and they are just using facts selectively to support their world view. You know, like a lot of economic and scientific reasoning happens, in particular among semi-educated authors writing material for popular consumption.
But think about this: assume the company was named "Mickey Mouse Search" or "Star Trek Search" or "Frodo Search", do you think that Disney or WB or whoever wouldn't be able to object? Companies do manage to claim characters and terms from their writings as their intellectual property.
I still think this claim should get turned down, but then I also think that companies should not be able to claim character names, characters, or plot lines as their property.
No, it represents a comprehension of the physical fact that the speed of transportation--which is the true limiting factor here--is not likely to grow exponentially, due to fundamental physical constraints. That means that the problems of exponential growth of population growth and resource consumption will have to be dealt with locally millions of years before they have an opportunity to affect a significant proportion of the galaxy.
You're missing the point. Exponential population growth just means that human populations will spread about as fast as travel permits. If technology permits interstellar travel at 1/10 light speed, that would mean we'd have conquered the whole galaxy in less than a million years.
But that isn't even the main point. The main point is that if we don't figure out how to live sustainably first, every colony we found will perish just like its parent. We'd just multiply our misery and destruction billionfold.
No, it is that millions of years from now, we are going to be effectively a different species, and extrapolating the behavior of our many-times-removed descendants after millions of years is going to be about as meaningful as attempting to anticipate the modern problems of humanity from the issues that faced the dinosaurs.
What makes you think we will have changed much in a few million years? We have probably done all the evolving we are going to do for a long while. Dinosaurs are actually a good example: they survived for 160 million years and would still be around largely unchanged if they hadn't been wiped out by a freak accident.
So you believe that there are no trends in technological advancement aside from improvement in travel? To me, the most dramatic changes are likely to be in areas of biology and information processing, not space travel.
What kinds of "dramatic changes" do you anticipate? I don't see any. Science and technology are fun, but I don't see any profound changes.
Notions like "most" founder in the face of the "really bigness" of space. Even a very small proportion, multiplied by the number of stars in the galaxy, tends to give you a very big number.
Well, that depends on one's notion of "most" and the frequency with which one thinks that any form of intelligent life arises. I think it's likely to be pretty rare: teeth and claws are simpler and generally more effective evolutionary strategies.
I also think you overestimate the vastness of space. There are about 10^11 stars in the galaxy, a big number, but not that big. You have several orders of magnitude more cells in your body alone.
In any case, I didn't list all the possibilities. So, there are intelligent species that are not interested in technology at all (probably the vast majority) and those that use it responsibly. That leaves the ones that use it irresponsibly. But I suspect such species probably destroy themselves before becoming capable of interstellar travel or (if interstellar travel is common) are destroyed by others before they can do harm.
So, I think it is pretty much impossible that we achieve interstellar travel as we are right now, and I think we shouldn't even try--we should first work on changing ourselves. It's just that if, by some statistical fluke, we manage to, the consequences would be bad indeed.
The universe is far larger than even most geeks realize.
Let's put that into perspective. 7*10^22 is a common estimate for the number of stars in the universe. There are about 5*10^13 cells in the human body and about 5*10^9 humans on the planet, giving 2.5*10^23 human cells on the planet. And there are probably about 5*10^30 (!) bacterial cells on earth, each with about 10^6 bytes of information in its genome.
The universe is so practically infinite, your silly concerns are of no value.
Ah, I see, you do ethics by the numbers. By your reasoning, there are six billion people on our earth, so it would be foolish to worry about a few thousand deaths--percentagewise, they just don't count, right?
But that's not even the real problem. The real problem is that if, as a species, we are psychologically predetermined to commit ecological suicide, then that means that every planet we settle will ultimately result in the deaths of billions of people.
Even now, on earth, you could have every human, now alive, live in the state of texas, with the population density of, say, paris.
No, you couldn't. You may live in a 600 sq ft apartment (or maybe a 100 sq ft dorm room), but if you live an average American lifestyle, you actually use up acres upon acres of land for your food alone, not to mention enormous amounts of other resources. Our species is already far too populous given our individual resource needs.
