Fermi's paradox is a SETI related thing. It asks the question, "If the galaxy is inhabited (even modestly) with intelligent beings, why haven't we had contact yet?

Some answers are (1) aliens are keeping us isolated for study. This is the zoo hypothesis. Or (2) we are the first intelligence in the galaxy. or (3) they all decided not to explore, or (4) they use technology that we aren't looking for because we don't know about such technology yet.

Another possibility is that our galaxy suffered a sterilization event within the last several billion years. Gamma ray bursts are prime examples of such an event. Perhaps we live in a unfortunate galaxy in which most of the life was sadly and drastically wiped out. If this galaxy-wide extinction event hadn't occured, we would be surrounded by ETI 's all over the place, and Fermi wouldn't have had to propose his paradox. But our galaxy did experience such a calamity, and so here we are, one of many intelligent civilizations trying to rebuild. Or perhaps Earth was spared, but most the other civilizations were wiped out, and perhaps are now trying to crawl their way back to dominance.

Clearly earth itself has suffered multiple near death experiences. Why not assume that the galaxy has also suffered upheaval like, two black holes colliding at the center of the galaxy, etc....

Perhaps the list of sterlization events on a galactic scale is larger and more probable than our astronomers currently know about?

Related link: http://www.faughnan.com/setifail.html

Stephen Baxter's "Manifold Time" and (especially) "Manifold Space" and are extensive explorations of two variants of the Fermi paradox. The first uses the "rarity of life" explanation, the second assumes ubiquitous life but emphasizes how vicious the universe appears to be. The second book presupposes that intelligent life cannot get substantially "smarter" than we are now (ie. no super-intelligences); this is a necessary assumption for his story telling (and an increasingly common device in science fiction). Manifold Space is much the more interesting of the two. In this story life seems to be exploding everywhere at about the same time, and the competition is vicious. Coordinated explosion is explained by pan-galactic sterilizing events (gamma bursters) that periodically wipe out all life forms in a galaxy; technologic civilizations then re-emerge in a synchronous fashion, leading to synchronous colonization. This is the most novel explanation of the Fermi Paradox that I know of. As Baxter points out in Manifold Space, the logical implication of this explanation is that we don't have much time left before the next sterilizing event. One wonders if one could find "fossil" evidence of such an intense radiation bombardment in lunar geology.

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The good thing about 2008 is that when you accidentally write '2007' on something, the trailing seven can be easily corrected into an eight.



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Here's a good article that discusses how Ayn Rand, who advocated reason and individualism, could nonetheless produce a cult-like atmosphere for her fans:

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/12/ayn-rand.html




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Another great article from the Devil Mountain OfficeBench folks. This time they chronicle the bloating that has occured in microsoft's Windows/Office stack from Windows 2000 to Vista:

http://exo-blog.blogspot.com/2007/09/wh ... -away.html




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Consider the this article.

It shows the following benchmark numbers between VISTA and it's predecessor:



These benchmarks show virtually no difference between the two operating systems. Now consider the Devil Mountain benchmark results:




This shows a very large difference between VISTA and XP.

The Devil Mountain benchmark is a script that automates a series of office tasks and then computes the amount of time taken.

The Vista Team has made the argument that users won't notice the difference. This is probably true. But it reveals that vista burns twice the cpu cycles for doing essentially the same task(s) as XP. This difference has to show up somewhere; perhaps when watching a video on one monitor and editing a spreadsheet on another you'll begin to notice the difference between XP and Vista.


Notice that the Vista Teams argument, "User Won't Notice", assumes they have figured out what users will be doing now and in the near future. What if a new killer application emerges that needs those extra cpu cyclces? Vista would suck and XP would emerge superior.




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This article does a good job explaining why vista is slower than xp.

http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/00 ... 060344.htm

"Vista handles graphics more in the manner of video games, using a software library called DirectX designed to exploit hardware-accelerated graphics. DirectX is also used in Windows XP, but Vista uses it throughout, not just for games. Unfortunately there is a performance cost for traditional Windows applications like Microsoft Office. These generally use an older graphics library called GDI (Graphics Device Interface). In Windows XP this was hardware accelerated, but in Vista this is no longer true. Instead, they are mapped through DirectX. The new system also holds GDI windows in memory twice over, contributing to Vista's memory bloat."


Here's the devil mountain benchmarks which shows the startling differences between Vista and XP:

http://exo-blog.blogspot.com/2007/11/wi ... gains.html







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Once again spam is getting into my comment system. FUCK!


Disabled. Use email etc... cheer,



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DRM in all its incarnations are elaborate schemes to prevent illegal copies of high quality movies and music. But any guy with a camcorder, a tripod, and microphone can copy ANY media into a degraded 2nd generation copy (no DRM scheme can ever prevent this type of copying). Because modern camcorders are all digital, this 2nd generation copy will remain "pure" in the sense it can be shared to millions of people without any further degradation of quality.

As the success of youtube.com shows, this degraded version is still good enough for most users. If I refuse to pay $30 for some hollywood blockbuster I might be willing to pay $.30 for a decent 2nd generation copy.

Let's assume that Vista's DRM architecture is more or less hack proof (a bogus assumption, IMO), it still remains vulnerable to illegal copies of 2nd generation degraded versions. I bet that a good computer setup in Thailand with top of the line monitors, speakers, sound proof room, and the best digitial camcorder could produce an excellent 2nd generation copy.

(It would be a neat research project to attempt to make the most awsome 2nd generation copy only using off the shelf components. Then publish the original along side the copy and let users know how opressive DRM really is, for no real progress in stopping piracy)

And most people in emerging economies will be perfectly happy with a pirated version of a movie that is hundreds of times cheaper than the full fledged high quality version.

DRM seems like an elaborate scheme that degrades computer performance for honest folks and makes all modern electronic devices more expensive and complicated. And for what? To protect pristine 1st generation copies. Leaving the problem of 2nd generation copies totally unaddressed.

The costs with DRM schemes don't seem worth it to me. Better to spend ones resources on legislative approaches to stop piracy.

So if you are a hollywood content producer remember this: If your movie can be shown to a human it can also be shown to a camcorder and thus a decent 2nd generation copy can be created. Once those 1's and 0' get recorded they will never degrade (and this stream of 1's and 0's will forever be DRM free). Pirates will still have a market. Perhaps DRM means they can't sell pirated copies for $3 (because the quality is less), but there will still be a market for the 2nd generation version for $0.30.



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