[t]o make matters worse, users who don't secure their networks are often the very people who don't keep their computers up to date with the latest security patches and antivirus software
I'd say it makes things irrelevant. If your PC is wide open, it hardly matters whether it is linked to the Internet by a wire or an insecure WiFi system. There are so many attackers out there on the net that it is hardly worth worrying about some guy parked outside your house with a Pringle-can antenna.
Malicious Haxies are theoretical, but then again there are no known malicious exploits in the wild against the URL handler that you installed two apps to protect yourself against. Good security is about protecting yourself from theoretical exploits before they are actual exploits
The concern about the URL vulnerability is that your computer can be attacked as a result of merely clicking on a link, even though these theoretical exploits do nothing worse than could be accomplished by the most trivial trojan--like the recent "Office 2004" trojan. So yes, a haxie could be a trojan, just like any other program you choose to install and run. And the only defense against trojans--haxie or otherwise--is still to only install software from a trusted source.
The gay thing about Rosyna's little rant is that it doesn't address my number one complaint with APE; that is slows the system down.
Ironically, that used to be the major complaint about graphical user interfaces. And it's true. A nice user interface slows the system down. Fortunately, in many cases, a substantial increment in usability and convenience can be obtained with only a tiny effect on speed.
Apple uses talented programmers, has a QA department, doesn't allow commits without thorough code reviews (or at least, didn't in my department when I worked there), and tests in a multitude of different environments. Plus they have guidelines for acceptable programming. People who write 'haxies', by and large, have none of these advantages.
That sounds nice in theory. However, in practice, I have had more serious problems with minor Apple updates than I have with APE.
That is to say, blame Apple for wanting their OS to have a consistent user interface and consistent operation. If you don't like Mac OS X's user interface, you don't have to use it, but the last thing you should expect is good support for changing it.
Wishful thinking aside, if the UI does not meet people's expectations, then they are going to change it. The fact that other user interfaces may be even less satisfactory is irrelevant. So Apple might as well accept reality and provide a reasonably benign way of doing it.
Whose definition? A trojan, by the usual definition, is a program that pretends to be one thing, but actually does something else. Like the Trojan Horse, you know. The documentation of APE is quite straightforward about what it does.
I've used APE for years, and have only once had a problem which turned out to be due, not to APE, but to an APE module. Which was immediately obvious, since like any reasonably sophisticated user, I disable APE modules when trying to isolate the source of a problem.
I am sorry, but if so is the case, then why aren't scientifics and/or government agencies takinng care of it instead. A private insurance company is not asked to comment on this or that technology.
It is their business to quantify risk. Nothing is more dangerous to the survival of an insurance company than an unquantified risk, because it makes it impossible for them to know what to charge for insurance. They have a legal responsibility of their investors to do their best to anticipate and quantify the risks of new technologies.
1. Each door provides access to only certain parts of the home, and 2. Each door is not able to be accessed via the same methods
Well, in this case all the doors clearly provide access to the same part of the house--namely my home directory where I keep my files. And the "method" that I have in mind is the "script kiddie" method: Get hold of an example written by somebody who actually knows what he's doing (such as the various benign demos of these exploits). Identify the payload. Substitute my own.
No, you're wrong too. It is simple math. You have a pile of exploits. You remove one, and now you have fewer possible exploits. You are therefore less vulnerable.
So if my home has 5 unlocked doors, and I lock one of them, I am less vulnerable? The math doesn't seem quite so simple to me. I have a nagging suspicion that locking the last door makes a much greater contribution to my security than does locking the first door.
Binocular disparity only works out to a few metres distance. Beyond that you use different cues.
An amusing exercise is to get hold of a periscope, turn it sideways, and look through it with one eye, thereby effectively increasing the distance between your eyes to a foot or more and enhancing binocular disparity. Watch distant objects leap into dramatic perspective!
I call bullshit - I'm pretty positive you're making those numbers up on the spot. This is an article [apa.org] about the efficacy of drugs versus therapy.
The article addresses only unipolar depression, where "talking" and pharmacological therapy are about equally effective. this is not the case for schizophrenia.
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.
However, all I'm assuming is that the probability is a few orders of magnitude greater than 10^-11. That's a far cry from inevitability.
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.