Relax. This kind of fear reflects a complete incomprehension of just how vast space is. As the Hitchhiker's Guide states,
That kind of response reflects a complete incomprehension of exponential growth.
Barring some kind of faster-than-light transport (which there is no hint of in any practical sense), there is simply no way that we can occupy more than a tiny fraction of even our own galaxy in any reasonable time frame. To talk about occupying any significant portion of our galaxy, we must began to speak in a geological time frame--millions of years, longer than most species have survived on earth.
And your point is what exactly? That misery spread over billions of planets and millions of years is somehow acceptable?
If we make interstellar travel work even at sub-light speeds and there is a signficant density of habitable planets to make colonization feasible, we'll be spreading pretty close to the maximum speed at which we can travel, first from earth, an then in a few centuries from the first colonies.
Given the pace of technological change, it is virtually inevitable that humanity, if it survives at all, will be completely unrecognizable to contemporary man in a mere few thousand years,
I see no reason why there should be any significant technological change past interstellar travel. Once people have figured out interstellar travel, they'll be too busy having babies and flying from one planet to the next. Furthermore, there may well be intrinsic limits to technology and we could be close to them; you just can't extrapolate from the rate of change during the 20th century to the future.
Also keep in mind that if it was really that easy to trash a galaxy, the laws of probability (and the immense number of stars, and presumably, planets with life) make it virtually inevitable that some other species would have done it by now.
Maybe most life is not intelligent at all, or it is intelligent enough not to bother with interstellar travel.
researching the wrong thing
on
Cure for Cancer?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Having a general purpose mechanism for killing cells with specific, detectable differences is nice, but it isn't exactly new: most of cancer therapy is based on that premise. This particular mechanism sounds like it may give you more specificity, but there are already lots of ways of targeting cancer cells with high specificity.
The problem is that the more complex you make the molecules that kill cancer cells, the harder they get to deliver. You can think of RNAi as a simpler version of this "molecular computer", something that would probably already help in many cancers, and we can't even deliver something that comparatively simple reliably.
There is no conceivable technology that would allow us to send people elsewhere fast enough to have nay significant effect on population growth or pollution. So going to space will not relieve us of the need to solve our problems.
Oh, I fully agree. But that's not the point. If our species is intrinsically incapable of living sustainably, then being confined to earth will mean that the problem lives and dies here. If we spread to other planets before then, it means we may destroy habitable planets in the entire galaxy or even beyond--leaving behind trashed planets and dying human populations.
There's nothing like managing life aboard a space ship or colony to make people acutely aware of the importance of resource management and recycling.
Most likely, that will be orchestrated and enforced by machines if it is to work at all for long voyages. What makes you think that people don't revert to their biological imperatives once they land?
We need to demonstrate first here, on this planet, that we can live responsibly and sustainably at a planetary scale, not because something is forcing us, but because it is how we operate. Before we reach that point (if ever), it would be a disaster if we got out.
Slashdot Mirror
The FSF just published a license, which Linus just happened to adopt for Linux. What do they have to do with the SCO lawsuit?
In essence: gaming is dead, folks. Don't expect to see the cycle of new, fun games continue. They haven't continued for some time now.
That's like Yogi Berra saying "Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded".
Traditional gaming is becoming a smaller and smaller percentage of the game industry, but that doesn't mean it's going away or gaming is dead.
The reason for this is simple: Microsoft's proprietary graphics and sound APIs are lightyears ahead of rivals and open source.
Microsoft's gaming APIs are like all Microsoft APIs: lots of quickly slapped-together libraries. That's how immature software markets work. As the market matures, people create open standards and open implementations, and the same is happening with gaming. Maybe Microsoft can squeeze another generation of proprietary APIs and implementations in there, but eventually, they are going to lose control of it. Attempts at a grand unification under a proprietary banner are doomed to failure in the long run.
Getting 3D to work right and perform well under X is still painful. It has to work "out of the box" folks. It may already be too late.
Comments like that show that you just don't have the slightest clue of what you are talking about; you just mindlessly bash X because that's what you have heard.
