As has already been said, it would be an exercise in futility for planets inside the sphere of colonization to spread; growth would not be exponential as you predict.
What's more, it stands to reason that civilizations will not grow indefinitely. There are any number of things that could halt the spread of a civilization. Then of course there's the possibility of war: for all we know there is a massive war raging on the other side of the galaxy right now that has halted expansion for our space-faring neighbors.
It could take millions of years from the beginning of colonization before a civilization stumbled across us. There may be ships on the way here now; why should we assume that there has been intelligent life in the galaxy for millions of years when our own planet has supported for so short a time?
100 advanced civilizations in the galaxy, evenly distributed and travelling at sub-light speeds, would have very little chance of ever encountering one another. That's roughly 2 billion stars and 78,500,000 square light years of the galaxy (and that's only two-dimensional). If my math is right, 100 civilizations would be separated from each other by an average of 10,000 light years (plus some on the Z axis).
For us to even detect an undirected signal--as in, not particularly meant for us--at 10,000 lightyears would be quite a feat. I seriously doubt that out of the 200,000,000,000 stars in the galaxy, anyone pointed a transmitter at our little planet at just the right time for us to pick up a clear signal. THAT is where the odds are truly astronomical.
As for your response regarding argument by authority being valid: it never is. Simply saying "9 out of 10 doctors recommend it" means nothing.
Again, there is still substantial debate over the causes of the current warming trend, and even more over the future of the climate. The fact is, the reason people like you claim the debate to be over is that the press and a number of like-minded scientests shout down anyone who asks questions.:In a demonstration of a complete lack of scientific principle, any time someone proposes alternatives to the accepted thinking regarding global warmning, they are labelled a polical hack, a quack, or a fraud. Evidence to the contrary (the MWP, for example) is dismissed by many scientists because it doesn't fit in with what they already believe. It's a religion to these people, and it's dangerous the way they have behaved for the past decade.
I'm just seeking intellectual honesty in what has become a highly politcal debate. Statements like "we know for a fact" DO NOT BELONG IN SCIENCE. By declaring the debate over, the consensus held, and the facts decided, we declare that research is no longer necessary and that any questions or opposing theories are just bad science. It results in the behavior described above: serious challenges to the status quo are dismissed without consideration.
Do we need to do something before we really screw things up? Yes. Have we really screwed things up yet? The jury is still out.
I just want to offer up one glaring misuse of science in the past: I've seen all sorts of scientific abominations used to support things like racism and genocide. The Nazis twisted science to justify many of their actions just as European royalty and corrupt church leaders manipulated Catholicism to their own selfish ends. Just as some modern Muslims twist their faith to justify senseless violence and needless death.
You missed my point entirely. It had nothing to do with the movie. I'm tired of the whole "99% of scientists agree, so it's fact" argument. First of all, argument from authority isn't valid in science. Second, that's simply not true. The evidence is there that global temperatures are rising. There is a strong indication that we may be contributing to the warming. But there is certainly NOT a consensus on just how much of it is our doing, nor has there been an end to the debates. The fact of the matter is, there is a lot we don't know, and there are a lot of theories out there attempting to explain what we do. The MWP has been debated recently, and I've personally seen two professors get quite heated on the topic of global warming.
The summary incorrectly states that the debate is over, and that's an insult to science in general and scientists everywhere.
They spent a half million pounds, so obviously they had money to burn. A few thousand of that could have put a couple of guys in week-long training camps to get a crash course in Linux deployment and administration.
I train people in Windows all the time. It's made a huge difference in the level of support I've had to provide; in the year I've been at my current job, ticket creation has dropped nearly 40% for the people at my sites because I teach them how to resolve simple problems themselves and give them the tools they need to find answers on their own. They've learned that they have a choice: answer their own question in 15 minutes or wait two days for me to show up.
No, the training needed is for the IT department so that they can competently deploy and support Linux, as well as train their other users in the basics of it.
I'm not even a Linux fanboy; I've been quite vocal in the past of problems I've had with Linux lately and saying it's not ready as a mainstream desktop OS. But when you spend 500,000 pounds attempting to make 200 PC work and can't pull it off, I'm going to point and laugh.
Last I heard, they were still arguing over the existence of the medieval warming period and a hundred other possible oddities in recent climatological history. There is quite a bit of debate over what our role in the warming is, and what the climate will do in the next hundred and the next thousand years.