It's worth noting that despite numerous ecological problems, the sort of ecological catastrophe that you describe hasn't happened lately. So maybe we're actually making some progress at living sustainably, even if we're more aware of the ways in which we fall short. But living in space is a real crash course in sustainable living. In any case, we aren't going to be settling anywhere else in large numbers anytime soon, considering that all of the other planetary real estate in our location is inhospitable.
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.
I'm not aware of any such limitation. The brain uses relatively slow information transmission channels, so the potential exists to speed it up by multiple orders of magnitude.
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.
There are many areas of study where a rate limiting step in progress is how rapidly people can figure things out. Even in highly experimental sciences, most people I know spend at least as much time interpreting and understanding their results as they spend acquiring them.
Human suffering is not a question of technology, resources, or wealth, it's a question of sociology and psychology.
I disagree. Technological advances in the prevention and (to a lesser extent) treatment of infectious disease have made major contributions to relief of human suffering. And wealth, at least in so far as it is sufficient to obtain the basic necessities of life, can also make a major difference in the level of suffering.
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.
And indeed, whether we will settle, as opposed to merely exploring, any part of the universe outside our solar system depends in a critical way on the density of "planets worth settling." 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'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.
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.
You are assuming that species that strongly desire to expand will mostly succeed.
Nope; merely that the fraction is a few orders of magnitude greater than 10^-11. That's still a whole lot less than "most."
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.
And what leads you to believe that the bandwidth at which we actually process information will remain forever fixed?
Benefit in what way? Live longer? Eat more cake? Have more sex?
Fewer people suffering would be good enough for me, at least to begin with.
The problem in the past has often been that game developers companies spend much of their budgets on expensive media licenses and have little left to make the actual game. But as movie producers are realizing that games can bring people into the movie, this may be changing.
Another example of an excellent game adaptation is the first Buffy game (although the second was not as good). And the Matrix games seemed like a decent effort, with serious support from the movie producers, even though the games didn't quite come off.
I don't see this lasting too long. The "Van Helsing", "Spider Man", and "X-Men" video games are weak, and get horrible reviews.
The Playstation Spider-Man game got good reviews and the PS2 sequel got fairly good reviews. The Capcom X-Men fighting games were extremely popular and got good reviews.
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.
So based upon that argument, we should by now have conquered the entire solar system. 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 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.
Correct. And that is why you have significant risk of dying of cancer, even though "most" cells do not become cancerous. Similarly, even if only a small percentage of stars have expansionist cultures (continuing the cancer analogy), you have to multiply that by 10^11. And statistically speaking, about half of them would have a head start on us.
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.
I think we've barely begun. Already, experiments in genetic modification of human beings are underway. We are on the verge of taking control of our own evolution. We might not even recognize our descendants a million years from now, and I'm sure that we have little conception of how they may think and behave.
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.
In a long enough expanse of time, "freak" accidents become statistical inevitabilities. Few species of the time have survived unchanged.
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.
Genetic modification of the brain. Direct interfacing with computers. Loss of the distinction between computers, software, and biological organisms. And those are just the obvious inevitabilities (assuming we survive as a technological race).
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 not an either/or proposition. We aren't even attempting interstellar travel at the moment, and we certainly are going to continue to change ourselves at an accelerating rate whether we go into space or not. 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.
That kind of response reflects a complete incomprehension of exponential growth.
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.
And your point is what exactly? That misery spread over billions of planets and millions of years is somehow acceptable?
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.
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.
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. Even with any conceivably advances in space travel, most people are not going to be traveling to other planets.
Maybe most life is not intelligent at all, or it is intelligent enough not to bother with interstellar travel.
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. Basically, either we are virtually unique in the galaxy (in which case screwing it up for other species is not much of an issue), which sounds pretty unlikely (that sort of "we are unique in the universe" thinking has never turned out to be right), or else it is really, really hard to screw up the galaxy, in which case we probably won't be able to do it either.
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.
Relax. This kind of fear reflects a complete incomprehension of just how vast space is. As the Hitchhiker's Guide states,
Space is big.
Really Big.
You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is.
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. 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, if that. So it is absurd to base our expectations and fears on the ways humans behave currently. 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.
It's a simple scam: Make up a false straw man claim by substituting the word "inventor" for "developer," "creator," or "father." Then point out that the victim didn't literally invent the item in question. If anybody calls you on it, look blank and insist that "inventor" is essentially a synonym for the real word.