In reality, 3D and gaming works under X the same way it does under Windows: it is largely completely separate. You use X APIs to create windows and manipulate them, and you use separate APIs to access screen memory and 3D graphics hardware directly. I think that's actually a bad design, but it's a bad design that X copied from Windows. Hopefully, it will get fixed in the long term again, with proper separation of client-server responsibilities for gaming. But that will probably take another 10-20 years.
Scepticism indeed seems warranted here. For one, it is telling that this "breakthrough" has appeared in a low-impact journal.
High-impact journals select for, well, high impact, not for better quality. And there is plenty of junk science in Nature, Science, Cell, and other such journals.
That doesn't mean I believe the nanobacteria results, but I wouldn't believe it any more than if it were published in some other journal.
The whole point of XNA is provide a solid common library, which focuses on common game development tasks.
You mean like OpenGL, OpenAL, and SDL? Who would ever have thought of it. The real question is: why isn't Microsoft supporting such standards? Why do they have to re-invent the wheel? Well, you know the answer yourself, and that's why people are complaining about XNA.
Just to clarify... I wrote:
If Microsoft wants to create a gaming standard they should do so through an accepted, open standards process.
By this, I mean that if Microsoft wants to create anything that one might call a "standard", they would have to go through a standards process, with industry-wide input and an open, unencumbered, complete standards document. It does not mean that such a "standard" would then be universally used for games.
Also note that important gaming APIs are already standardized through things like OpenGL. The problem is that Microsoft isn't following those standards. Microsoft is, apparently, more interested in owning a platform than in having standards.
After all, it'd make life easier for many of those who have been trying to achieve (and somewhat suceeded) what Microsoft is proposing for a very long time.
It would also make life much easier if we all got assigned standardized housing units, standardized furniture, standardized clothes, and standardized transportation. The Chinese and Soviets tried it--it doesn't work very well.
Furthermore, Microsoft's isn't proposing a standard, meaning something that can be implemented competitively by different companies, they are proposing that we do what they always want us to do: license their software. Microsoft has proven time and again that the company is incapable of producing an open standard on any significant scale. All Microsoft ever does is what a 19 year old college CS major would do: start hacking on a huge library, ship it, and call it a "de-facto standard". (Not to beat up on Microsoft alone, that's also what Sun has been doing with Java, for example.)
If Microsoft wants to create a gaming standard they should do so through an accepted, open standards process.
Content is what matters.
But the kind of content that gets created and the cost of creating it is intimately linked to the platform and operating software.
What makes me wonder is, that if it wasn't MS to propose such idea, would people have had the same reaction?
Probably not, but that is entirely reasonable. I think people intuitively know that "universal platform" plans are bad for them. They get uneasy about it when Microsoft proposes it because Microsoft has demonstrated that they can, in fact, force such a bad idea down their throats, if people don't fight it early enough.
I'll answer to this one. People have no clue, what a gaming or computing platform means. Their needs is the *end result*. PEOPLE do not care how it get's there. People do not care how a fridge freezes water into ice cubes. Even more they do not give a rats bum what company makes the ICE MAKER, they just want ICE for their drink.
If you bothered to look around, you'd see that there are dozens of manufacturers of ice makers. Some are attached to fridges, some aren't. They come in a huge variety of decors. Some are DIY isntallation, others require professional installation.
People may not care whether it uses ammonia refrigeration, freon refrigeration, environmentally friendly refrigerants, magnetic refrigeration, or Peltier elements, but they sure care about whether it complies with local regulations, how much it costs, how much power it needs, how big it is, how noisy it is, how dangerous it is, and how long it lasts.
Yes, even something as dull and seemingly well-defined as an "ice maker" isn't standardized because even for something as dull and well-defined as an "ice maker", there are lots of different requirements.
It wants to own the entire standard of gaming across every platform.
Microsoft's managers still hang on to the silly dream that they can create a single platform that works for everybody. They can't. First, technically, people have needs and interests that are far too diverse to be served by any single platform. Second, even if it was technically feasible, any market like that is far too large not to attract competition--that's, after all, the purpose of a free market economy.