The earth is warming. We may or may not have a role in the warming. We do know for certain that our presence has affected climates at the local level; there *is* some debate still over how much influence we exercise over the global climate. Science has been wrong several times about climate change in the past few decades (The big chill never happened, and warming hasn't progressed nearly as quickly as was once predicted). We've got a lot left to learn before we can accurately predict where this is going.
Don't do science a disservice and proclaim an end to debate. One of the key tenets of science is that very few things are absolute, and our knowledge of climate certainly isn't one of them. As often as science has proved itself wrong in the past, to proclaim an end to debate over a subject like global climate change and declare once side to be fact is to spit in the face of science.
Agreed. It's probably a bad idea to switch to Linux without knowing how to:
Install it Customize it Deploy it Support it
In the past I've said many times that Linux has problems making inroads on the desktop because it's hard for endusers to use. In this particular case, though, it's a matter of IT staff expecting it to be easy and not bothering to familiarize themselves with Linux enough to competently deploy it.
Linux should "just work" for Joe Six-pack, but IT staff need to know it as well as they know Windows if they're going to use it. Where I work we don't use Linux because we don't have sufficient knowledge of the OS and don't have the time or money to get good training. If and when we can learn it well enough, we might start using it.
I'm sorry, but I just don't think you have a realistic picture of computing demands.
Call centers, cubicle farms for accounting and the like, home users who don't do any gaming, even dual monitor users--a Radeon 7000 can use dual monitors quite well for productivity apps--far outnumber stock traders, programmers, and graphic designers.
As for gamers: anyone chewing through 2-5 video cards a year is reckless and spends way too much money on hardware. ATI and nVidia are both on a six-month cycle, so there is absolutely no use in buying more than two cards a year, and that's if you're a rich kid who always has to have the fastest PC on the block. In all reality, It takes 18 months for a top-of-the-line card to start showing its age, and the mid-range cards ($200-250) last 12-18 months running the latest games at reasonably good graphic quality. Anyone buying more than one card a year does so either out of pride or because they damaged their hardware and can't RMA it.
(yes, I generalize a bit, but I've honestly never seen someone who didn't fit in those two categories)
You assume that this would do away with video cards; there's not a chance of that happening any time soon. As I said in another thread, it'd be quite simple for AMD to disable the on-chip video in favor of a detected add-in card.
Right now I'm buying a $200 vidcard every 18-24 months. I'm looking at probably getting my next one middle of next year, around the same time I replace my motherboard, CPU, and RAM. My current system is struggling with the Supreme Commander beta and upcoming games like Crysis should be equally taxing on it. In the past six years, I've bought three CPU upgrades. If AMD could market a $300 chip that gave me a CPU and GPU upgrade with similar performance and stay on the same socket for 3-4 years, I'd be breaking even.
I don't see why not. A lot of modern systems have integrated graphics that automatically switch off or become secondary if an add-in video card is detected. No reason AMD couldn't do this in their own chips.
So...there are only servers and enthusiasts in the market?
Wow. And here I was thinking there was this vast market for things called "workstations" where businesses didn't need high-end video cards and home systems where users didn't require the best 3D accelerators on the market. Shows what I know.
Even most enthusiasts only replace their video cards every 12-18 months. If a CPU/GPU combo was in the same price range as a current video card (not farfetched) then there'd be no reason not to use a combo chip.
But hey, feel free to waste hundreds of dollars just because you think you know how things will work. Don't let the facts get in the way of your fanaticism.
It was Napster that really drove broadband adoption for the masses. The ability to download a song in minutes instead of an hour put DSL and cable in high demand.
Will HD video drive the next step and bring the US back into the lead for home internet access? IPTV and HD-on-demand will help drag broadband into the rural areas and increase connection speeds everywhere. Here's hoping he's right and the new HD discs are doomed to fail in favor of digital distribution.
I was compiling stuff because the package manager wouldn't. I was using Ubuntu 5.10, and even though the app I wanted (a PHP editor) was listed it refused to install. I downloaded the app and tried to compile--only to find that I needed another package. Which needed another package. Which needed another package. Which...ahh screw it, I'm going to Windows.