Perhaps for humans to spread across the galaxy like a bunch of rats or cockroaches would allow us to avoid facing our problems: we could keep breeding with impunity and consume resources.
Not to worry. 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. More likely, it will do the opposite. It is not a coincidence that the ecology movement really began to take off once pictures of the earth from space became available. How often have you heard the term, "Spaceship Earth." 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. Indeed, technological advances arising as spinoffs of space travel are likely to do more indirectly to help us deal with those problems on earth than throwing the same amount of money at their problems here on earth--because in space, if a solution doesn't really work, you find out in a hurry.
My school had a policy that anyone involved in a fight/assault was suspended, even if you didn't hit back you were gone. And yes, that was enforced. I got a 3 day vacation for being on the receiving end once.
Although unfortunately common, this sort of policy reflects a fundamental contempt for the concept of justice, and sets a terrible example for students. What it reflects is a fundamental laziness and irresponsibility on the part of the administration. They take the easy course of punishing the innocent rather than going to the trouble of investigating the situation. It gives great power to bullies, who are able to force the suspension of an innocent student by attacking him. Although the intent is to discourage fighting, it tends to make fights worse, because once a fight begins, you have nothing to lose by retalliating. It would be terribly unfortunate if you happened to have a sharpened pencil in your hand when you were attacked. Somebody who started a fight with you could suffer a horrible accident...
BayStar hasn't withdrawn its demand that SCO return its money and BayStar's lawyers, he said, still haven't told SCO's lawyers how SCO breached their contract.
Who knew that the wheel of karma had such a short turning radius?
This sounds similar to the recent trojan horse proof-of-concept.
No, that involved an application pretending to be a document. This is a case of an application pretending to be a different application. There is no security regarding the identity of applications, and an application can have any icon it chooses--the burden is on users to obtain their applications from trusted sources, not Limewire. Of course, if he really thought it was a "public beta," as he claims, he probably would have gone looking for it at the Microsoft web site.
But, if you say that Keynes' theories were better that the implementation, that does not surprise me, and I can accept it.
Much as the theories of Free Market Capitalism seem better than its implementation? Or the theories of Marxism seem better than its implementation? Sad how the real world so persistently fails to live up to our theoretical idealizations, isn't it? However, it is manifestly unfair to compare idealized Capitalism to real-world Marxism or feudalism. Ultimately, it seems like the true limiting factor on all of these systems is not how well they would work in the ideal, but rather how closely that ideal can be attained in actual practice.
In addition, the complaint is not about SpamCop running blacklists. It's about them going to individual ISPs to get these guys cut off.
SpamCop doesn't go to individual ISPs to get guys cut off. It is spam recipients who do this. All SpamCop does is provide spam victims with the ISP addresses and a temporary return address so that a user who chooses to do so may correspond with a suspected spammer without disclosing his address.
There is a very short list of firms who I have authorized to send me advertisements, so I have a quite good idea of what is spam and what isn't. To my knowledge, I have made only one mistake with SpamCop--I once reported a company that I had had business dealings with months perviously. I had not given them permission to send me ads, so I still consider that to be spam--however, my personal policy is to first correspond directly if the spammer is somebody whom I have dealt with before, before making use of SpamCop. The company that I complained about responded to me via SpamCop's forwarding service. Since I regard that as evidence of a sincere intent not to spam, I sent them my email address, and they removed me from their list. I can only presume that the firms who object to SpamCop's email system are those whose policies are such that they receive such a huge volume of complaints that it would not be feasible to respond to them individually--i.e. intentional spammers.
Not necessarily. You forgot to mention that SpamCop didn't go to OIRB in the first place to find out whether or not the claim had any merit.
But the complaint doesn't come from SpamCop. It comes from me, the spam victim. SpamCop merely provides emailing services with a temporary address to insure that my complaint does not make me the target of more spam, and provides automated header analysis to help me identify who to complain to. As a recipient of spam, I have a pretty good idea who I've given permission to send me email, so I don't need to check with OIRB--I don't intentionally or knowingly opt-in to mailing lists, so if OIRB is sending me email, then they got my address in a manner that I consider dishonest. Whether or not their spamming is legal under CANSPAM is irrelevant to my right to complain.