The only way any company can maintain dominance in a market like Microsoft does is through monopolistic practices. Microsoft could get away with that once because they succeeded when people didn't understand what was happening--but that isn't going to work again, under the scrutiny of competitors and anti-trust enforcement.
If, on average, such planets turn out to be separated by a thousand years of travel time, I don't think you'll see much settling going on, exponential growth of population or not.
I think we aren't going to get interstellar travel at all. I was just making a hypothetical argument that if we did, it would be bad.
Nope; merely that the fraction is a few orders of magnitude greater than 10^-11. That's still a whole lot less than "most."
You fixate on the term "most" as if I was trying to make a numerical estimate and then try to disprove that. But I was simply making the point that I think that your apparently implicit assumption of inevitable technological development of species is wrong.
No matter whether "most" intelligent species are potentially expansionist or not, no matter whether there are a lot of intelligent species or a few, I think expansionist species simply don't survive long enough to achieve interstellar travel even if manned interstellar travel were feasible. You can multiply with 10^6 or 10^11 and it won't happen. By comparison, the around 10^10 humans we have on earth don't spontaneously turn into fire-breathing Godzillas or start flying. And among the around 10^25 molecules in your living room, none will spontaneously tunnel through your living room wall during your lifetime or the lifetime of the sun. Even given very large numbers, things behave predictably and reproducibly.
I think that it is a type of hubris that leads us as humans to imagine that we can "destroy" a planet. We can certainly make it a much less pleasant place to live, but very little that we do is likely to have perceptible consequences on a geological time scale.
Here, you are missing the point, too. I'm concerned with ecologic destruction and its effect on the human population: a few hundred people settle, they grow to a population of 10^10, they destroy their environment, and then a large number of them live and die under horrible conditions. Until we have figured out how to live sustainably on earth, we are just going to replicate our mistakes on every planet we settle. Whether the planet becomes "livable" again a few million years later makes no difference to the misery and suffering that that kind of behavior causes.
Second, in the process of settling a planet, its own natural biosphere would be irrevocably and perpetually altered and contaminated, taking away its opportunity for its own evolution.
And what leads you to believe that the bandwidth at which we actually process information will remain forever fixed?
I actually do believe that there are pretty hard intrinsic limits to the bandwdith with which minds can process information, regardless of what you do with the hardware or software they are based on.
But, assuming for the moment, that we can speed up brains, what new capabilities does that give us? If you speed up brains by a factor of 10, that gives you the same computational power as 10 generations of brains. But now those brains are even more out of sync with the speed of the real world: your particle accelerator won't get built 10 times sooner and some PCR reaction won't work 10 times faster just because your brain is 10 times as fast. And, unlike the 10 generations of brains, the fast brains will never start out with a fresh perspective on things.
Fewer people suffering would be good enough for me, at least to begin with.
And what inventions or discoveries from space travel are going to have any impact on human suffering?
Human suffering is not a question of technology, resources, or wealth, it's a question of sociology and psychology.
So based upon that argument, we should by now have conquered the entire solar system.
Well, no: we don't have the technology for manned interplanetary travel at a reasonable cost yet. Furthermore, there are no other planets worth settling in this solar system, so, in effect, we have "conquered" the solar system, such as it is.
Ultimately, limits to exponential growth must be found, and must be found much sooner than we will be able to occupy any significant fraction of the universe. Note also that a limitation is speed of travel, combined with the expansion of the universe, implies a limited accessible volume.
I'm just saying that if, through some miracle, we manage to get technology for practical interstellar travel before we kill ourselves, then biological growth patterns mean that we will push out at roughly whatever speed we can travel. And our behavior and psychology mean that we will leave in our wake dying colonies and destroyed planets. Whether that will encompass only a few planets, or the entire galaxy, or even beyond doesn't change that I would find that kind of behavior repulsive. I think most people would, in fact (think of the villains in independence day), they just don't think about the fact that that is how we have behaved in the past when presented with a new frontier and how we would behave in the future.
Similarly, even if only a small percentage of stars have expansionist cultures (continuing the cancer analogy), you have to multiply that by 10^11.
