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You always need a target.

Actually, no. There are a-life systems that don't have any explicit target or 'fitness function', and yet display increasing complexity and even ecologies. (I wrote a version myself just to play with it, and reproduced the results myself. Even a couple minor new ones.)

It's a very unusual kind of GA, I'll grant. But it seems to be a GA nevertheless.

The 'default' body plan for mammals is female. Left to itself, an embryo will develop (mostly) female unless specific steps are taken at specific times. Developing a male means (a) suppressing female development paths, and (b) initiating male development paths. (And yes, those are two separate steps. Sometimes (a) doesn't happen even though (b) does, and you get hermaphrodism.

It's rare, but you can get things like Swyer syndrome, where an apparently normal girl gets to be around sixteen and has never had a period or other signs of puberty. Examination reveals the girl has no functional ovaries and actually has a Y chromosome.

(This has other implications, so far as I can see. When something's more complicated to make, that means there are more ways for it to go wrong...)

Actually, it's a little different. Since the masculine parts by and in large develop from the same parts as the feminine parts, they are dimorphic... you get one or you get the other. The ovaries and testes are like that. They develop from a common precedent in the body. The same with the labial-scrotal folds, and the clitoral-penile protrusion.

However, there are female parts that are not directly competitive against male counter parts, those would be the Müllerian ducts. A man can have a uterus. Usually, it's not found until they have to go in and do some exploratory surgery or something like that for an appendix, or whatever. Basically, the guy goes in to get his appendix taken out, and is met in post-op with the news "oh, btw, we found a uterus, and removed it for you. It's perfectly normal, don't freak out."

"Hermaphotism" doesn't actually occur, it requires the existence of male and female gonads at the same time. Ok, correction, you can end up with a chimeric individual who develops one testis through one gene line, and an ovary through the other gene line. This is by far even more unlikely than any form of intersexuality.

The most common result of pronounced intersexuality is when the doctor pulls the baby out of the vagina, looks at it, and says, "oh dear... this baby has a very shallow vagina, slightly fused labial-scrotal folds, a urethra that exits at the bases of the penis? which could also just be a really big clitoris..."

Either way, you're _NOT_ going to end up with a penis and a vagina on the same individual without surgical intervention...

It's rare, but you can get things like Swyer syndrome, where an apparently normal girl gets to be around sixteen and has never had a period or other signs of puberty. Examination reveals the girl has no functional ovaries and actually has a Y chromosome.

(This has other implications, so far as I can see. When something's more complicated to make, that means there are more ways for it to go wrong...)

When it comes to the ultimate origin of the universe, I'm fine with saying "I dunno.". Maybe one day we will know.

Here you go, a torrent for the 1 gigabyte hi-res video:

advantage-insecurities-exhibit-hires.mp4.torrent

Actually, the "template-based addressing" in the story really can have some profound effects. (My own explanation of how Tierra works here.) Google becoming intelligent probably isn't one of them, but some systems are a lot more 'evolvable' than others.

...like this one. People are complicated critters.

If it slows down the computer, it slows down the user.

I'm trying to abide by that for my 3D file manager. It's not ready for release yet, but there's some screenshots here. I'm still not sure it's the right idea, but I'm trying not to get in the user's way. I don't force you to walk across a "room" (directory); if you can see it, you can put the cursor on it and hit the space bar. Bang, you're teleported to that object.

Anyway, if anyone can come up with a better name than "First Person File Manager", I'd love to hear it.

My mom had one of these orange screened Compaq monsters.

Mom had a drapery business then. She'd drag me off to client's houses and talk window dressings with them, and I'd hide in the corner with this portable 386 and play games on it's orange screen. mmm reader rabbit.

oh you mean a modern day computer? I don't know. I have this 10 pound dell from work and love the 1920x1200 pixel display. 2 hour battery is enough for most purposes but when I travel I'll bring 2-4, depending on the location.

So far as I can see, consciousness requires a brain of sufficient complexity. It's conceivable that something else (e.g. a 'soul') is also needed, but a brain is a minimal requirement. Before about a month, there's nothing even arguably a brain present. After a month, from what I understand, the various parts of the brain are at least present in preliminary stages, though they don't all actually hook up together for a couple months yet. I don't have to like abortion before the first month, but I don't see how there's any actual other person to take into account then, and it's the woman's choice then. After that, there's at least a decent chance that there might be another actual person there, and I'm a lot less comfortable with abortions after that point. (Of course, if the mother's life is in danger, it's her choice - you can't force someone to risk their life to save someone else.)

... is that they misspelled xapping.

I suspect that the vast percentage of viewers to this site are Anonymous/not logged in, and hence can't see your sig. So here's the link: SSH not secure enough? Try Ostiary.

We must remember that evolution is historical science and we cannot test/repeat what has happened in the past.

How ironic. I just put this up this morning. Back in the mid-1990s, just for fun, I reimplemented Tierra ('ancestor' to Avida) myself, and I detailed the results I found. Finally converted it to HTML. Source code is there, too, if you want to play with it. Vanilla ANSI C, should run on practically anything/

Basically, you've got little programs that compete to survive. No other fitness function, just: do they reproduce? You get parasites, optimization, and other such things. The little suckers figured out features of the instruction set I implemented that I hadn't thought of.