Slashdot Mirror
[t]o make matters worse, users who don't secure their networks are often the very people who don't keep their computers up to date with the latest security patches and antivirus software
I'd say it makes things irrelevant. If your PC is wide open, it hardly matters whether it is linked to the Internet by a wire or an insecure WiFi system. There are so many attackers out there on the net that it is hardly worth worrying about some guy parked outside your house with a Pringle-can antenna.
Malicious Haxies are theoretical, but then again there are no known malicious exploits in the wild against the URL handler that you installed two apps to protect yourself against. Good security is about protecting yourself from theoretical exploits before they are actual exploits
The concern about the URL vulnerability is that your computer can be attacked as a result of merely clicking on a link, even though these theoretical exploits do nothing worse than could be accomplished by the most trivial trojan--like the recent "Office 2004" trojan. So yes, a haxie could be a trojan, just like any other program you choose to install and run. And the only defense against trojans--haxie or otherwise--is still to only install software from a trusted source.
The gay thing about Rosyna's little rant is that it doesn't address my number one complaint with APE; that is slows the system down.
Ironically, that used to be the major complaint about graphical user interfaces. And it's true. A nice user interface slows the system down. Fortunately, in many cases, a substantial increment in usability and convenience can be obtained with only a tiny effect on speed.
Apple uses talented programmers, has a QA department, doesn't allow commits without thorough code reviews (or at least, didn't in my department when I worked there), and tests in a multitude of different environments. Plus they have guidelines for acceptable programming. People who write 'haxies', by and large, have none of these advantages.
That sounds nice in theory. However, in practice, I have had more serious problems with minor Apple updates than I have with APE.
That is to say, blame Apple for wanting their OS to have a consistent user interface and consistent operation. If you don't like Mac OS X's user interface, you don't have to use it, but the last thing you should expect is good support for changing it.
Wishful thinking aside, if the UI does not meet people's expectations, then they are going to change it. The fact that other user interfaces may be even less satisfactory is irrelevant. So Apple might as well accept reality and provide a reasonably benign way of doing it.
Meaning it's by definition a type of trojan.
Whose definition? A trojan, by the usual definition, is a program that pretends to be one thing, but actually does something else. Like the Trojan Horse, you know. The documentation of APE is quite straightforward about what it does.
I've used APE for years, and have only once had a problem which turned out to be due, not to APE, but to an APE module. Which was immediately obvious, since like any reasonably sophisticated user, I disable APE modules when trying to isolate the source of a problem.
I am sorry, but if so is the case, then why aren't scientifics and/or government agencies takinng care of it instead. A private insurance company is not asked to comment on this or that technology.
It is their business to quantify risk. Nothing is more dangerous to the survival of an insurance company than an unquantified risk, because it makes it impossible for them to know what to charge for insurance. They have a legal responsibility of their investors to do their best to anticipate and quantify the risks of new technologies.
1. Each door provides access to only certain parts of the home, and
2. Each door is not able to be accessed via the same methods
Well, in this case all the doors clearly provide access to the same part of the house--namely my home directory where I keep my files. And the "method" that I have in mind is the "script kiddie" method: Get hold of an example written by somebody who actually knows what he's doing (such as the various benign demos of these exploits). Identify the payload. Substitute my own.
No, you're wrong too. It is simple math. You have a pile of exploits. You remove one, and now you have fewer possible exploits. You are therefore less vulnerable.
So if my home has 5 unlocked doors, and I lock one of them, I am less vulnerable? The math doesn't seem quite so simple to me. I have a nagging suspicion that locking the last door makes a much greater contribution to my security than does locking the first door.
Binocular disparity only works out to a few metres distance. Beyond that you use different cues.
An amusing exercise is to get hold of a periscope, turn it sideways, and look through it with one eye, thereby effectively increasing the distance between your eyes to a foot or more and enhancing binocular disparity. Watch distant objects leap into dramatic perspective!
I call bullshit - I'm pretty positive you're making those numbers up on the spot. This is an article [apa.org] about the efficacy of drugs versus therapy.
The article addresses only unipolar depression, where "talking" and pharmacological therapy are about equally effective. this is not the case for schizophrenia.
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.
However, all I'm assuming is that the probability is a few orders of magnitude greater than 10^-11. That's a far cry from inevitability.
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.