You are assuming that species that strongly desire to expand will mostly succeed. I didn't claim that. In fact, I think species that have a strong desire to expand (ourselves included) will almost certainly kill themselves long before they become capable of interstellar travel. I was just giving a hypothetical argument that should we miraculouslyh achieve interstellar travel, the consequences would still be dire.
Genetic modification of the brain.
Modification to accomplish what?
Direct interfacing with computers.
For what purpose? Eyes, voice, and fingers are versatile input/output devices, and their bandwidth is matched to the bandwidth at which we actually process information.
Loss of the distinction between computers, software, and biological organisms.
Again, what does that change? What does that kind of blending let you do that you can't already do?
And the experience of space travel is likely to provide crucial insights that will benefit the vast majority who (at least for the near future) remain on earth.
Benefit in what way? Live longer? Eat more cake? Have more sex?
"Googol" is a word a guy came up with a long time ago to describe a natural phenomena, or "math" if you will.
Googol is of no relevance to mathematics, physics, or any other science; it doesn't even fall within the standard sequence of SI multipliers (which would be 10^99 or 10^102). "Googol" is essentially a literary term and device.
are nothing more than common theives, is not worth debate. I call a spade a "spade" and these folks are theives. Or perhaps you prefer words with more syllables. How about extortionists? Blackmailers? Criminals?
If their case has no merit, it will get thrown out. If it is frivolous, they have to pay all the costs. But even filing a frivolous lawsuit is not (usually) a criminal offense.
Accusing someone publicly of being a felon or criminal when you know full well that they don't meet the definition, however, may be libel, and there are laws against that.
People have fallen into the habit of denouncing anybody who raises questions about anything as spreading "FUD", as if that were a bad thing.
If the Linux kernel actually violated SCO's copyrights, you bet that you should have fear, uncertainty, and doubts. The problem with SCO's FUD is that SCO has no case; all they have is ever more preposterous legal claims. Furthermore, SCO's lawyers and management must know that. SCO is using unjustified fear, uncertainty, and doubt as a tool to manipulate their own stock price.
But don't let the manipulations of companies like SCO turn you off to critical thinking. Fear, uncertainty, and doubt are crucially important. For example, you should genuinely fear getting locked into proprietary architectures, you should be aware of uncertainty where it exists because uncertainty is expensive in the long run, and you should doubt marketing messages and proclamations of openness that some big vendors want you to swallow uncritically.
Your terms of service almost certainly prohibit it, so you are violating something. Furthermore, you'd have a hard time arguing that you are a telephone company or cable company, and you probably don't comply with the kinds of regulatory requirements they have to comply with, so the "I'm a carrier" excuse won't hold.
And, from your statement, it sounds like you are doing this deliberately, know that you are doing it deliberately, and know the consequences: your connection will be used by spammers, copyright infringers, child pornographers, and other unsavory characters, and people will probably be able to argue that thereby you wilfully contribute to those crimes.
Mickey Mouse is a brand name and Disney goes to great links to protect that. Same with Star Trek and Frodo.
No, not quite. Companies have successfully made copyright claims, in addition to, or instead of, trademark claims, over characters and plots. Furthermore, many of those characters existed long before anybody thought to trademark them. And that still leaves open the question of whether trademarking them should even be allowed.
This is nothing more than a bullshit land grab by theives. Period. They are trying to steal from Google and I wonder what snake put them up to it if they hadn't come up with it themselves...absolute crap.
Ah, well, here we have the makings of a quality discussion: almost no content, but extensive use of emotive words like "stealing", "crap", "bullshit", etc.
And you are so blinded by your emotional outburst and your admiration of Google that you don't even realize that I'm not even attacking Google or defending these people. I'm just making a simple point: these kinds of claims are probably not entirely out of the question under current practice. There is "nothing more" to it, other than that I would wish that current practice would change.
I feel really sorry for you, to be at the point where you hate your own species so much.
Recognizing one's own flaws doesn't mean self-hatred.
I however, love humanity (and all our many flaws),
Contrary to what people may have told you in pop-psychology, addressing problems does not begin with loving your faults. If you are obese, drug addicted, and overly aggressive towards others (the personality traits that we exhibit as a species), you need to work on curbing your appetite, stop taking drugs, and reducing your aggressive tendencies.
and really want to get us into the position where one little thing (natural or man-made) can remove all that we have been, and all that we can be in an instant.