Wouldn't it be simpler to prepackage an app with all the libaries and other apps necessary for compiling than to force someone to hunt down layer after layer after layer of dependencies?
The Linux community has been slowly losing my support because they seem completely uninterested in making Linux easy for me to start using. If I can't get the apps I need to work, what's the use in learning the OS? How am I supposed to learn the OS if there are no practical applications for it? Sure I can surf the web and edit office docs, but my Microsoft OS does that and far more.
I really want to get into Linux. It's a pity they've made it so frustrating that I keep putting it back on the shelf.
The blogger is advocating Microsoft forcing users to accept drastic changes to the way their PCs function. Because if "opting out" were easy, we'd all do it and there would be no savings.
However, it is quite simple to use group policy and scripting to make use of energy saving features and shut down PCs when they are not being used. I know, the school district I work for uses them.
We have over 1,200 computers in the district, and every one of them will power down its monitor after 15 minutes idle. We've had to disable hibernation because it doesn't work properly on older systems, but we are powering down hard drives after 30 minutes. At the end of the day, the only workstations not powered down are administration and IT--less than 50 total.
Something not mentioned in that article: MS hasn't been able to make hibernation and suspend 100% reliable, and they've had years to work on it. Now this guy wants them to force us all to use it. No, thanks. Maybe when he gets a CS degree and can fix MS's code so that all the energy saving features work right on every PC they encounter I'll consider it, but until then this guy needs to shut his trap about things he doesn't understand.
I'm a broken record on this subject, but I've had quite a few nightmare compiles on Linux that have resulted in me abandoning it on my laptop in favor of Windows. At least there the software I want to use works. They have *got* to fix that problem if Linux is going to become a mainstream desktop product.
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As has already been said, it would be an exercise in futility for planets inside the sphere of colonization to spread; growth would not be exponential as you predict.
What's more, it stands to reason that civilizations will not grow indefinitely. There are any number of things that could halt the spread of a civilization. Then of course there's the possibility of war: for all we know there is a massive war raging on the other side of the galaxy right now that has halted expansion for our space-faring neighbors.
It could take millions of years from the beginning of colonization before a civilization stumbled across us. There may be ships on the way here now; why should we assume that there has been intelligent life in the galaxy for millions of years when our own planet has supported for so short a time?
It will be a sad day when the POTS stops accepting pulse dialing.
Know how to cure a nymphomaniac? Marry her!
:(
I tried, it didn't work
So I got her pregnant. Nope, that didn't work.
Now she's pregnant again and still always wanting some. What's Plan C???
100 advanced civilizations in the galaxy, evenly distributed and travelling at sub-light speeds, would have very little chance of ever encountering one another. That's roughly 2 billion stars and 78,500,000 square light years of the galaxy (and that's only two-dimensional). If my math is right, 100 civilizations would be separated from each other by an average of 10,000 light years (plus some on the Z axis).
For us to even detect an undirected signal--as in, not particularly meant for us--at 10,000 lightyears would be quite a feat. I seriously doubt that out of the 200,000,000,000 stars in the galaxy, anyone pointed a transmitter at our little planet at just the right time for us to pick up a clear signal. THAT is where the odds are truly astronomical.
As for your response regarding argument by authority being valid: it never is. Simply saying "9 out of 10 doctors recommend it" means nothing.
:In a demonstration of a complete lack of scientific principle, any time someone proposes alternatives to the accepted thinking regarding global warmning, they are labelled a polical hack, a quack, or a fraud. Evidence to the contrary (the MWP, for example) is dismissed by many scientists because it doesn't fit in with what they already believe. It's a religion to these people, and it's dangerous the way they have behaved for the past decade.
Again, there is still substantial debate over the causes of the current warming trend, and even more over the future of the climate. The fact is, the reason people like you claim the debate to be over is that the press and a number of like-minded scientests shout down anyone who asks questions.
I'm just seeking intellectual honesty in what has become a highly politcal debate. Statements like "we know for a fact" DO NOT BELONG IN SCIENCE. By declaring the debate over, the consensus held, and the facts decided, we declare that research is no longer necessary and that any questions or opposing theories are just bad science. It results in the behavior described above: serious challenges to the status quo are dismissed without consideration.
Do we need to do something before we really screw things up? Yes. Have we really screwed things up yet? The jury is still out.