It's worth noting that despite numerous ecological problems, the sort of ecological catastrophe that you describe hasn't happened lately. So maybe we're actually making some progress at living sustainably, even if we're more aware of the ways in which we fall short. But living in space is a real crash course in sustainable living. In any case, we aren't going to be settling anywhere else in large numbers anytime soon, considering that all of the other planetary real estate in our location is inhospitable.
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.
I'm not aware of any such limitation. The brain uses relatively slow information transmission channels, so the potential exists to speed it up by multiple orders of magnitude.
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.
There are many areas of study where a rate limiting step in progress is how rapidly people can figure things out. Even in highly experimental sciences, most people I know spend at least as much time interpreting and understanding their results as they spend acquiring them.
Human suffering is not a question of technology, resources, or wealth, it's a question of sociology and psychology.
I disagree. Technological advances in the prevention and (to a lesser extent) treatment of infectious disease have made major contributions to relief of human suffering. And wealth, at least in so far as it is sufficient to obtain the basic necessities of life, can also make a major difference in the level of suffering.
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.
And indeed, whether we will settle, as opposed to merely exploring, any part of the universe outside our solar system depends in a critical way on the density of "planets worth settling." 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'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.
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.
You are assuming that species that strongly desire to expand will mostly succeed.
Nope; merely that the fraction is a few orders of magnitude greater than 10^-11. That's still a whole lot less than "most."
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.
And what leads you to believe that the bandwidth at which we actually process information will remain forever fixed?
Benefit in what way? Live longer? Eat more cake? Have more sex?
Fewer people suffering would be good enough for me, at least to begin with.
The problem in the past has often been that game developers companies spend much of their budgets on expensive media licenses and have little left to make the actual game. But as movie producers are realizing that games can bring people into the movie, this may be changing.
Another example of an excellent game adaptation is the first Buffy game (although the second was not as good). And the Matrix games seemed like a decent effort, with serious support from the movie producers, even though the games didn't quite come off.
I don't see this lasting too long. The "Van Helsing", "Spider Man", and "X-Men" video games are weak, and get horrible reviews.
The Playstation Spider-Man game got good reviews and the PS2 sequel got fairly good reviews. The Capcom X-Men fighting games were extremely popular and got good reviews.
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.
So based upon that argument, we should by now have conquered the entire solar system. 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 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.
Correct. And that is why you have significant risk of dying of cancer, even though "most" cells do not become cancerous. Similarly, even if only a small percentage of stars have expansionist cultures (continuing the cancer analogy), you have to multiply that by 10^11. And statistically speaking, about half of them would have a head start on us.
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.
I think we've barely begun. Already, experiments in genetic modification of human beings are underway. We are on the verge of taking control of our own evolution. We might not even recognize our descendants a million years from now, and I'm sure that we have little conception of how they may think and behave.
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.
In a long enough expanse of time, "freak" accidents become statistical inevitabilities. Few species of the time have survived unchanged.
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.
Genetic modification of the brain. Direct interfacing with computers. Loss of the distinction between computers, software, and biological organisms. And those are just the obvious inevitabilities (assuming we survive as a technological race).
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 not an either/or proposition. We aren't even attempting interstellar travel at the moment, and we certainly are going to continue to change ourselves at an accelerating rate whether we go into space or not. 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.
That kind of response reflects a complete incomprehension of exponential growth.
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.
And your point is what exactly? That misery spread over billions of planets and millions of years is somehow acceptable?
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.
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.
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. Even with any conceivably advances in space travel, most people are not going to be traveling to other planets.
Maybe most life is not intelligent at all, or it is intelligent enough not to bother with interstellar travel.
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. Basically, either we are virtually unique in the galaxy (in which case screwing it up for other species is not much of an issue), which sounds pretty unlikely (that sort of "we are unique in the universe" thinking has never turned out to be right), or else it is really, really hard to screw up the galaxy, in which case we probably won't be able to do it either.
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.
Relax. This kind of fear reflects a complete incomprehension of just how vast space is. As the Hitchhiker's Guide states,
Space is big.
Really Big.
You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is.
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. 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, if that. So it is absurd to base our expectations and fears on the ways humans behave currently. 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.
It's a simple scam: Make up a false straw man claim by substituting the word "inventor" for "developer," "creator," or "father." Then point out that the victim didn't literally invent the item in question. If anybody calls you on it, look blank and insist that "inventor" is essentially a synonym for the real word.