It is highly unlikely that we will be wiped out by a natural disaster any time soon and man-made disasters are within our control.
In any case, I think we don't have a choice--manned interstellar travel isn't going to happen any time soon for technological reasons. I simply painted the hypothetical picture of what would happen if it did to show that it would be pointless--we would just repeat what we are doing on earth on millions or billions of other planets, over and over again. We need to fix ourselves before going anywhere else.
More to the point, Microsoft-owned XENIX and COMMAND.COM are clearly derivative of AT&T's work.
But Microsoft licensed and paid for XENIX, so that's OK.
I'm not so sure that this is such a big Microsoft PR move as it is an attempt by someone to write a controversial book to get sales.
I think it's neither. I think the people at the "Alexis de Tocqueville Institution" really believe the crap they are writing, and they are just using facts selectively to support their world view. You know, like a lot of economic and scientific reasoning happens, in particular among semi-educated authors writing material for popular consumption.
I tend to agree with the sentiment.
But think about this: assume the company was named "Mickey Mouse Search" or "Star Trek Search" or "Frodo Search", do you think that Disney or WB or whoever wouldn't be able to object? Companies do manage to claim characters and terms from their writings as their intellectual property.
I still think this claim should get turned down, but then I also think that companies should not be able to claim character names, characters, or plot lines as their property.
No, it represents a comprehension of the physical fact that the speed of transportation--which is the true limiting factor here--is not likely to grow exponentially, due to fundamental physical constraints. That means that the problems of exponential growth of population growth and resource consumption will have to be dealt with locally millions of years before they have an opportunity to affect a significant proportion of the galaxy.
You're missing the point. Exponential population growth just means that human populations will spread about as fast as travel permits. If technology permits interstellar travel at 1/10 light speed, that would mean we'd have conquered the whole galaxy in less than a million years.
But that isn't even the main point. The main point is that if we don't figure out how to live sustainably first, every colony we found will perish just like its parent. We'd just multiply our misery and destruction billionfold.
No, it is that millions of years from now, we are going to be effectively a different species, and extrapolating the behavior of our many-times-removed descendants after millions of years is going to be about as meaningful as attempting to anticipate the modern problems of humanity from the issues that faced the dinosaurs.
What makes you think we will have changed much in a few million years? We have probably done all the evolving we are going to do for a long while. Dinosaurs are actually a good example: they survived for 160 million years and would still be around largely unchanged if they hadn't been wiped out by a freak accident.
So you believe that there are no trends in technological advancement aside from improvement in travel? To me, the most dramatic changes are likely to be in areas of biology and information processing, not space travel.
What kinds of "dramatic changes" do you anticipate? I don't see any. Science and technology are fun, but I don't see any profound changes.
Notions like "most" founder in the face of the "really bigness" of space. Even a very small proportion, multiplied by the number of stars in the galaxy, tends to give you a very big number.
Well, that depends on one's notion of "most" and the frequency with which one thinks that any form of intelligent life arises. I think it's likely to be pretty rare: teeth and claws are simpler and generally more effective evolutionary strategies.
I also think you overestimate the vastness of space. There are about 10^11 stars in the galaxy, a big number, but not that big. You have several orders of magnitude more cells in your body alone.
In any case, I didn't list all the possibilities. So, there are intelligent species that are not interested in technology at all (probably the vast majority) and those that use it responsibly. That leaves the ones that use it irresponsibly. But I suspect such species probably destroy themselves before becoming capable of interstellar travel or (if interstellar travel is common) are destroyed by others before they can do harm.
So, I think it is pretty much impossible that we achieve interstellar travel as we are right now, and I think we shouldn't even try--we should first work on changing ourselves. It's just that if, by some statistical fluke, we manage to, the consequences would be bad indeed.
Asteroids are very considerate that way, waiting until a species gets good 'n entrenched before coming along and wiping them all out.
Yes, surprising as it may seem, that's how the statistics work out.