I just want to offer up one glaring misuse of science in the past: I've seen all sorts of scientific abominations used to support things like racism and genocide. The Nazis twisted science to justify many of their actions just as European royalty and corrupt church leaders manipulated Catholicism to their own selfish ends. Just as some modern Muslims twist their faith to justify senseless violence and needless death.
"First you were like WHOA! And we were like WHOA! Then you were like whooooaaaaa."
You missed my point entirely. It had nothing to do with the movie. I'm tired of the whole "99% of scientists agree, so it's fact" argument. First of all, argument from authority isn't valid in science. Second, that's simply not true. The evidence is there that global temperatures are rising. There is a strong indication that we may be contributing to the warming. But there is certainly NOT a consensus on just how much of it is our doing, nor has there been an end to the debates. The fact of the matter is, there is a lot we don't know, and there are a lot of theories out there attempting to explain what we do. The MWP has been debated recently, and I've personally seen two professors get quite heated on the topic of global warming.
The summary incorrectly states that the debate is over, and that's an insult to science in general and scientists everywhere.
Thank goodness Al Gore built it in. But what if one of the tubes leaks and the basement floods?
They spent a half million pounds, so obviously they had money to burn. A few thousand of that could have put a couple of guys in week-long training camps to get a crash course in Linux deployment and administration.
I train people in Windows all the time. It's made a huge difference in the level of support I've had to provide; in the year I've been at my current job, ticket creation has dropped nearly 40% for the people at my sites because I teach them how to resolve simple problems themselves and give them the tools they need to find answers on their own. They've learned that they have a choice: answer their own question in 15 minutes or wait two days for me to show up.
No, the training needed is for the IT department so that they can competently deploy and support Linux, as well as train their other users in the basics of it.
Who said it affects us?
I'm not even a Linux fanboy; I've been quite vocal in the past of problems I've had with Linux lately and saying it's not ready as a mainstream desktop OS. But when you spend 500,000 pounds attempting to make 200 PC work and can't pull it off, I'm going to point and laugh.
Last I heard, they were still arguing over the existence of the medieval warming period and a hundred other possible oddities in recent climatological history. There is quite a bit of debate over what our role in the warming is, and what the climate will do in the next hundred and the next thousand years.
The earth is warming. We may or may not have a role in the warming. We do know for certain that our presence has affected climates at the local level; there *is* some debate still over how much influence we exercise over the global climate. Science has been wrong several times about climate change in the past few decades (The big chill never happened, and warming hasn't progressed nearly as quickly as was once predicted). We've got a lot left to learn before we can accurately predict where this is going.
Don't do science a disservice and proclaim an end to debate. One of the key tenets of science is that very few things are absolute, and our knowledge of climate certainly isn't one of them. As often as science has proved itself wrong in the past, to proclaim an end to debate over a subject like global climate change and declare once side to be fact is to spit in the face of science.
Agreed. It's probably a bad idea to switch to Linux without knowing how to:
Install it
Customize it
Deploy it
Support it
In the past I've said many times that Linux has problems making inroads on the desktop because it's hard for endusers to use. In this particular case, though, it's a matter of IT staff expecting it to be easy and not bothering to familiarize themselves with Linux enough to competently deploy it.
Linux should "just work" for Joe Six-pack, but IT staff need to know it as well as they know Windows if they're going to use it. Where I work we don't use Linux because we don't have sufficient knowledge of the OS and don't have the time or money to get good training. If and when we can learn it well enough, we might start using it.
I'm sorry, but I just don't think you have a realistic picture of computing demands.
Call centers, cubicle farms for accounting and the like, home users who don't do any gaming, even dual monitor users--a Radeon 7000 can use dual monitors quite well for productivity apps--far outnumber stock traders, programmers, and graphic designers.
As for gamers: anyone chewing through 2-5 video cards a year is reckless and spends way too much money on hardware. ATI and nVidia are both on a six-month cycle, so there is absolutely no use in buying more than two cards a year, and that's if you're a rich kid who always has to have the fastest PC on the block. In all reality, It takes 18 months for a top-of-the-line card to start showing its age, and the mid-range cards ($200-250) last 12-18 months running the latest games at reasonably good graphic quality. Anyone buying more than one card a year does so either out of pride or because they damaged their hardware and can't RMA it.