Perhaps for humans to spread across the galaxy like a bunch of rats or cockroaches would allow us to avoid facing our problems: we could keep breeding with impunity and consume resources.
Not to worry. 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. More likely, it will do the opposite. It is not a coincidence that the ecology movement really began to take off once pictures of the earth from space became available. How often have you heard the term, "Spaceship Earth." 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. Indeed, technological advances arising as spinoffs of space travel are likely to do more indirectly to help us deal with those problems on earth than throwing the same amount of money at their problems here on earth--because in space, if a solution doesn't really work, you find out in a hurry.
My school had a policy that anyone involved in a fight/assault was suspended, even if you didn't hit back you were gone. And yes, that was enforced. I got a 3 day vacation for being on the receiving end once.
Although unfortunately common, this sort of policy reflects a fundamental contempt for the concept of justice, and sets a terrible example for students. What it reflects is a fundamental laziness and irresponsibility on the part of the administration. They take the easy course of punishing the innocent rather than going to the trouble of investigating the situation. It gives great power to bullies, who are able to force the suspension of an innocent student by attacking him. Although the intent is to discourage fighting, it tends to make fights worse, because once a fight begins, you have nothing to lose by retalliating. It would be terribly unfortunate if you happened to have a sharpened pencil in your hand when you were attacked. Somebody who started a fight with you could suffer a horrible accident...
BayStar hasn't withdrawn its demand that SCO return its money and BayStar's lawyers, he said, still haven't told SCO's lawyers how SCO breached their contract.
Who knew that the wheel of karma had such a short turning radius?
This sounds similar to the recent trojan horse proof-of-concept.
No, that involved an application pretending to be a document. This is a case of an application pretending to be a different application. There is no security regarding the identity of applications, and an application can have any icon it chooses--the burden is on users to obtain their applications from trusted sources, not Limewire. Of course, if he really thought it was a "public beta," as he claims, he probably would have gone looking for it at the Microsoft web site.
But, if you say that Keynes' theories were better that the implementation, that does not surprise me, and I can accept it.
Much as the theories of Free Market Capitalism seem better than its implementation? Or the theories of Marxism seem better than its implementation? Sad how the real world so persistently fails to live up to our theoretical idealizations, isn't it? However, it is manifestly unfair to compare idealized Capitalism to real-world Marxism or feudalism. Ultimately, it seems like the true limiting factor on all of these systems is not how well they would work in the ideal, but rather how closely that ideal can be attained in actual practice.
In addition, the complaint is not about SpamCop running blacklists. It's about them going to individual ISPs to get these guys cut off.
SpamCop doesn't go to individual ISPs to get guys cut off. It is spam recipients who do this. All SpamCop does is provide spam victims with the ISP addresses and a temporary return address so that a user who chooses to do so may correspond with a suspected spammer without disclosing his address.
There is a very short list of firms who I have authorized to send me advertisements, so I have a quite good idea of what is spam and what isn't. To my knowledge, I have made only one mistake with SpamCop--I once reported a company that I had had business dealings with months perviously. I had not given them permission to send me ads, so I still consider that to be spam--however, my personal policy is to first correspond directly if the spammer is somebody whom I have dealt with before, before making use of SpamCop. The company that I complained about responded to me via SpamCop's forwarding service. Since I regard that as evidence of a sincere intent not to spam, I sent them my email address, and they removed me from their list. I can only presume that the firms who object to SpamCop's email system are those whose policies are such that they receive such a huge volume of complaints that it would not be feasible to respond to them individually--i.e. intentional spammers.
Not necessarily. You forgot to mention that SpamCop didn't go to OIRB in the first place to find out whether or not the claim had any merit.
But the complaint doesn't come from SpamCop. It comes from me, the spam victim. SpamCop merely provides emailing services with a temporary address to insure that my complaint does not make me the target of more spam, and provides automated header analysis to help me identify who to complain to. As a recipient of spam, I have a pretty good idea who I've given permission to send me email, so I don't need to check with OIRB--I don't intentionally or knowingly opt-in to mailing lists, so if OIRB is sending me email, then they got my address in a manner that I consider dishonest. Whether or not their spamming is legal under CANSPAM is irrelevant to my right to complain.