The universe is far larger than even most geeks realize.
Let's put that into perspective. 7*10^22 is a common estimate for the number of stars in the universe. There are about 5*10^13 cells in the human body and about 5*10^9 humans on the planet, giving 2.5*10^23 human cells on the planet. And there are probably about 5*10^30 (!) bacterial cells on earth, each with about 10^6 bytes of information in its genome.
The universe is so practically infinite, your silly concerns are of no value.
Ah, I see, you do ethics by the numbers. By your reasoning, there are six billion people on our earth, so it would be foolish to worry about a few thousand deaths--percentagewise, they just don't count, right?
But that's not even the real problem. The real problem is that if, as a species, we are psychologically predetermined to commit ecological suicide, then that means that every planet we settle will ultimately result in the deaths of billions of people.
Even now, on earth, you could have every human, now alive, live in the state of texas, with the population density of, say, paris.
No, you couldn't. You may live in a 600 sq ft apartment (or maybe a 100 sq ft dorm room), but if you live an average American lifestyle, you actually use up acres upon acres of land for your food alone, not to mention enormous amounts of other resources. Our species is already far too populous given our individual resource needs.
the reason you're confused is that he has more requirements: he wants to get away from computers for the whole time.
Then a Palm should be perfect.
Relax. This kind of fear reflects a complete incomprehension of just how vast space is. As the Hitchhiker's Guide states,
That kind of response reflects a complete incomprehension of exponential growth.
Barring some kind of faster-than-light transport (which there is no hint of in any practical sense), there is simply no way that we can occupy more than a tiny fraction of even our own galaxy in any reasonable time frame. To talk about occupying any significant portion of our galaxy, we must began to speak in a geological time frame--millions of years, longer than most species have survived on earth.
And your point is what exactly? That misery spread over billions of planets and millions of years is somehow acceptable?
If we make interstellar travel work even at sub-light speeds and there is a signficant density of habitable planets to make colonization feasible, we'll be spreading pretty close to the maximum speed at which we can travel, first from earth, an then in a few centuries from the first colonies.
Given the pace of technological change, it is virtually inevitable that humanity, if it survives at all, will be completely unrecognizable to contemporary man in a mere few thousand years,
I see no reason why there should be any significant technological change past interstellar travel. Once people have figured out interstellar travel, they'll be too busy having babies and flying from one planet to the next. Furthermore, there may well be intrinsic limits to technology and we could be close to them; you just can't extrapolate from the rate of change during the 20th century to the future.
Also keep in mind that if it was really that easy to trash a galaxy, the laws of probability (and the immense number of stars, and presumably, planets with life) make it virtually inevitable that some other species would have done it by now.
Maybe most life is not intelligent at all, or it is intelligent enough not to bother with interstellar travel.
Having a general purpose mechanism for killing cells with specific, detectable differences is nice, but it isn't exactly new: most of cancer therapy is based on that premise. This particular mechanism sounds like it may give you more specificity, but there are already lots of ways of targeting cancer cells with high specificity.
The problem is that the more complex you make the molecules that kill cancer cells, the harder they get to deliver. You can think of RNAi as a simpler version of this "molecular computer", something that would probably already help in many cancers, and we can't even deliver something that comparatively simple reliably.
There is no conceivable technology that would allow us to send people elsewhere fast enough to have nay significant effect on population growth or pollution. So going to space will not relieve us of the need to solve our problems.
Oh, I fully agree. But that's not the point. If our species is intrinsically incapable of living sustainably, then being confined to earth will mean that the problem lives and dies here. If we spread to other planets before then, it means we may destroy habitable planets in the entire galaxy or even beyond--leaving behind trashed planets and dying human populations.
There's nothing like managing life aboard a space ship or colony to make people acutely aware of the importance of resource management and recycling.
Most likely, that will be orchestrated and enforced by machines if it is to work at all for long voyages. What makes you think that people don't revert to their biological imperatives once they land?
We need to demonstrate first here, on this planet, that we can live responsibly and sustainably at a planetary scale, not because something is forcing us, but because it is how we operate. Before we reach that point (if ever), it would be a disaster if we got out.