(yes, I generalize a bit, but I've honestly never seen someone who didn't fit in those two categories)
And rather than pay per minute, now you'll get to pay per KB!
You assume that this would do away with video cards; there's not a chance of that happening any time soon. As I said in another thread, it'd be quite simple for AMD to disable the on-chip video in favor of a detected add-in card.
Right now I'm buying a $200 vidcard every 18-24 months. I'm looking at probably getting my next one middle of next year, around the same time I replace my motherboard, CPU, and RAM. My current system is struggling with the Supreme Commander beta and upcoming games like Crysis should be equally taxing on it. In the past six years, I've bought three CPU upgrades. If AMD could market a $300 chip that gave me a CPU and GPU upgrade with similar performance and stay on the same socket for 3-4 years, I'd be breaking even.
I don't see why not. A lot of modern systems have integrated graphics that automatically switch off or become secondary if an add-in video card is detected. No reason AMD couldn't do this in their own chips.
So...there are only servers and enthusiasts in the market?
Wow. And here I was thinking there was this vast market for things called "workstations" where businesses didn't need high-end video cards and home systems where users didn't require the best 3D accelerators on the market. Shows what I know.
Even most enthusiasts only replace their video cards every 12-18 months. If a CPU/GPU combo was in the same price range as a current video card (not farfetched) then there'd be no reason not to use a combo chip.
But hey, feel free to waste hundreds of dollars just because you think you know how things will work. Don't let the facts get in the way of your fanaticism.
It was Napster that really drove broadband adoption for the masses. The ability to download a song in minutes instead of an hour put DSL and cable in high demand.
Will HD video drive the next step and bring the US back into the lead for home internet access? IPTV and HD-on-demand will help drag broadband into the rural areas and increase connection speeds everywhere. Here's hoping he's right and the new HD discs are doomed to fail in favor of digital distribution.
I'm sorry...did I ever say Linux did it right? Did I recommend Linux over Windows? Did I mention Linux AT ALL?
No?
Then what, pray tell, are you going on about?
He has a hobby: finding new and interesting ways to get ejected from an NBA game.
I was compiling stuff because the package manager wouldn't. I was using Ubuntu 5.10, and even though the app I wanted (a PHP editor) was listed it refused to install. I downloaded the app and tried to compile--only to find that I needed another package. Which needed another package. Which needed another package. Which...ahh screw it, I'm going to Windows.
Wouldn't it be simpler to prepackage an app with all the libaries and other apps necessary for compiling than to force someone to hunt down layer after layer after layer of dependencies?
The Linux community has been slowly losing my support because they seem completely uninterested in making Linux easy for me to start using. If I can't get the apps I need to work, what's the use in learning the OS? How am I supposed to learn the OS if there are no practical applications for it? Sure I can surf the web and edit office docs, but my Microsoft OS does that and far more.
I really want to get into Linux. It's a pity they've made it so frustrating that I keep putting it back on the shelf.
The blogger is advocating Microsoft forcing users to accept drastic changes to the way their PCs function. Because if "opting out" were easy, we'd all do it and there would be no savings.
However, it is quite simple to use group policy and scripting to make use of energy saving features and shut down PCs when they are not being used. I know, the school district I work for uses them.
We have over 1,200 computers in the district, and every one of them will power down its monitor after 15 minutes idle. We've had to disable hibernation because it doesn't work properly on older systems, but we are powering down hard drives after 30 minutes. At the end of the day, the only workstations not powered down are administration and IT--less than 50 total.
Something not mentioned in that article: MS hasn't been able to make hibernation and suspend 100% reliable, and they've had years to work on it. Now this guy wants them to force us all to use it. No, thanks. Maybe when he gets a CS degree and can fix MS's code so that all the energy saving features work right on every PC they encounter I'll consider it, but until then this guy needs to shut his trap about things he doesn't understand.
Allow me to do a variation on a Balmer-related meme:
Dependencies! Dependencies! Dependencies! Dependencies! Dependencies! Dependencies! Dependencies!
I'm a broken record on this subject, but I've had quite a few nightmare compiles on Linux that have resulted in me abandoning it on my laptop in favor of Windows. At least there the software I want to use works. They have *got* to fix that problem if Linux is going to become a mainstream desktop product.