I saw your post on Ekiga 2.0 when I googled for other stuff, but it was to late to replay and I can't find a function for sending private messages so I'll answer here instead. Sorry for beeing off topic.

Regarding SIP and Ekiga I'm not sure if there are any chances to use SIP behind a NAT without any forwarded ports (in that case using STUN but I doubt it.)
What ports are used are application dependant, but this is what I use and I have no troubles with any application or provider so far:

5060 TCP/UDP (SIP UAS, I think this should be enough.)
5000-5100 UDP (But with only the ports above I could only use my other account, not the Ekiga.net one, with these both works.)
3478-3479 UDP (STUN service)
49152-65535 UDP (RTP, RTCP multimedia streaming)

I _think_ that port 5060 (or 5000-5100) is used to say "hi, you got a phone call", but the actual voice data are sent over port 49152-65535 (valid for SJPhone, might be application dependant). I think you only need the STUN ports open if you use STUN, STUN seems to be a service which helps the application to figure out what kind of firewall it is behind.

I've covered this with screenshots in my blog but it's written in swedish so I don't know how much help that gives. Atleast you can look at the images?
I know for my "real provider" I had to tell them if I where behind NAT or not, doesn't seem like anything like that is needed for the ekiga.net account for whatever reason. Maybe with STUN + NAT enabled user you don't have to forward any ports at all?

Another alternative is to use Asterisk or Asterisk@home somewhere outside the firewall and have that handle the SIP account and use IAX for your clients instead. There is a nice (atleast screenshots says so) client available for UNIX called KIAX.

Ekiga is a nice client, for whatever reason it crashes all the time now when I upgraded to Ubuntu Dapper, but I've got noone else to blame than myself for that one. SJPhone isn't open-source but it doesn't cost anything and is very competent aswell. For Linux linphone is less good and kphone is even less good ;), I would rate X-ten X-lite(is that the name?) as just beneath SJPhone.

get it here: http://mstauffer.homeunix.net/markus/imps_chapter1 _DAVENPORT_928735.avi.torrent

see here:

http://mstauffer.homeunix.net/markus/HTTP-Request- Smuggling.pdf

How is that funny? Your statement perpetuates a
mythical quotation.

-David

Here's a free one that I bookmarked a couple years ago. Once you figure out the interface, you can put in a a word and have the translation from one, or several languages at once.
http://magic-dic.homeunix.net/

It is a fact that my iBook is better made than the Toshiba I had before and it is clearly holding up to daily use better than the Toshiba.

I love my iBook, but the hard disk on it died with a horrible grinding sound recently, after only a year and a half. Ironically enough, the hard disk was in fact made by Toshiba. Perhaps tempting fate, I replaced it (what a bitch!) with another Toshiba (upgraded from 20 to 40 Gb), although I've been making twice-weekly backups since then.

Oh, and OS X is much nicer than Linux on a laptop. That is a fact and I have been a Linux user since 1994 (before that I used SunOS).

Here I have to disagree :-) I'm using Debian GNU/Linux because of the utter convenience of upgrading and software installation, and the superb development environment for free software it provides. (Yes, I know about Apple's IDE, but I don't want to learn Objective C and the GUI isn't at all portable to other UNIXes.)

Plus, Linux and the vast quantity of software packaged in Debian are free. To be able to use the latest Fink packages, OTOH, I would either have to spend forever compiling them, or upgrade OS X to 10.3, which is a not-insignificant sum of money for a grad student. I don't think I've even booted into OS X since re-installing, except from inside MOL a few times.

Now if only we could get RMS to sing this to the tune of a Hungarian folk song, then we'd have a hit!

[stabs ear drums with knitting needles after hearing him sing "share the software"]

Yes, half the public is below 100 I.Q. I don't think that's a reason to stop open records. Luckily, most people are too stupid to know they can get at these records, then if they do don't know how to sort them out. Then once they think they find a problem, all they can do is whine on talk radio.

I never heard such an amusing joke before. Where did you hear it? I'm sure it must be true, especially if you repeat it long enough.

1. You have the equivalent of a Windows machine online.
2. In case you're Finnish, insert a lame joke about downloading (here the verb for vacuuming is slang for downloading).
3. Profit!

This.

The clearly stole the idea of unix from chips. Chips weren't running linux before SCO!

Blogzine
Fortress of Insanity TM

this is a test isaac@testbox.homeunix.net thanks

..and taken this picture of the screen in Tampere, Finland. It was big enough to walk through, in which case some steam would condense onto you. IIRC the layer of steam was kept in place by air currents on both sides.

If you use mailscanner, there's a mailstats script that has a feature to help automate that.

http://www.while.homeunix.net/mailstats/

temp mirror

There are a number of things that you can do with mailing lists. But unfortunately, since there are so many different types of mailing lists with so many different configuration options, there typically isn't one single, easy to set up solution.

For what it's worth the TMDA documentation on the web site is pretty good. As for me, I tend to use TMDA sender addresses to subscribe to mailing lists. More details here. And, of course for anything more complicated than the docs can handle, there are the TMDA mailing lists, which can be accessed without subscribing through GMANE

Once you've gotten a little bit comfortable with TMDA, this is a pretty good reference for using it with mailing lists.

Good luck.

Where's 'lose', not 'loose' when you need him?!

I thought the explanation for the name was here, where boa is roughly a synonym for fat pipe -- something you need a fast server to saturate.

my corner in Montreal.